By Sven R. LARSON

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Everyday life has become a pressure cooker. The question is when that pressure cooker is going to blow up, and what forms that explosion will take.

Two  dangerous trends are coalescing in Germany: the deterioration of private life and the tyrannization of politics. The latter comes to light in the persecution of any political opinion marginally different from that of the government.

Private life deteriorates under pressure from a stagnant economy with its withering welfare state. Unending tax hikes are coupled with the erosion and increasing unreliability of social benefits.

There is another aspect of the regress of private life in Germany. In a rare tour behind the official German media façade, journalist Liv von Boetticher tells of a police force in deep moral decline, of runaway crime, and of law enforcement institutions more concerned with suppressing political viewpoints than stopping crime.

The report by von Boetticher, low-key as it is, offers a frightening example of the forces behind European societal disintegration. Originally published in Die Welt on June 19th (where it appears to be inaccessible from the U.S.), this story is comprehensively covered by U.S. news site Breitbart:

The journalist said she was prompted to come forwards [sic] with what she’d learnt after noticing … officers told a very different and unvarnished account of Germany after official interviews had finished and the cameras stopped rolling.

Let us stop and think about this for a moment. Germany is now a society where police officers feel a need to put watertight walls between what they say in public and what they really think and believe. In a free, open society, with a thriving democracy where people live in peace and harmony, police officers do not feel the need to dichotomize between their official and unofficial views on work and life in general.

If a police officer in a democracy is dissatisfied with something, he knows he can go to his superiors and—without fear of retribution—express his opinions. He also knows that if he ever felt a need to discuss the state of his profession in public, he could do so, and his opinions would be met with respect and responsibility.

This is no longer the case in Germany. Liv von Boetticher uncovers a frightening suppression of opinion within the police force—and a precariously tone-deafGerman government. The most loyal state servants, the ones who are saddled with the duty to uphold law and order, have had their professional and personal lives so curtailed that they can no longer point to the grim, even sickening reality in which these police officers work.

Back to Breitbart:

Having given the official line their jobs may depend on to be taped, afterward they related what [von Boetticher] called “stories of fear and anger, violence, loss of control, and failed migration policies, and the feeling among law enforcement officers of often being abandoned by politics and society.

In what she describes as a “pretty much unanimous opinion” among police officers in every state in Germany, the nation’s thin line of law enforcement believes that Germany “is disappearing,” that the government has created “open season” for serious criminals to go about their business, and that—according to many of them—Germany as a country is “lost” or “finished.”

I have no reason to doubt their account of how crime runs rampant in Germany. It is a clockwork-reliable consequence of a society where politics is dominated by Marxist conflict theory; since police officers are deemed by said theory to represent power, law enforcement needs to be suppressed for the ‘liberation’ of the ‘oppressed’—the criminals.

To that point, is not this dissatisfaction with high crime just the usual complaints from politically right-wing police officers?

It is not. As von Boetticher explains, these are the views of police officers who have survived “a decade-long effort” by the German government to eliminate national conservatives and patriots from the ranks of law enforcement. Suppression of speech and of privately held political views includes an open ban on anyone sympathetic to conservative-nationalist AfD from being a police officer.

In other words, with AfD trending to become the biggest party in Germany, the men and women who have survived the political purge within the ranks of police are politically more leftist than Germany’s voters are. Despite this, they hold opinions that—if even hinted at officially—would cost them their jobs and possibly a lot more.

It takes a lot for people with leftist political views to concede that they were wrong. Therefore, when these viewpoints seep out of Germany’s politically sanitized police force, the deterioration of society has already gone beyond the point where normal police work would be effective—even without its politically correct restrictions.

What we have here, plain and simple, is a country where the government is nullifying its own law-and-order system. It is a country where freedom of speech is increasingly curtailed and where the practice of Berufsverbot—a ban from the workforce—from last century’s anti-terrorist campaigns has been revived.

This is the same country where Nazis and communists aggressively oppressed anyone with a dissenting view.

To put it bluntly, German history is fertile soil for seeds of totalitarianism to set roots and grow—and to do so with the blessing of those who claim to be fighting that very same totalitarian ideology.

All this political suppression is taking place over the heads of a population whose ability to feed themselves is being continuously eroded by Germany’s stagnant economy. The ongoing deindustrialization of the country gradually robs growing segments of the working class of well-paying jobs.

At the same time, unchecked criminal activity creeps increasingly closer to the coveted privacy of a family’s home and everyday life.

The compounding effects of persistently deteriorating economic conditions and increasingly invasive crime call for an outlet, a reaction, a strong and stern expression of public opinion. It calls for fundamental change to a political system that is failing its own people—one that would permit the very opinions that are banned, persecuted, and criminalized by the German government.

In short, everyday life in Germany has become a pressure cooker. The question is when that pressure cooker is going to blow up, and what forms that explosion will take. So far, the nation’s political elite has shown absolutely no interest in relenting: if anything, increasingly hardline political persecution will continue to lead Germany into the dark realm of tyranny.

What we can expect, in other words, is for the German government to ignore the formation of a perfect storm of societal decline. Instead of recognizing the real threats to Germany’s future, the government in Berlin will continue to fight the symptoms of that decline: growing support for AfD, declining morale in police, and perennial budget deficits.

The German elite’s methods of suppression will become harsher and more unforgiving. A government that transitions from democracy and freedom to totalitarianism and suppression of dissent will sooner or later, with eerie predictability, try to dictate the nation’s economy in the same way it dictates politics and public opinion.

At that point, Germany’s political decline will escalate to an economic implosion. At this point, even governments around Europe who are sympathetic to the German persecution of free speech will suffer the consequences of such policies.

Original article:  europeanconservative.com