Angela Merkel’s Deutschland

Germany has made great strides since WWII at shredding its Teutonic image as a war-loving, brutal peoples bent on conquering everything and everyone. Its image as an anti-Semitic monster has faded with only period movies and newsreels as distant memories of Germany’s sordid past. So, it can’t be reassuring to a number of Germans – and the rest of the world – that Angela Merkel’s Germany is sliding back into its historical role as tyrannical discriminators in the new millennium. Jews have been replaced with Muslims. Hitler is now Jesus. It’s all too familiar.

Among the right, Jesus walks with new sandals. He has become the rallying cry for racism, homophobia and hate. In the US south and in our own halls of Parliament, the voices of Christianity echo loudly. But in Germany, those voices are even more strident and hollow. Angela Merkel is their leader and she is the face of something from which her citizens should be recoiling with disgust. But they are not.

In North America, we should all take note. With Stephen Harper’s successful preaching of fundamentalist government to George Bush’s lasting tea party goonery, Islamophobia and homophobia are the undercurrents of what is driving the conservative base. Under the guise of that gentle, bearded image of peace and justice, the new wave of Jesus freakery is simply a monster walking backwards into a cave of racism and totalitarianism. Angela Merkel may need a little more Christianity but to anyone paying attention, what the world needs now – especially the historically-burdened Deutschland – is a lot less Jesus and a little more love.

Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans debating Muslim integration to stand up more for Christian values, saying Monday the country suffered not from “too much Islam” but “too little Christianity.”

Addressing her Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party, she said she took the current public debate in Germany on Islam and immigration very seriously. As part of this debate, she said last month that multiculturalism there had utterly failed.

Some of her conservative allies have gone further, calling for an end to immigration from “foreign cultures” — a reference to Muslim countries like Turkey — and more pressure on immigrants to integrate into German society.