So British intelligence has deigned to alert us to the presence of 60,000 far-right extremists in Germany, as if we are to be shocked that the continent that gave us the Holy Roman Empire and the Third Reich might still harbour a few thousand fanatics. Brecht, I think, saw this coming: “The womb is fertile still from which that crawled.” The real news is not the number, but what it signifies: a complete collapse of European security, a failure of the post-war liberal order, and a smugness that has left us all patting ourselves on the back while the foundations crumble.
Consider the Victorian era, when Britain ruled the waves and the continent was a patchwork of empires and principalities. Then, as now, intelligence services tracked subversives, but they did so with a clear sense of purpose, national identity, and moral certainty. Today, our intelligence agencies are so cowed by political correctness that they can barely name the threat, preferring euphemisms like “far-right” to the more accurate labels of nationalist, traditionalist, or indeed, reactionary. These are men who believe in something, however misguided, in an age where belief itself is considered a disease.
Compare this to the Fall of Rome, when the barbarians were not just at the gates but already within the walls. Alaric’s Visigoths were far more than 60,000; they were a people on the move. Here, we have a scattered network of disgruntled men, many of them ex-soldiers, who have been radicalised by the very forces our elites unleashed: mass immigration, cultural destruction, and economic stagnation. The intelligentsia, having spent decades mocking patriotism and tradition, now feign surprise when the remnants of those forces fight back.
The real decadence lies in our response. We will nod gravely, allocate a few more millions to “counter-extremism programmes”, and then return to our Twitter wars about pronoun usage. Meanwhile, the German state, which once managed to integrate tens of millions of refugees without a murmur, now struggles to contain a few thousand hotheads. This is not a failure of security; it is a failure of civilisation. When a society no longer knows what it stands for, every fringe movement looks like an existential threat.
I am not defending these extremists. They are often crude, violent, and intellectually bankrupt. But they are a symptom, not a cause. The cause is the hollowing out of the European soul, the replacement of history with therapy, and the belief that we can build a society on nothing but consumerism and moral posturing. The 60,000 are the canaries in the coal mine, but the mine itself is collapsing.
We should take a lesson from the Victorians: they faced down Chartists, Fenians, and anarchists, but they did so with a robust sense of national purpose and a willingness to enforce order. Today, we are paralysed by legalism and guilt, unable to even define the enemy. If British intelligence is truly worried, they should start by telling us the truth about the age we live in: a new dark age, where the lights are flickering, and the barbarians are already inside the gates. And they are not just in Germany, they are in our own minds.
