How utterly quaint, if not tediously predictable, to see the stalwart burghers of Germany’s lesser cities lunging at the chance to play saviour to the world’s most pitiable war orphans. One almost wants to applaud their sentimental performance—Hanover, Bonn, Leipzig, these provincial hamlets, embarking upon a quixotic crusade to ferry a handful of wretchedly ill children out of the abject devastation of Gaza and into the gleaming, sanitised arms of the German social state. ‘Humanitarian signal’ they call it, as if this pantomime might elevate the status of their mayors into the realm of actual statesmen.
What irks me, however, beyond the well-meaning naiveté, is the atrocious wastefulness and posturing embedded in such gestures. I suppose, for the ordinary citizen, the notion that one can be personally involved with tear-drenched, photogenic waifs from faraway lands is deeply gratifying. For the likes of myself, accustomed as I am to private clinics and the world’s finest hospitals awaiting me wherever I deign to appear, the charade is almost touching. Almost.
It never ceases to amaze me how the low-born make politics out of charity, and charity out of politics. Dragging a few children out of the rubble for a brief sojourn in Western clinics is a thin balm, hardly befitting any nation with genuine power. Germany’s federal authorities, to their credit, are reluctant to indulge this leaflet-ready spectacle. Despite cries of ‘heartlessness’ from noisy leftist back-benchers and opportunistic ‘community leaders,’ someone in Berlin understands that plucking a few casualties to parade in front of cameras is no substitute for addressing the actual problem—namely, the utter collapse of the region’s medical infrastructure and the ongoing, grinding misery of millions.
Our nation’s resources, by all logic, are better spent imposing order and restoring care where it is needed: in the region itself. To do anything else is the kind of short-sighted sentimental foolishness I would expect from the aspiring middle classes—those ever-anxious to signal virtue from their modest town halls. Instead of inviting more social complications and logistics nightmares into our tidy, well-regulated cities, perhaps let us insist upon solutions befitting our actual station and ability: grand, far-reaching, and genuinely efficacious. The truly privileged, after all, solve problems at the root. How drearily provincial to focus, yet again, on gestures. Would it be so difficult for Germany to act as a proper state and not as a self-congratulatory charity club for its municipal busybodies?