Waitt, What?

For hundreds of years, defeated or condemned Samurai warriors and feudal lords would often be compelled to commit seppuku, more commonly known as hara-kiri, to avoid capture by their enemies or restore their honor from a disgrace. This excruciatingly painful process first involved thrusting a knife deep into the abdomen, followed by a grisly slice across the belly, and ultimately culminating in the Samurai’s beheading by a Kaishakunin as an act of mercy. While thankfully the Japanese have long stopped performing this violent ritual, many outside Japan, myself included have long been fascinated with this ritual and use it as a euphemism for any self-destructive act. Today, the policies enacted by Western governments, both culturally and economically, I will describe as no less dramatically self-destructive than a Samurai committing hara-kiri. Perhaps the best case in point is Germany. On Monday, January 15, as my home in Tennessee was being blanketed by 9 inches of snow, more than 30,000 angry German farmers and their tractors created a blockade in the center of Berlin to protest the planned phase-out of subsidized diesel fuel. Finance Minister (equivalent of the Secretary of the Treasury) Christian Linder attempted to assuage the crowd only to be heckled off the stage. The farmers’ protests have been the culmination of months of strikes across the country by rail workers, plumbers, and even Amazon delivery drivers all in opposition to the German economy’s slow decline and the German government’s habit of accelerating this decline. For a country that once prided itself as the #1 economic power of Europe with ambitions to rival the United States in the global economy, the fall has been swift (not Taylor) and stunning.