TIME magazine named German Chancellor Angela Merkel as its Person of the Year. The New York-based magazine praised “her resilience and leadership when faced with the Syrian refugee crisis and turmoil in the European Union over its currency this year.” Angela Merkel is the first women to lead Germany and last month completed uninterrupted 10 years at the helm of Europe’s largest economy.
Merkel has often been referred to as the most powerful woman in the world. In fact TIME’s celebratory issue’s cover story calls her “the Chancellor of the Free World.” Since President Obama has abandoned the leadership of the Free World as a matter of principle, the top job was up for grabs anyway. The problem is only the direction Merkel is steering the Western World in face of the historic migrant crisis.
To give credit where it’s due, the liberal editors at TIME Magazine had quite a tough time picking this year’s winner. German Chancellor was pitted against “Black Lives Matter” activists, Islamic State’s “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, celebrity transgender Caitlyn Jenner, and Iran’s dictator Hassan Rouhani.
Republican hopeful Donald Trump was upset over the fact that judges at TIME didn’t chose him for this year’s award, and as Trump (rightly) put it, “picked a person who is ruining Germany.”
But judging by the cover story and accompanying articles that TIME ran justifying its decision to pick the German leader, neither Trump nor anyone else in this year’s fray had the slightest chance. It’s just one big deceleration of love to Angela Merkel, or as TIME says, to the “de facto leader of a continent”.
In the process TIME embellishes Merkel’s biography, inflates her stature, looks over her blunders and leaves out the “inconvenient truths.” TIME writes:
Europe’s most powerful leader is a refugee from a time and place where her power would have been unimaginable. The German Democratic Republic, where Angela Merkel grew up, was neither democratic nor a republic; it was an Orwellian horror show, where the Iron Curtain found literal expression in the form of the Berlin Wall. The shy daughter of a Lutheran minister, Merkel slipped into politics as a divorced Protestant in a largely Catholic party, a woman in a frat house, an Ossi in the newly unified Germany of the 1990s where easterners were still aliens. No other major Western leader grew up in a stockade, which gave Merkel a rare perspective on the lure of freedom and the risks people will take to taste it.
It is true that Merkel’s father Horst Kasner — who greatly influenced her beyond the formative years — was a Lutheran priest in oppressive Communist East Germany. TIME doesn’t tell its readers that in 1954 Horst Kasner voluntarily moved from Hamburg in West Germany to Communist controlled East Germany, right after his daughter Angela’s birth. This was a weird move for a priest in a time when Stalinist purges of Christians and anti-Communists in Soviet Union and Eastern Block were at their peak. In same year he fled to the Communist-held East Germany, over 180,000 Germans fled from East to the West.
So why would a Christian minister in his sound mind move over to the dark side, TIME won’t tell us that. Truth is; Merkel grew up in the Orwelian hell of East Germany that TIME so eloquently described, only because her father choose to take her there.
Further, TIME wants its readers to believe that Merkel’s political career first began in her late 30s when she joined the Christian Democrats (CDU) in 1990s after the falls of the East German Communist regime and the Unification of Germany.
There’s no extent to which the liberal media wouldn’t go in order to whitewash the past of a demigod it decides to place on the public pedestal. If it means rewriting the history or omitting embarrassing biographical detail, so be it.
TIME fails to inform the readers about Merkel’s political career in the East Germany during the Cold War. Merkel was functionary of the East German Communist youth league (FDJ) — and by all accounts an enthusiastic member. Her ideological reliability was key to her successful career under the Communist system. She secured a comfortable and lucrative academic career, and from 1978 right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall she worked at the prestigious Academy of Sciences (East Germany).
If Merkel wasn’t a bleeding-heart communist back in those days, she was at least a calculating opportunist. When dissenters and anti-communists where sifted out from the public, commercial and academic life, she was climbing the academic ladder unhindered. Merkel never came clean on her past, and infatuated mainstream media can’t be bothered to put her feet to fire for that.
The migrant crisis inundating Europe is Merkel’s own creation. Single-handedly she suspended regulations in place to register and scan migrants at the Europe’s outer border, creating a migrant influx of biblical proportions that now threatens to transform Europe’s demography in a single generation.
Judging by the sheer magnitude of the havoc Merkel has wrecked on Europe, she could well be the “Person of the Year” if not more, but she doesn’t deserve the accolades.
Video: Merkel’s telling other EU states to follow her open-door migration policy
(Cover image courtesy TIME, Youtube screenshot)
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY