TAKE ME TO YOUR LIDL

AS MENTIONED PREVIOUSLY, Lidl Global Supermarkets, originally called called Schwarz Lebensmittel-Sortimentsgroßhandlung (Schwarz Assorted Wholesale Foods), and run by Lidl Stiftung & Co., KG, has, since 1973, managed to become the fifth-largest retailer in the world with sales of $82.4 billion (2011), and is now invading the United States.

MANY SOURCES HAVE FOUND FAULT with the unethical methods employed by this company, but I suspect that this flak is only from those who are not in touch with the zeitgeist; the fact is that in the machtpolitik of world domination the supermarket floor is today's front line, thus meaning that the foot soldiers working for Lidl should be treated as inferior beings, sacrificed to the greater good of a weltanschauung that believes that everyone will benefit from German control, and that these workers are even lower than the lumpen who buy their delicacies off Lidl's palettes.

WITH VOLKSWAGEN CARS, German industry had taken Henry Ford's maxim for the Model T of "you can have any color you like as long as it's black" one goosestep further as it produced the no-frills VW beetle. It looked bad, sounded bad, felt bad and was bad. Yet given the utterly incredible poor taste and lack of money of those who bought VWs it became a massive hit. The vehicle itself is still a star possession in the eyes of those who love revivalist kitsch.

LIDL IS EQUALLY UNFORGIVING IN ITS GLEICHSCHALTUNG approach towards the politics of ethnic minority immigrants. Lidl in the United Kingdom allegedly banned Polish (or any other) staff from speaking in a language rather than English while in the workplace as, this might "upset customers", although they were quick to deny the ban ever took place after Welsh MPs and the Polish ambassador complained.

HOW THIS WILL AFFECT FUTURE LABOUR RELATIONS in the fatherland is anyone's guess, but there is no doubt that Merkel's decision to allow up to a million migrants into Germany is, if it works, a master stroke. Germany's future plans for economic expansion into the lebensraum to the East envisaged Turkey entering the European Union, with plans to open as many as 800 Lidl's in the country already set out. Austria's veto put a stop to this idea a few years ago, but now Germany seems to have found a solution.

INSTEAD OF GERMANY INVESTING IN THESE COUNTRIES, the people in the new markets of Turkey, and then Syria, Iran etc., are now going to be in Germany, to shop and work in Lidl, and work in car factories, presumably after there has been a triage period to decide which refugee/migrants are which. This will help bring down wages, increase productivity, make German products cheaper and increase exports. Germany's generosity will also help us all forget the "bad Germany" that reduced Greece's economy to rubble.

AND WHEN THE DUST DIES DOWN in the Middle East the "new" Syrians will be extremely welcoming to their Teutonic friends in order to help them in the rebuilding process, perhaps slipping in a few German car factories and Lidl outlets as they go. After all, Germany will not be seen like those nasty French, British and Americans, all of whom, in relation to the Syrian crisis, showed nothing but Schadenfreude.

(My photo shows a projected site to be cleared to make way for the new MegaLidl mall in Palmyra)

TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

EARLIER THIS WEEK I WAS SURPRISED one morning, as I munched on my granola with dried pomegranate, to see that what I imagined on television to be Syrian refugees queuing in desperately cold and drizzly conditions to enter yet another railway station in Austria or Hungary en route to "freedom" in Germany were in fact fans of Star Wars, the Disney company's children's entertainment franchise, who were prepared to undergo such hardship in order to be among the first to purchase plastic toys depicting aspects of its latest moving picture film release.

INDEED, IN MANY WAYS, THE REAL news about what is being called a "migrant" or "refugee" crisis mirrors scenarios from science fiction productions of recent times. One of the most popular pieces of serial television amusement now on American TV involves the drama facing a group of seemingly "normal" people who are more or less incarcerated within their several dwellings due to the dangers presented to them by hordes of starving individuals wandering aimlessly yet menacingly about and preventing the protagonists from going about their daily affairs.

SUCCESSFUL HORROR FICTION derives its impact from a capacity to strike a chord in the hearts and minds of its recipients. Never have I been more frightened by hearing a banging hatch in the attic in a film more than when I watched one alone in my house with a banging door in the attic above me. 

AT THE MOMENT EUROPE AND AMERICA is afraid of, as usual, the outsider, or, as philosophers like to put it, the "Other". At the moment the "Other" is banging on the latch on the door in the attic and we are developing a form of paranoia instead of sitting comfortably pretending that the crisis in Europe is just about to go away.

THIS REMINDS ME OF THE PARANOID WAY of seeing the wider world in nineteen fifties and sixties humorous fiction, often involving some forms of parody. In many of these science-fictional scenarios aliens, often pointing what were at the time called "ray guns", would emerge somewhere on the planet and, in sometimes broken English, demand "take me to your leader".

I DETECT A FULFILLING OF THE PROPHETIC elements occasionally present in Science Fiction with the current situation of the aliens arriving on the borders of the European Union. These people, rather than being content to remain in Malta or Cyprus, or even Greece or Italy, are demanding to be taken to our leader in Germany, someone they know will take care of them correctly. 

UNFORTUNATELY, THE DUBLIN REGULATION (Regulation No. 604/2013; sometimes the Dublin III Regulation; previously the Dublin II Regulation and Dublin Convention) is a European Union law that determines that the responsible Member State for treating asylum seekers or other distressed peoples will be the state through which the asylum seeker first entered the EU. Thus these good people are not allowed to travel to Germany.

YET FORTUNATELY, DESPITE one of the so-called "golden rules" of the European Union stating "No treaty change can be made without the agreement of all the member states", our leader Merkel has unilaterally decided to suspend the above-quoted regulation. Thus in my view, and in the line of the United States Constitution, the European Constitution could also have an amendment: "All rules apply unless Germany decides otherwise."

COMING NEXT: TAKE ME TO YOUR LIDL