The world is fixated on Europe. On bond yields, currency exchanges and bailout packages, on the new governments in Athens and Rome, on the weekly slew of meetings among European leaders, and the tension and bickering they bring. But there is an odd dimension to all the attention Europe is getting.

While many are looking, very few actually understand what they are witnessing.

The number is growing as it becomes more obvious—but still, relatively few truly realize that Germany is conquering Europe!

Victim One

Take the latest round of the Greek crisis. It began October 31, when Prime Minister George Papandreou jeopardized the Greek bailout package and infuriated eurozone leaders by announcing he would allow the Greek populace to actually vote on the austerity conditions ensconced within the bailout package. Papandreou backed down two days later, but he failed to stop the tumultuous chain of events that resulted in his resignation.

As the Greek government convulsed, Brussels and Berlin swooped in. First, rather than leave the decision of who should lead Greece to Greek voters in a national election, European elites—threatening Greece with financial collapse if it refused —commanded Athens to form a national unity government. A few days later news broke that Lucas Papademos, a former European Central Bank vice president and tried and tested Europhile, had been installed as Greece’s new prime minister.

Grasp what happened. Greece is a sovereign nation of 11 million people, and—or so we’ve been led to believe—a valued member of the European community. But in a matter of a week, European elites blackmailed Athens into foregoing a democratic election, establishing a unity government and then agreeing to pass into Greek law a series of harsh, transformative rules that were created in Brussels.

Victim Two

Not content with its victory in Athens, Berlin and Brussels that same week brought down Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Mr. Berlusconi resigned November 12 after his partners in government and global financial markets—following the lead of German and European elites—lost faith in his leadership.

What was the political orientation of his replacement? Italy’s new Prime Minister Mario Monti is an experienced economist and politician, and a former European commissioner intimately familiar with the inner workings of the European Union. During his time as a commissioner, Monti authored a report on the establishment of a European single market that included measures by which Brussels could extend its reach into the financial matters of EU member states.

This is incredible: In the space of a week, Germany brought down two sovereign governments, blocked the democratic election of new leaders, and installed its own man on the throne of each nation!

And it still wasn’t done. With Greece and Italy in its pocket, Germany wasted no time in setting its sights on its next victim.

Victim Three

At the November congress of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union, Volker Kauder, the party’s parliamentary leader, proposed an EU-wide tax on financial transactions.

Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer called the proposal “a bullet aimed at the heart of London.” In an article published in the Evening Standard the day before Kauder’s speech, George Osborne roundly criticized the notion of a financial transaction tax, saying, “Europe certainly shouldn’t be creating new burdens. … The EU should be coming forward with new ideas to promote growth, not undermine it.”

Kauder addressed the criticism directly: “I can understand that the British don’t want that when they generate almost 30 percent of their gross domestic product from financial-market business in the City of London,” he said in his keynote speech. “But Britain also carries responsibility for making Europe a success.”

“Now, all of a sudden, Europe is speaking German,” Mr. Kauder declared.

“Germany and the UK are on a collision course,” said the director of the European center of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Jan Techau.

Three days after Kauder’s provocative remarks, Britain’s Telegraph ran a front-page story titled “Germany’s Secret Plans to Derail a British Referendum on the EU.” Citing a memo leaked from the German government, Bruno Waterfield revealed that Germany had drawn up a strategy to prevent the British government from holding a referendum on Britain’s membership in the EU. Waterfield also revealed that the memo “discloses radical plans for an intrusive new European body that will be able to take over the economies of beleaguered eurozone countries” (Nov. 18, 2011).

Brimming with confidence after what it had achieved in Greece and Italy, Germany was sending the message to Britain that it would be next!

Meanwhile, Spain, Ireland, Belgium and even France are on the edge of the financial precipice—and only Germany has the economic strength to pull them back.

Don’t be naive about what is happening here. Berlin is reshaping Europe into a distinctly Germanic edifice.

“It is time for a breakthrough to a new Europe,” stated German Chancellor Angela Merkel in November at a conference in Berlin. Just to make sure there was no ambiguity about what this “new Europe” would look like, Merkel stated that this will “mean more Europe, not less Europe.”

Economic Colonization!

One cannot overstate the significance of these events. We are “witnessing … the economic colonization of Europe by stealth by the Germans,” wrote Simon Heffer in the Daily Mail. In the past, it would have “taken an invading military force to topple the leadership of a European nation. Today, it can be done through sheer economic pressure,” he wrote (Nov. 8, 2011; emphasis added throughout).

Such alarming statements are becoming more and more common. In a separate editorial, the Daily Mail warned, “Increasingly, it appears we are witnessing the death of democracy and the right of sovereign nations inside the eurozone to govern their own affairs” (ibid). After Germany conquered Greece and Italy, British politician and European parliamentarian Nigel Farage gave a blistering speech before the European Parliament decrying the EU’s blatantly undemocratic, German-dominated agenda.

“We are now living in a German-dominated Europe—something that the European project was actually supposed to stop—something that those that went before us actually paid a heavy price in blood to prevent. I don’t want to live in a German-dominated Europe,” Farage told the assembly.

Germany’s ambitions have been made plain, wrote Peter Mullen in the Telegraph: “What is being envisaged in Mrs. Angela Merkel’s mind is a unified Europe, a superstate, in which the most powerful, and therefore dominating, nation would be Germany.” His conclusion was even more chilling: “We were promised by the Eurocrats a continent-wide democratic defense against fascist dictatorship, but what we are heading for at great speed is precisely that dictatorship.”

After decades of this project in motion, the ruthless ambitions of the elites guiding the EU are finally being exposed. We are seeing that the EU has no interest in protecting the rights of European states and defending those of the European people. Rather, as the Trumpet has repeatedly warned, the EU is an undemocratic, German-led powerhouse engaged in a strategy to conquer, then subjugate, the sovereign states of Europe.

In fact, it’s all that and much,muchmore!

In an article November 4, one of the most popular conservative thinkers in Britain, who blogs under the pseudonym Archbishop Cranmer, got close to the truth of the matter. The German-led “European Union is essentially the re-creation of the old empire of Charlemagne,” he wrote. The EU today, he explained, has picked up the mantle of Charlemagne, just like Otto the Great did in the 10th century, then the Habsburg kings in the Middle Ages and then Napoleon in the early 19th century.

If you know your European history, you know that’s a terrifying comparison!

“The spirit of Charlemagne still broods,” he wrote. There is more to come, he warned, as the “same fate will befall Portugal, Italy and Spain, for the powerfully federalist character of this project has yet to be appreciated.”

What about you? Can you appreciate what we are witnessing? While the world is fixated on the currency exchanges, on the bond yields and bailout packages, on the effect of Europe’s financial crisis on global stock markets and hedge funds, what are you seeing in Europe? Do you see a continent being systematically conquered by an invigorated, empowered German nation?

The spirit of Charlemagne is brooding. Whether you see it later or now is a matter of life and death. It is that serious!