“Civil war is coming to Europe,” a German city politician told me this week.

I shan’t mention his name – it was an off-the-record briefing and, anyway, in Germany there are penalties for this kind of frankness.

But he was only repeating what plenty of other people say in private in Germany where I’ve spent the last couple of weeks, soaking up the atmosphere, people-watching, gauging the public mood in the wake of Angela Merkel’s open invitation to perhaps three million immigrants – most of them fighting-age males from Muslim countries.

Three million is higher than the figure admitted by the German authorities, which tend to put it closer to 1.5 million. My source tells me the higher number is closer to the mark.

I was staying in Frankfurt, not one of the places hardest hit by the immigration wave. Partly this is because its traditions as an “open city” date back centuries so, culturally it has always been better attuned to accepting and absorbing immigrants from all backgrounds. Partly it’s because, being Germany’s financial centre, it tends to attract the better educated sort of immigrant.

That doesn’t mean it has remained immune to the problem hardly anyone dares talk about except in private: hordes of Muslims, often with entirely different, indeed hostile, value systems who can’t or won’t integrate, and often just don’t want to integrate for reasons ranging from laziness to contempt and a jihadist desire to bring the West under submission to Islam.

You see some of them begging on the street, often young women pitiably clutching a picture of a child (which may or may not be theirs) while, a few yards back, a sullen looking male (perhaps a relative, perhaps acting as kind of pimp) lurks as her chaperone.

Mostly though they just hang in groups, in the shopping areas and squares and parks, smoking cigarettes, kicking their heels, or, if they’ve found some way of making a living, in the shisha bars and kebab houses which are cropping up all over the place.

The Germans – instinctively polite, kind and reluctant to rock the boat – affect not to notice. They’re welcoming and friendly to those immigrants who make the effort (the nice, hard-working Syrians who run the felafel store in Bergerstrasse, say), and would really rather bury their heads in the sand about the others and just pretend it’s not happening.

That’s why, even now, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) the main party of the resistance to Angela Merkel’s madcap Islamic enrichment experiment still only polls around 16 percent of the national vote.

Remember that next time you’re told that the “far-right” (as the media likes to misrepresent the AfD) is on the rise and rise. It may now be Germany’s second-biggest party. But this is all but meaningless in a nation which has long been ruled by rainbow coalitions. The other parties – Angela Merkel’s majority Christian Democrats and the SPD and the Greens, especially – will make sure that the AfD stays out of power by forming alliances of convenience.

So if you were pinning your hopes on the AfD rescuing Germany (and Europe) from the consequences of Merkel’s self-inflicted disaster – don’t. Things are going to get a lot lot worse before they get better.

Hence my German city politician’s talk of civil war.

And let me stress, he wasn’t talking about it with any enthusiasm. Germans have spent so many years beating themselves up about what happened under Hitler they squirm at the thought of militarism of any kind, which is why their army is so fat and useless. It was more a resigned sigh about the inevitable.

I think he’s right. Or at least that his argument has unassailable logic. You can agree or disagree. It goes something like this.

Why is Germany inflicting this immigration on itself?

Apart from desperation to show itself in a good light to make amends for World War II and the Holocaust, there are two main reasons.

Economics: there is a view abroad, mostly promoted by the mainstream liberal-left but also by squishy conservatives, that Germany’s ageing population needs an influx of fresh blood. If native Germans won’t breed at replacement rates, then “guest-workers” must be imported to keep the economy going strong. Obviously, this is nonsense for a number of reasons debunked by Douglas Murray in his The Strange Death of Europe. But it appeals greatly to the German psyche: they saw what happened after the unemployment of the Weimar era and they don’t want it to happen again.

Anti-Nationalist, Post-Borders New World Order: this the world-view promoted and funded by George Soros and his acolytes, an article of faith for many on the hard left. Encouraging immigration from apparently inimical foreign cultures will ultimately make us better people. It will solve the disgusting problem of white privilege. We will interbreed and cross-pollinate and abandon our unhelpful nationalistic identities which have led to so much chauvinism and war in the past. Sure there might be the odd blip, but because this New World Order is so self-evidently desirable, no sacrifices are too great in order to achieve it.

Yes, most of us find even the first rationale abhorrent, let alone the second.

The problem is that this, pretty much, is the current thinking of the global liberal elite which dominates our governments, local governments, civic institutions, corporations, law firms and so on. Most of them probably haven’t thought it through on quite those explicit terms outlined above, but then groupthink is an insidious and pervasive thing. It is a simple, observable truth that most of our governing class – at every level, from the supranational (UN; EU), the national, to the local (councils, senior police, etc) – have bought into the idea that mass immigration and the formation of parallel communities by unintegrated Muslims is an inevitability which cannot be challenged too hard.

It’s not at all where the people are – hence the Brexit vote, hence Donald Trump, hence the wave of populist upstarts from Matteo Salvini in Italy to Viktor Orban in Hungary – but it’s definitely where most of those in charge of us are.

And this is why there is going to be a civil war.

We know, of course, that it has long been one of the missions of Islamic State and similar Muslim terror organisations – indeed it’s the goal of political Islam generally – to provoke a civil war in Europe in order to force moderate Muslims to take a side, and ultimately, to bring the whole of Europe into Islam.

What we probably mistakenly assumed is that the political establishment would be on our side in such a conflict.

You only have to look around to appreciate that this is not necessarily the case.

Look at the Maoist mode of thinking which prevails in Google and the rest of Silicon Valley – and of course in academe: anything that combats white privilege must perforce be desirable.

Look at how the senior police in Britain and elsewhere determinedly promote the idea that the “far right” is as big a threat as the Islamic one, and why they stigmatise people like Tommy Robinson.

Look at how the mainstream media, even conservative imprints, frequently like to brand any vaguely anti-immigrant political movement, however middle class and determinedly non-extremist, as “far-right”.

Look at how the protest rally in Chemnitz – held to draw attention to the large number of rapes and murders inflicted by mostly Muslim immigrants on Germans – was utterly misrepresented by the media and the authorities as neo-Nazi revivalism.

Look at how the New Year mass rapes in Cologne and elsewhere were covered up by the German police and the German media.

Look at how Germans who want to find out what’s happening in their own country cannot get the truth in their own newspapers – only by reading foreign outlets like Breitbart.

Ordinary people across Europe – in the U.S. too before Trump came along – are becoming increasingly frustrated at the failure of their governing elites to take their worries seriously, especially where the two biggest worries of all are concerned: immigration and terrorism.

But instead of responding by mending their ways and addressing these issues, the elites are shooting the messengers. They are clamping down on the people who speak out about the rape gangs, the murders, the acid attacks, the antisocial behaviour who are being punished, not the actual perpetrators.

I’m sure some inkling of these truths had been swimming around my ahead before, especially after reading Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe. But it only really became clear after spending time in a country even further down the road to disaster than my own – and after talking to a German politician who spelled out the problem clearly.

This is the kind of argument, I know, which induces apoplexies of self-righteousness and shrill denials among liberals and leftists of all hues. They’ll bang on about how it’s an ill-supported, classically right-wing paranoid conspiracy theory. Of course they will: because that is the time-honoured method they have used to close down the argument, to make people embarrassed to talk about it, to bully newspapers into not covering it as honestly they should.

I welcome articulate disagreement.

But in order for it to persuade me it will have to answer a simple question:

When there is such a huge and growing gulf between where our governing, globalist elites are on Islam and immigration – and where ordinary people are on Islam and immigration – how can there ever, possibly, be a happy ending?