Politics and Press

Auschwitz 77 years later

Exactly 77 years ago the Red Army entered a large relatively  new settlement built outside the old Polish garnison city of Oswiecim and discovered the relics of  Auschwitz,the largest of more than half a dozen Nazi killing centres.  In the Auschwitz Protocol its genocidal purpose had been described in detail almost a year earlier by the Slovak Jew Rudy Vrba , who was the first and one of the very few who ever had escaped from it.  But about  a million others had been murdered in that place, mostly Jews, but also hundreds of thousands of others who for political, sexual or ethnic reasons were deemed unworthy of remaining alive.  This was decreed  by a murderous government with its centre in Berlin.  In the German parliament in the same city on the anniversary of that day, a 91 year old Polish-born Jewish man named Marcel Reich-Ranicki who became Germany’s leading literary critic reminded the elected members of that parliament about what that previous political system had done to him  personally, to his family, to his culture and ultimately to the reputation of Germany  throughout the world.

It is a sign of the  sea change in the public position of Germany that no one in that parliament made up of parties ranging from deeply conservative to near-communist expressed anything but  unanimous approval of a motion that Germany undertake a united effort  to make sure such an event could not happen again.  The reason  for this unanimity was however deeply unsettling and very clear.  Over the last decade a terrorist group based in Zwickau in the former East Germany had been murdering ethnic Turks (along with a Greek and a  policewoman)who ran small businesses in Germany at a rate of about one  a year.  This came as a shock to the average German population as it recalled an  evil past that almost all Germans dearly wished had faded into history.  It was even more of a shock when it became clear that  the trio of murderers could not have remained undetected for a decade without a substantial  support group that many suspect  included some police.  Keep tuned and see whether Germany, with a powerful prime minister who is definitely untouched by any suspicions of  having had anything to do with those Nazi events, can combat this threat with efficiency, power and justice.

German elections – the nuclear power opponents win a surprising victory

The nuclear disaster in Japan will no doubt have a negative ripple effect on the popularity of the nuclear power industry throughout the world – at least one would hope so as the consequences of a nuclear meltdown begin to hit home – and the first plebiscites on the topic in regional elections in southwest Germany have delivered completely unexpected results. In Baden-Württemberg, where the Conservative CDU party has ruled for almost 60 years, the Green Party, which for 30 years has attacked nuclear power programmes from a gradually-growing minority position, will apparently deliver the next premier, as the Greens received, by a very slight margin over the social Democrats, the most votes with 24%. And in neighbouring Rheinland-Pfalz the Greens will have gained a crucial position to rule in coalition with the Social Democrats. There is no doubt that the impulse for this amazing result is German uneasiness with the proposed expansion of nuclear power plants in view of the catastrophe in technologically-proficient Japan.

There is also no doubt about who the big losers are in this. Angela Merkel’s ruling CDU/CSU government has been punished for waffling on the topic of nuclear energy, and its weak coalition party, the FDP, lost half its votes in the elections and fell below the 5% level, which gets you into parliament, in one of them. For the FDP, which traditionally supplies the Foreign Minister when in coalition, it could be a fatal blow. For the CDU/CSU it is a rude wake-up call as analysts have determined that many thousands of voters who normally vote conservative switched to the Greens as a protest on federal nuclear power policy. It seems that a stance that was once the home territory of an offbeat protest party finds a great deal of support among conservatively-minded Germans. After all, the potential spread of radiation in Japan pays no attention to political interests. It looks like it may make everybody’s land uninhabitable for a long time in a wide area around the crippled reactors.

Back to the Past – Mutiny on the sailing ship

German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg is suddenly in big trouble because of a military incident that recalls the nineteenth rather than the twenty-first century. In early November, 2010, the German military sailing ship Gorch Foch, one of the largest and most beautiful sailing ships in operation, that is now used to train German naval cadets in the skills of nineteenth century seamen, anchored in a Brazilian port. Cadets were ordered up into the rigging to reef the sails and one of them, a 25 year old female officer candidate who had arrived on board two days before, fell to her death. When the captain ordered other cadets to climb up, some refused, an act of mutiny by naval military code, and the entire crew was flown back to germany and replaced by professionals for the return trip. It is a scene out of a work like Melville’s Billy Budd.

Reports that followed did not mention the breakdown of order on the ship. In January the true story emerged through unofficial channels, and only then did the Defence Minister act by removing the captain from command. While he denies having acted only after coming under media pressure, Guttenberg, probably the most promising younger politician to be considered as a Chancellor candidate as Merkel’s tenure seems to be running down, may well be the first post-modern head-of-state candidate to be removed from his potential command because of dangerous winds blowing out of the supposedly long-forgotten past. One thing all agree on: climbing up into the rigging – six people have fallen to their deaths from the rigging since the Gorch Fock first set sail – is an unnecessary task for a modern naval officer.

Sweden votes right – wrong

The federal election in Sweden on September 19 should have sent shock waves through the western world, and it did not go unnoticed as it would have if the Social Democrats had won the election, as they have gotten used to doing since the 1920s. It’s true there have been blips before in their winning streak, but the upset winners have then not lasted more than one term, and the world continues to think of Scandinavia and The Netherlands in general and Sweden in particular as the prime examples of tolerant societies with a strong social net that is designed to make the playing field level for all citizens.

But this time something happened which may in fact spell the end of the Social Democrats’ view of themselves as the naturally ruling party of Sweden after being in in power 83% of the time since 1932. This time the blip did not disappear, but rather rewarded a conservative party that has been ruling in coalition with a group of smaller moderately right parties since the last election by doubling its vote to 30%, with its coalition partners to 49%, thus winning 172 of the 349 seats, just short of a majority. This conservative coalition will thus once again form the government, while the Social Democrats dropped 4 percentage points to only 31%. On its own this is big news, as it may signal the end of socialist power in apparently prosperous northern European societies. However it is not not shocking news.

The shock comes from the 5.7% of the vote, and 20 seats, won by the ultra-far right Sweden Democrats party, running on an anti-immigrant platform that many consider to be Neo-Nazi, and featuring an ad in the final weeks before the vote that showed 3 young women, easily identified as Moslems by their clothes, shoving aside an older woman, easily identifiable as Swedish, as they bully their way to a welfare-benefit counter. This ad would be illegal and unshowable on German or Canadian television, but in Sweden it helped make the “Sweden for Swedes” party the potential kingmaker of the next government as the conservative coalition cannot form a majority without the help of some other party. And it looks like none of the leftist parties will consider being part of it. Anyone interested in looking at the vote results in German elections in the 1920s is welcome to do so.

In Praise of Prose

Here are four antidotes to the endless announcements of the death of books and reading. These are prose works written in the last couple of years in four different languages that can hold their own in any discussion of reading material that will keep you glued to the written page.

1: Per Petterson (Norway) – “Kjøllvannet” – In English “In the Wake”. Following up “Out Stealing Horses” with an equally convincing meditation on the power of memory and the importance of appreciating the potential of life before “the axe blow from within”, to quote one of his favourite authors Tomas Tranströmer, strikes home. The narrator talks about the grand perception of memory in another of his favourites, Alice Munro, and his two latest novels show that he has learned from the masters.

2. Daniel Kehlmann (Germany) “Die Vermessung der Welt” – in English, “Measuring the World”.
In his hugely successful novel about genius, Kehlmann juxtaposes the lives and adventures of two German geniuses who met in older age. One, Alexander von Humboldt, let his genius unfold through great exploratory journeys to the ends of the world; the other, Johann Gauss, explored the wonders of mathematics from a solitary room. Kehlmann’s work is also surprisingly funny.

3. Sofi Oksanen (Finland/Estonia) “Puhdistus” in English “Purge”
Oksanen takes on nothing less than the epic of the small Baltic state of Estonia from the Nazi occupation through the Soviet counter-attack and takeover followed by the establishment of an independent state after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the current situation. In a stunning display of narrative control, Oksanen delivers a grand epic through the fates of individuals. Written in Finnish, it may well become the national epic of linguistically-related Estonia.

4. John Vaillant (Canada) “The Tiger”.
Vaillant’s just-published epic of the Russian Far East as seen through the eyes of the last wild tigers in the world and the people who live with them talks the talk and walks the walk. On its way to a climax that will knock your socks off, it tells the extraordinary tale of a world that hasn’t changed much in the last century and whose inhabitants still live in awe and on occasion deadly fear of the tremendously powerful animal who wanders through their mutually-shared taiga.

Wake up and smell the smoke

Not all of Russia is burning . It is way too big. But a lot of it is and that part is in Europe. It’s been 40 degrees in Moscow on many days for longer than seems possible and it’s been 35-37 degrees in Central Europe for weeks at a time. It turns out the German Bundesbahn is programmed to provide air conditioning in its fast (and expensive) CE trains when the temperature outside reaches 32 degrees, but to stop providing it when it reaches 35, which was assumed to be the maximum possible. The result was that hundreds of passengers were left boiling in superheated trains in the last weeks in which you could not open the windows, and some had to be flagged down before the situation of the passengers became critical. Even Stockholm was hot though few Swedes complained as they enjoyed their water-surrounded vacation spots more than usual.

But the tremendous storms that pushed regularly through Bavaria at dusk this summer never made it to eastern Europe and the question hanging in the air is if we are indeed seeing the future of a different Europe with drought, wild fires, suffocating smog and dangerous heat replacing the relatively moderate Central and Eastern European summers of the past. If that is the case – and lots of researchers think it is – it is simply incredible that the main polluters of the word – Canada, the U.S. China,India etc – are ignoring the problem and still building their energy futures on fossil fuels. The Obama government has stuck its head in the sand, the Harper government has the second largest oil reserves in the word and plans to use it despite the tremendous resources needed to transform it into fuel, and the cities of China and India already live in a permanently toxic soup. Only the European middle powers are making some real efforts at alternate energy sources – Germany, the Netherlands, Spain – but they don’t have a chance if the leaders of the big polluters don’t wake up and smell the smog before it’s too late.

World Cup – Giving credit where it is due

The World Cup deserves its title – unlike the World Series – because every four years populations everywhere in the world watch it carefully and draw perhps dubious conclusions about the state of nations everywhere in the world. This is no doubt a bizarre way of drawing conclusions about international developments, and yet… This World Cup has been even more interesting than usual in this regard. First of all, the beautiful country of South Africa, despite the economic and social problems it still must negotiate, has defied many sceptics, and pulled off this great organizational accomplishment, with virtually none of the feared problems arising. With only the semi-finals and final to go, it is easy to predict that South Africa will have shown that it can produce a world event with quality. Even its soccer team did better than expected.
Europe, on the other hand, presented teams that in a remarkable way tended to reflect the names the teams wore on their shirts. England, Italy and particularly France, looked old and tired and were quickly dispatched. The Netherlands remains well in the mix with a skilled veteran team that is steady as a rock. But it is Germany, of all places, that has come up with a group that almost too easily reflects a young, aggressive, skilled, hard-working multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual society. When you look at the German teams of the past and compare it with this one, you see the difference between a country completely dominated by veteran German-born, German-named Caucasian players, often of the highest level, and a very young team, with a talented group of somewhat older players with names like Lahm, Mertesacker, Schweinsteiger, Friedrichs as well as Klose and Pudolski (both from the old German parts of Poland) and the very youngest named Müller, and a crop of young players in the starting lineup named Ozeil, Khedira, Boetang, Gomez and Cacao (who could have played for Turkey, Tunesia Ghana, Spain and Brazil). It would be too naive to draw too many social and political implications from this. Nevertheless my brother will do that. He thinks that it is a sign of the European times that Germany, 65 years after the end of a war that they started to show their racial superiority should field a team that has the feel of a skilled, hard-working and multicultural unit that reflects the qualities of the new Germany that the rest of Europe has to look to for in leadership if it is going to pull out of its increasingly senile-feeling doldrums.

A German “Peace Corps” Comes to America

With the U.S. economy still climbing out of its greed-induced recession, support for government services to the disadvantaged is hard to find. Trapped by reduced  revenues and laws  against deficit spending, states, cities and towns have been forced to  lay off  employees that provide   many of their most important services: teachers, librarians, mental health workers, social workers, homeless shelter staff, etc.

Historically the Republican party and conservatives in general have sought to limit the role of government under the mantra of reduced taxes without adequate consideration of long term consequences. Their strategy of “starving the beast’ is very simple: reduce support for basic services to the point where the services are hopelessly inadequate, blame the government providers for not being able to perform and then call for further reductions in taxes by eliminating “wasteful services”. It becomes an endless cycle in which schools get worse, libraries cut hours, and the disadvantaged of all stripes are left to fend for themselves.

It is in this context that we find help coming from Germany, a country that we helped rebuild after WW II and that now supports a small but helpful reverse Marshall Plan. Young Germans – unlike Americans – face mandatory military service or – if they are conscientious objectors, mandatory public service. The Boston Globe has reported that for at least one small group of young Germans this has meant coming to the United States to provide care to a group of Americans “with conditions such as autism, mental retardation and emotional disabilities.” While we can be grateful for Germany’s help, that we need that help is one small example of how the strategy of “starving the beast” can bear bitter fruit.

A day of reckoning is coming but it seems unlikely to be reckoned right. With groups like the Tea Party clamoring for more  tax cuts – as long as they don’t affect programs they benefit from  – America seems headed for a continuing slide into mediocrity. The tea party folk do not seem to be arguing for less defense spending and they sure as hell do not want to cut their medicare or social security – which leaves them to argue for cuts in the future. It may only be a matter of time before the future, in the  form of their  children and grandchildren, turn around and bite them in the ass by cutting the programs aiding the aging middle class in favor of their own short-term needs and wants. “Be careful what you wish for” would not be a bad mantra for the tea party ‘s members.

Le déclin de l’empire européen

It should be Europe’s century. But ten years into it looks like the idealistic hopes imbedded in the idea of a united European state – first dreamed up half a century ago by its most powerful economic powers Germany and France – have shrunk as the stupendous debts of Greece grow. As it is, the European Union has the world’s largest economy, the largest number of soldiers under arms, and the largest budget for foreign aid. But you would never know it, as the economy does not work with any efficiency as the Germans once again found out as they were forced to bail out a profligate family member living far beyond its means with the lion’s share of the rescue, a tidy little cheque for $123 billion (yes, with a b) allowing Greeks to begin getting their pensions half a dozen years before Germans do. With much larger economies than Greece’s next in line – Spain, with 20% unemployment, Portugal, Ireland, all the East European states, maybe even Italy, and then there is the UK, which will have to learn to live with a massive debt – Prime Minister Merkel indicated in no uncertain terms that Germany’s patience with its unruly family, is running out. She had to be convinced that the bankruptcy of Greece could not be tolerated as the two countries share a common currency – the rapidly plunging Euro – and that Germany would have to pay the bill.

Similarly the EU military potential isn’t worth a tinker’s damn as all those soldiers are governed by individual national, not EU, structures and concerns, and there is no such thing as an EU armed forces. When one looks at Europe objectively these days, only Germany and the Scandinavian countries – and Norway has never joined the EU – and to a lesser extent France and the Benelux countries, are prospering economically and socially, and EU status has benefitted Poland. But the general effect has been an ever deepening gap between poor and rich members of what is supposed to be a united union, an expanding unwillingness for the haves to bail out the have-nots and an ever-growing suspicion that this will ultimately result in the decline and fall of a noble experiment.

Taxes, Healthcare and the American Way

Living in Europe provided a particular view of the relationship between taxes and quality of life, both of which are higher in most European countries than they are in the United States. While Americans are always attracted to lower taxes they do not always seem to understand the relationship between what they pay in taxes and what they get – or don’t get – in services. The trade-offs became obvious to me during three years in Munich in which I paid higher taxes than I would have in the U.S. and enjoyed benefits mostly unknown in the U.S.

The healthcare reform debate currently deadening many American’s brains is a case in point. Talk to almost anyone in Germany about their healthcare and they wonder what the hell is going on in America. The figures are well known – we pay TWICE as much, per capita, for slightly worse outcomes when measured in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, percent of those covered, etc. And, in Germany you would never worry about having your insurance cancelled for any reason. The payment for health insurance – which is mandatory and therefore covers everyone – is through a combination of taxation based on salary and employer contributions. Health insurance is viewed as a social contract among the German people unlike the U.S. where someone can opt out even though they fully expect expensive care when they need it – a kind of anti-social contract.

Taxes in Germany also pay for an excellent education system, roads and bridge maintenance that is unknown in the U.S., welfare nets that eliminate the worst consequences of poverty, and a healthy life style that includes six week vacations for most workers, generous medical leave policies, trains that run fast AND on time, airports that treat people as though they were human, and a food supply network that ensures healthy and fresh food.

While it may be hard for many Americans to understand just how bad they have it, what is worse is their unwillingness to consider alternatives; their belief that America is best in everything. Many Americans who complain about taxes focus on Reagan’s largely mythological welfare mothers or the current Republicans’ concern over costs of possible health care reform. In addition to the huge costs resulting from our lack of focus on preventive medical measures, Americans also typically ignore the overwhelming costs of our care and feeding of our military and military contractors, and the cost of misadventures like the Iraq War, both of which become exercises in jingoism which we willingly fund while much of American society seems to be crumbling.

The American press is of course part of the problem but at the end of the day the blame is ours for being too lazy to pursue the ramifications of our knee-jerk negative reaction to any suggestion that our taxes be raised..