Reality Verses Delusion

29. November 2005 · Comments Off on Reality Verses Delusion · Categories: European Disunion, General, Politics

Scott Johnson at Powerline is concerned with this from Mark Steyn’s Telegraph article, “Wake Up and Listen to the Muezzin“:

Tablighi Jamaat, the Islamic missionary group, has announced plans to build a mosque next door to the new Olympic stadium. The London Markaz will be the biggest house of worship in the United Kingdom: it will hold 70,000 people – only 10,000 fewer than the Olympic stadium, and 67,000 more than the largest Christian facility (Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral). Tablighi Jamaat plans to raise the necessary £100 million through donations from Britain and “abroad”.

And I’ll bet they do. I may be a notorious Islamophobic hatemonger, but, watching these two projects go up side by side in Newham, I don’t think there’ll be any doubt which has the tighter grip on fiscal sanity. Another year or two, and Londoners may be wishing they could sub-contract the entire Olympics to Tablighi Jamaat.

I was slightly surprised by the number of e-mails I’ve received in the past 48 hours from Britons aggrieved about the new mega-mosque. To be sure, it would be heartening if the Archbishop of Canterbury announced plans to mark the Olympics by constructing a 70,000-seat state-of-the-art Anglican cathedral, but what would you put in it? Even an all-star double bill comprising a joint Service of Apology to Saddam Hussein followed by Ordination of Multiple Gay Bishops in Long-Term Committed Relationships (Non-Practising or Otherwise, According to Taste) seems unlikely to fill the pews. Whatever one feels about it, the London Markaz will be a more accurate symbol of Britain in 2012 than Her Majesty pulling up next door with the Household Cavalry.

Scott’s chief cause of concern is the true nature of Tablighi Jamaat. His post, and the accompanying links, are well worth a read. But that wasn’t the central theme of Steyn’s article, which is what piqued my interest:

I notice, for example, that signatories to the Kyoto treaty are meeting in Montreal this week – maybe in the unused Olympic stadium – to discuss “progress” on “meeting” their “goals”. Canada remains fully committed to its obligation to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by six per cent of its 1990 figure by 2008.

That’s great to know, isn’t it? So how’s it going so far?

Well, by the end of 2003, Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions were up 24.2 per cent.

Meanwhile, how are things looking in the United States? As you’ll recall, in a typically “pig-headed and blinkered” (Independent) act that could lead to the entire planet becoming “uninhabitable” (Michael Meacher), “Polluter Bush” (Daily Express), “this ignorant, short-sighted and blinkered politician” (Friends of the Earth), rejected the Kyoto treaty. Yet somehow the “Toxic Texan” (everybody) has managed to outperform Canada on almost every measure of eco-virtue.

How did that happen?

Actually, it’s not difficult. Signing Kyoto is nothing to do with reducing “global warming” so much as advertising one’s transnational moral virtue. America could reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 87 per cent and Canada could increase them by 673 per cent and the latter would still be a “good citizen of the world” (in the Prime Minister’s phrase) while “Polluter Bush” would still be in the dog house, albeit a solar-powered one.

This is pretty typical. If you think back to the Tsunami, while the governments of the world were busy making “pledges”, and berating the US, our government and NGOs were stepping up to the plate.

But it goes further:

Likewise, those public sector union workers determined to keep their right to retire at 60. I’ve had many conversations with New Labour types in which my belief in low – if not undetectable – levels of taxation has been cited as evidence of my selfishness. But what’s more selfish than spending the last 20 years of your life on holiday and insisting that the fellows who can’t afford to retire at 60 should pay for it?

Forget Kyoto and the problem of “unsustainable growth”; the crisis that Britain and most of Europe faces is unsustainable sloth. Their insistence, at a time of falling birth rates and dramatic demographic change, on clinging to the right to pass a third of your adult life as one long bank holiday ought to be as morally reprehensible as what Gary Glitter gets up to on his own weekend breaks. Apart from anything else, its societal impact is far more widespread.

And here’s where it hits home. Because we have a certain degree of that here as well. We could “fix” the Social Security crisis permanently, if we simply raised the retirement age to 75, and continued to raise it as life expectancy increases. But it would be political suicide for one of our elected representatives to take this stand.

Update: Clive Davis looks at contemporary attitudes to Kyoto. It seems the US was way ahead of the curve here.

Values Taught In French Schools

09. November 2005 · Comments Off on Values Taught In French Schools · Categories: European Disunion, GWOT

This from Dave Kopel at Volokh:

One textbook quotes with approval an article written in the run-up to the Iraq war, arguing for the urgency of containing American power, which imposes its will by force and is contemptuous of allies.

Also approvingly reprinted in a textbook is a student essay: Terrorism is a revolt against aggressors. As in France during the Nazi occupation, terrorism appears when a people suffer and have no other solution except explosives.

After the riots began, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy denounced the rioters as “racaille,” which translates as “rabble” or “scum,” depending on who is doing the translation. As the French begin to ponder how their nation came to be filled with a Fifth Column of Jew-hating, French-hating criminal scum, I hope that France re-examines its educational system which, by justifying terrorism against Americans and Israelis, appears to have taught principles that were readily usable to justify terrorism against the French themselves.

Read the whole thing.

Brennt Paris?

07. November 2005 · Comments Off on Brennt Paris? · Categories: European Disunion, General

And so it is, for the eleventh night running, after the serious possibility being raised by the failed artist and sometime supposed paper-hanger turned dictator and ultimately unsuccessful military strategist some six decades previous. I follow the news about the suburbs of Paris being wracked by flames and insurrection with a curious mixture of dismay and indifference, because there are two—and maybe more— Cities of Light in contention in my imagination and experience.

I make no claim to intimate knowledge of Paris in the real world; I’ve only been there twice in my life. At the age of 16 I stayed in a youth hostel outstanding in memory for grunge hitherto un-encountered in what was admittedly a fairly sheltered life. The hostel was in a newer neighborhood. I retain memories of brutally ugly neo-Corbu concrete high-rises nearby, and a skim of greasy filth floating on a bowl of coffee essence and hot milk served up for breakfast along with a length of somewhat stale baguette. The same blue melamine bowls ten hours later also contained our dinner, a stew of potatoes and stringy, curiously sweet-tasting meat that we were fairly sure was horse, although my best friend, Esther Tutwyler held out for mule. There were bugs in the bunk bed mattresses, too. But we spent a couple of days there, exploring the Louvre, and climbing the endless stairs to the second level of the Eiffel Tower, and twenty years later I visited Paris once more, driving at leisure across Europe with my daughter, dipping into the tourist delights… the Louvre again, and buying kitchenware at Dehillerhin, before heading out into the countryside.

The France that I have in memory is a country road, unfolding between autumn-tinged trees, leading to a small town where grandmotherly hotel managers cluck over my daughter and feed her soup, where there are cathedrals and ruined castles, the war cemeteries where two generations of my family are buried (or at least, memorialized), the Provencal fields painted by Van Gogh— who got it right, incidentally. Olive trees and sunflowers, starry skies and tile-roofed buildings lighted by street-lights, fields of golden stubble and distant blue mountains; there are places you can look at, and know that yes, that was what he was looking at and he painted it, just right. If you cook, or love the Impressionists, or have an appreciation for history, you are always coming back to France… even if it only through books like “A Year in Provance” or “On Rue Tatin”.

But then there are those other Frances, as many as there are other Americas. An empty highway across the Great Basin is still in the same country as an inner-city project, as opposite as they seem to be. The project and the endlessly unfolding miles of the Far West are still in the same country. And the France of my personal memories is still the place beloved of memoirists and artists and foodies , for all that the so-called suburbs (which we would call “the projects”) full of angry, unassimilated immigrants ringing Paris and other major cities… I would no more have visited them, any more than I would have visited the projects, but they— like our projects most certainly do exist.
More »

Piglet Banned In Britain

04. October 2005 · Comments Off on Piglet Banned In Britain · Categories: European Disunion, Stupidity

This from Mark Steyn at the Daily Telegraph:

Alas, the United Kingdom’s descent into dhimmitude is beyond parody. Dudley Metropolitan Borough Council (Tory-controlled) has now announced that, following a complaint by a Muslim employee, all work pictures and knick-knacks of novelty pigs and “pig-related items” will be banned. Among the verboten items is one employee’s box of tissues, because it features a representation of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet. And, as we know, Muslims regard pigs as “unclean”, even an anthropomorphised cartoon pig wearing a scarf and a bright, colourful singlet.

Cllr Mahbubur Rahman is in favour of the blanket pig crackdown. “It is a good thing, it is a tolerance and acceptance of their beliefs and understanding,” he said. That’s all, folks, as Porky Pig used to stammer at the end of Looney Tunes. Just a little helpful proscription in the interests of tolerance and acceptance.

And where’s the harm in that? As Pastor Niemöller said, first they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character and, if I was, I’m more of an Eeyore.

And aren’t we all? When the Queen knights a Muslim “community leader” whose line on the Rushdie fatwa was that “death is perhaps too easy”, and when the Prime Minister has a Muslim “adviser” who is a Holocaust-denier and thinks the Iraq war was cooked up by a conspiracy of Freemasons and Jews, and when the Prime Minister’s wife leads the legal battle for a Talibanesque dress code in British schools, you don’t need a pig to know which side’s bringing home the bacon.

I could see the same thing happening here, pursuant to a “hostile workplace” lawsuit.

Hat Tip: LGF

Memo: D-Day, 6 June 1944

06. June 2005 · Comments Off on Memo: D-Day, 6 June 1944 · Categories: European Disunion, General, History, Military

To: France
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: Liberation

1. Make the most of it. We won’t be back the next time you’re overrun. You’re on your own as far as the Yanks are concerned.

2. Well, maybe the Canadians might come around, if they can work out a way to get there. And the Brits might, out of habit— they’re convieniently located, and they have the upkeep on those lovely villas in the South of France to think about.

3. Love the recipe books, by the way.

It’s been real,

Sgt. Mom

Germantown

19. April 2005 · Comments Off on Germantown · Categories: European Disunion, General, History

The comments at Davids’ Mediancritik set off a train of thought for me last week about Germany and the US, about how the German media is about as nastily and unflattering about Americans as the French is, but only the French catch it in reverse from American media. The usual explanation is that we always thought of the French as friends and allies, whereas we were fighting Germany in both world wars and therefore didn’t have too many illusions to be shattered.

I think the real explanation is a great deal more complex, and goes much farther back than that- and curiously, it is something that swims to the surface of regional consciousness much more often in the US than in Germany. It just so happens that quite a lot of Americans are descended from German immigrants. And even more to the point, in a lot of places, like Texas and Pennsylvania, there were distinct German enclaves and settlements, going back even before the American Revolution, some of whom, like the Amish (or Pennsylvania Dutch— which is actually a corruption of deutch) still speak German amongst themselves.

There is a trick history question that sums the situation up nicely: “Who was the winningest German general of World War Two?” The expected answer is usually “Rommel,” but the correct and unexpected one is “Eisenhower.” You can do a variant of it with the winningest German admiral, too— and the answer would be Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, who commanded the Pacific Fleet. Both Eisenhower and Nimitz were ethnically German, the descendents of German immigrants to America. Nimitz was actually born and raised in the little town of Fredericksburg, established as a refuge for German settlers in the mid-1840ies. Up until the two world wars, German was the common language of communities thorough-out the Hill Country, communities which were as distinct and self-contained as a Chinatown, or a little Saigon is today. In the adjacent town of New Braunfels, the local newspaper is still called The Herald Zeitung. My mother remarked how very much like Pennsylvania the area around Fredericksburg looked, with tidy stone-built houses, neatly organized little farms and orchards, the very image of comfort and domesticity. The image of German settlers in America was quite wholly favorable, associated with well-run and prosperous establishments, excellent food, frugal and neat, in comparison with the sometimes more slapdash Scotch-Irish.

German settlers were well established in the colonies; historians estimate that although they were about a twelfth of the overall population, they formed an eighth of the Revolutionary Army. The Reverend John Peter Muhlenburg preached a fiery Sunday sermon to his congregation, and then theatrically took off his clerical robe to reveal a Continental Army officers’ uniform underneath, and asked for volunteers. He eventually raised a regiment, and led them with distinction. There may even have been some thought given to making German one of the languages of the new republic.

The failure of the 1848 Revolution in Germany sent a tidal-wave of educated, politically active German immigrants to the United States. German-born and the descendants of German settlers were the largest ethnic component of the Union Army— only the Irish came anywhere close. Over two and a half centuries they were a presence in the upper mid-west, in Pennsylvania, in Texas and the West, a presence in a way that the French only equaled in Louisiana. A lot of what are typically German virtues— hard work, thrift, self-improvement, tidiness— are also seen as American virtues, at least in flyover country.

I think we are inclined to cut the present-day Germans some slack, and to swallow some of our disappointment. They are still kin, you see. Distant, but still kin.

Memo: TV Lives, Real Life

04. April 2005 · Comments Off on Memo: TV Lives, Real Life · Categories: European Disunion, General, Media Matters Not

To: The International Set
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Just Because You Watch American TV Programs…

1. Please stop assuming therefore that you just KNOW all about how Americans really live, think, and conduct themselves. A bare handful of television programs currently gracing international airways may, on occasion, reflect the realities of the lives of all those people who live outside the 90210 area code. Most of them do not. Let me break it to you gently, sweet-cakes… it is all made-up. Fiction. Dramatized. Jazzed up, prettied up and sexed up, to attract the eyeballs and the advertising dollar. It is not real, it is faked. It is filmed on a set, for Pete’s sake. And those people are actors.

2. I will allow that international television viewers may glean some kind of superficial knowledge of how Americans talk, and move and dress, of what the scenery looks like, and what the prevailing sense of humor runs toward. But this is a very limited view, and those limits ought to be more acknowledged. Just because I watch “Blackadder” and “Are You Being Served?” does not mean that I know all about English life… or qualify me to pontificate on how those who live there ought to be conducting themselves, politically and socially.

3. Lamentably, this sense of limitations is not reciprocated. I and many of my fellow citizens— especially those of us resident in “Jesus-Land” are fed to the teeth with being portrayed as drooling, gun-toting, uncouth and uncultured racists, addicted to fast food, exhibitionistic religious cults, and violence. Ordinarily, I could not care less what you really think of us, in your heart of hearts, but spreading this kind of manure all over media outlets like this one does a disservice to your own citizens. They are very disappointed when they come around here expecting to see oil-wells, gunfights in the streets, and holy-rolling snake handling at the 10:45 morning communion service at St. Peter the Stodgy Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod). In fact, they are usually rather crushed when they encounter mostly polite and soft-spoken people, libraries and museums stuffed with all that high culture from Europe and elsewhere, and discover that fine food and drink is hugely appreciated, and that there are in fact, two classical music stations in this one city alone.

4. In addition to those generalities, I should like to point out some of the ways in which I vary, rather substantially from the stereotypical American that the European media loves to sneer at. For one thing, I have had a passport, from the age of 16 on (although it has lapsed now). I have never liked coca cola, and I last ate food from McDonalds sometime in 1990. I own my own house, and it is a small one which does not in the least look like Martha Stewarts, even though I have made or refinished much of the interior stuff myself. I do not own a gun, nor do I intend to. Several of my neighbors do, though. I do not have a problem with that. I have also never witnessed, or been the victim of a violent crime. I draw no association between these last two facts, merely point out the coincidence. I have never been to a NASCAR event, or a pro football game, and have no interest in either, but I gracefully accept that there are individuals to whom NASCAR and football are shrines. I think television evangelists are right there with Jerry Springer, and don’t watch any of them (Or much television at all, come to think on it.) True faith gets its butt off the couch and goes to services in a real church. I refuse to be exhibitionist about matters spiritual, sexual, political or financial, on the grounds that all that is my own damn business. My living room is filled with books and Japanese prints, not pictures of Jesus in the Garden or Thomas Kinkade prints of sentimental cottages at twilight. My car is 30 years old, my stereo system is 25, and my television 20; they will be replaced when they break down irreparably, and not a decade before. I have never seen the appeal of Manolo Blahnik shoes, or indeed any shoe with more than 1-inch heels, and have better things to spend my money on; leaving aside the fact that shoes should protect your feet, and you should be able wear them and escape a hungry mountain lion or a collapsing building. I vote for the person, not the party… and I have, in fact, lived and traveled in several foreign countries. I could stand to loose 20 pounds, though.

5. The first person who says , “Oh, but you’re the exception!” — be warned, I will personally hunt you down and slap you silly. We are all exceptions, in one way or the other. To take your cues on this from exported television shows is to do yourselves a disservice.

Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom

Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite

08. February 2005 · Comments Off on Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite · Categories: European Disunion

I have just watched Condi’s first foreign policy address in Paris. And I was amazed at the rousing applause she received. Could this be a new beginning to Franco-American relations?

CIA: Brazil To Surpass Europe

20. January 2005 · Comments Off on CIA: Brazil To Surpass Europe · Categories: European Disunion, World

A new 120 page report by the CIA, Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project, is predicting the continued stagnation and decline of Europe and Japan, and the growth to prominence of the emerging economies of China, India, and even Brazil:

Branding Japan and Europe as the “ageing” powers, the experts predict that ageing populations and shrinking work forces will become a major economic and political challenge for the years to come.

“Either European countries adapt their work forces, reform their social welfare, education, and tax systems, and accommodate growing immigrant populations or they face a period of protracted economic stasis that could threaten the huge successes made in creating a more United Europe”, the US report warned.

Splintering Europe
The current welfare state is thought by to be “unsustainable” and the lack of any economic revitalization could lead to the “splintering or, at worst, disintegration of the European Union, undermining its ambitions to play a heavyweight international role”, the experts said.

A total break from the post-World War II welfare state model may, however, not be necessary, as shown in Sweden’s successful example of providing more flexibility for businesses while conserving many worker rights.

US on top
Going under the title, ‘Mapping the Global Future’, the report concluded that no other state in the world would match the US by 2020.

Yep, We’re Dumb. Nope, don’t bother me none.

01. December 2004 · Comments Off on Yep, We’re Dumb. Nope, don’t bother me none. · Categories: European Disunion

You know why I read Goldstein? I mean besides the fact he makes me spray milk through my nose when I’m not careful?

Because now and then he links to something serious like this article by Gerard Baker which says things that I suprisingly agree with and think about, but says them so much better.

The left and right in much of Europe agreed. America could no longer be seen as a civilized country: It had become an alien, medieval
sort of place. Europe should put even more effort now into building its own secularist, enlightened nirvana as a beacon of hope to the world.

News To Europe: Get With The Program

04. November 2004 · Comments Off on News To Europe: Get With The Program · Categories: European Disunion, Politics

There aren’t too many European mainstream news sources that I care much for, and they’re all from the UK. Among these, my favorite is The Scotsman, which can virtually always be trusted to deliver fair and objective reporting and analysis. This article on the election, and the demographic shift here in the US is a prime example:

European opinion, already somewhat alienated from Republican America, is likely to regard these developments with horror. There will be a tendency for Europe to try to go its own way, culturally, politically and economically. Such a response would be contradictory, as Europe’s main political criticism of the Bush White House is its alleged unilateralism. Better for Europe to try to understand the profound changes taking place in America, because they are here to stay. The paranoid conspiracy theories of Michael Moore only obscure a rational analysis of the deep-seated changes in American society and voting behaviour.

Traditional values

The rising tide of social conservatism in the United States has many roots. It is an obvious reaction to the same social ills that afflict Europe, such as family breakdown, drug abuse and crime. It is a reaffirmation of traditional American values in the wake of the national humiliation and social divisions of the Vietnam War. It reflects a defensive response to the collapse of the rural farming economy in the Southern states. And it builds on the deep-rooted social structures of the Scots-Irish community, which have been integral to American life for three centuries. What the 2004 election proves is that America’s new conservatism is not just a coup inside the Republican Party, but a mass phenomenon that Europe must come to terms with.

That said, President Bush has to recognise that he is more than the representative of just one constituency, even such a significant one: he is now president of the whole United States. It is incumbent on him to reach out and find a way of healing America’s divisions, to use the apt phrase of Senator Kerry in his concession speech. In his victory speech, Mr Bush seemed to recognise this healing task. He specifically addressed those who had voted for Senator Kerry, asking for their support and promising that he would work to earn it.

I encourage you to read the whole thing. Personally, while I don’t deny a demographic shift in the United States – particularly among our youth, I believe this election had as much or more to do with the silent majority speaking up. Beyond that, absent in this article (understandable, as it is directed at readers on that side of the pond) is an opinion on what the Democrats must do to continue to be a viable force in American national politics. But it’s very much akin to what the Europeans must do. It has to start with getting out of the victim mindset. The Jackass Party’s only binding ideology seems to be that everyone’s lot in life is someone else’s fault – the politics of divisiveness and class envy. Similarly, a common opinion in Europe, particularly in France, is that they are victimized by American imperialism – be it economic, cultural, or whatever.

Attic Marathon

14. August 2004 · Comments Off on Attic Marathon · Categories: European Disunion

So it is that the Athens Olympics opened last night, and Oh, I am so glad that I am not there. I hope for the best for everyone involved, but am prepared for the worst; bombs and gunmen and terrorists oh my. I have thin hopes for the Greek law enforcement authorities keeping a lock on any planned mayhem for the next fortnight; after, all I have seen them direct traffic. I also saw them in action in the early 1980ies, when the N-17 gang seemingly operated at will, and various Palestinian terrorists had the run of the country and no hesitation— as the saying goes— about crapping in their own mess-kit. Greece to me is a schizophrenic country, a place that I loved beyond all rational reasoning, and a place that I looked every day over my shoulder and checked the underside of my car for explosive devices; my daughter insists that that is one of her earliest memories. She waits on the stoop of the door to the apartment building at the corner of Knossou and Delphon, Ano Glyphada, and watches me solemnly kneel down and look underneath the chassis of the VEV, looking for trailing wires and strange and unexplained devices.

If I could, though, there are places I would go back to; a time before genocide against Americans was only enforced against those few of us who wore a uniform, or worked for the State Department, the places that I frequented when I lived in Athens, and thought myself lucky to have the opportunity to do so.
Of course, I would not go to any of the Olympic events, were I magically transferred to Greece this weekend; the unatheletic nerd that I am automatically forbids any interest in that sort of thing; besides, I don’t like crowds, especially hot, sweaty crowds, driven into a tightly controlled venue.

Given unfettered freedom of movement this weekend, I would go to the Kassiriani Monastery, first, a Byzantine monument high on the piney mountaintop overlooking Athens— from there the Akropolis looks like a miniature carved from ivory, the hillside below the monastic complex is thick with rosemary and lavender, delirious with bees. On a higher peak above the Kassiriani is a concrete platform, a brutally modern bit of infrastructure left over from the Second World War, an emplacement for German anti-aircraft guns. Not visible is a cave in the slope of the hill, dedicated to the Greek pantheon, but with evidence of pre-historic occupation; the entire sweep of human history, visible and manifest in a small space.
Penny and Georgios, my neighbors, take a collection of plastic jugs with them, when they visit the Kassiriani; there is a spring-fed fountain on the grounds— the water is pure and sweet-tasting; they fill their motley collection of jugs and bring it back to their house in Ano Glyphada. Water from the mountains, uncorrupted by such things as pipes, pumps and faucets. (There is another such spring above the shrine of Apollo at Delphi; clear spring water flowing out of the mountain into a crumbling stone basin, half sheltered by gnarled little trees; to drink of this fountain is to acquire the gift of poetry, or so it is believed. Or at least, remarked a skeptical Danish tourist when I was there, a howling case of dysentery.)

Having gone in that direction, roughly north-east from metropolitan Athens, I would head over the mountain backbone of the Attic peninsula towards Nea Makri and Marathon, first on a modern highway that looked eerily familiar; deep cuts into chaparral covered hillsides. We took a picnic lunch the first time we ventured in that direction, but half our sandwiches only made as far as a scenic pull-out on the mountainside, with a view of the folded dark-green hills for miles. There was no one else at the overlook but us, and the VEV on a weekday midmorning, only a pathetically skinny dog. The dog came up and looked at us, cringing at any sudden move, but begging in that silent way that dogs have. We could not see a house anywhere near, so we laid two ham on brown bread sandwiches on the dusty ground and drove away as the dog devoured them avidly. We ate the rest of our lunch—the remaining sandwiches and a small bag of fresh cherries, sitting on a marble bench under the tall monuments and cypress trees at the site of the Marathon battle, listening to the spring birdsong. We were the only people in the place; incredible to think there had ever been a battle here, from which fleet-footed Phedippides had run all the way to Athens bearing the news of Miltiades’ victory over the Persians—all along the route we had come by car— to bring news of victory. Greece was so stiff with history, cheek by jowl and elbow to elbow with it, thirty centuries worth. To the west of Athens, in the other direction, Leonides and his 300 Spartans made a last stand against Xerxes and the Persians again in the narrow pass at Thermopylae. The Persian envoy had given Leonides a chance to surrender, and threatened so many arrows that their volleys would block out the sun, and Leonides was reported in the histories to have defiantly replied, “Very well, then, we’ll fight in the shade.”

Almost too much history; sometimes the only way to live with it is to take a break and go to the beach. The long white-sand beach curved in a gentle arc between Marathon and Nea Makri, and the water was clear and green, and on this early summer day the light breeze hardly kicked up any surf at all. The beach sloped so gently, it was as shallow as a swimming pool for a long way out, perfect for babies and small children— who in Greece (and Europe generally) did not have to wear swimsuits, and frolicked like pink tadpoles in the mild shallows.

Oh, where we would go, if we were in Athens this weekend, and wanted to avoid the crowds: perhaps down the coast road to the temple to Posidon at Sunion, at the very tip of the peninsula; another place almost always nearly deserted when we went there; the worn marble colonnade on a high scrub-brush covered knoll overlooking the sea— which really is as dark as wine. In classical times, sailors rounding the peninsula and coming up into the Saronic Gulf on a clear day, could see the bright gold glint that was the sun on the spear of the statue of Athena that stood outside her shrine on the Parthenon hill. Dark red corn poppies grew among the tumbled stones and between the cracks of the paving around the temple: until quite recent times sailors and travelers could bribe the attendant to look the other way and carve their name onto the stones. Lord Byron was supposed to have done so, at any rate: I have a picture still of some names on the foot of one of the crumbling columns: “Geo. Longden” “J.S. Barton, London” “R. Laing, Aberdeen 1885” “ C.J. Young, NYC 1885” “ J. Davis —-pool, 1893″
”, a jumble of intials, names pecked out in Cyrillic, dates, 1902, and some long scratches that may merely be wear and tear.

We had a splendid salad, in a little one-room restaurant, near Sunion, nothing but the plain village salad; chopped tomatoes oozing their own sweet juice, cucumber slices, topped with a creamy-salt slab of feta, and a dribble of rich green olive oil over all… but the tomato, ah, that luscious perfect tomato. I had friends there that swore they had never liked tomatoes, but that was before they came to Greece and tasted real tomatoes. The tomato in this salad was fresh, straight off the vine and still warm from the sunshine; I suspect the waitress took our order, ran out the back door to pick it, and there it was… a perfect tomato.

(to be continued)

Chutzpah

31. July 2004 · Comments Off on Chutzpah · Categories: European Disunion

I was reading this article in the Guardian and did a double-take when I read this paragraph:

Increasing German pressure on the Poles for an admission of the wrongs done to Germans at the end of the war and for some form of material compensation are causing intense resentment and mistrust in Poland, where 6 million people died during the war and whose invasion by Hitler in 1939 triggered the outbreak of the conflict.

😯

You’re shitting me, right? The Germans, who put Hitler in power. The Germans, who kept Hitler in power. The Germans, who loved Hitler. The Germans, who did nothing as Jews, gypsies and other “undesirables” were led away to the camps to be slaughtered and worked to death. The Germans, who were Hitler’s willing executioners, want compensation for discomfort suffered at the end of a war they started? A war that resulted in over 20 million dead? If they want to start talking compensation, then they need to take a number and stand behind about 500 million people who have a greater claim.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s this:

Some 12 million Germans were kicked out of central Europe, many of them killed, at the war’s end, when Europe’s borders were redrawn by the allies. Poland, in particular, was literally lifted from east to west and transplanted on to territory that for centuries had been peopled by Germans.

The rightwing Prussian Trust organisation, which represents the families of expropriated and resettled Germans, has been launching private lawsuits in Poland for the return of lost property, believing that Poland’s accession to the EU in May will make it easier for Germans to reclaim their former homes.

That is a box you really don’t want to open, especially when it comes to the Poles. For starters, let’s begin with the “Hey, You Don’t Exist Anymore!” partition, whereby Prussia, Russia, and Austria simply declared Poland to be theirs. Sorry, you don’t exist anymore. My ancestor who came over on the boat wasn’t listed as Polish, but as Prussian. He left because education was limited to the Germanic elite, he was prohibited from speaking both Polish and his tribal tongue of Kascubian, and because you guys were assholes.

If you really want to get into it, little Prussian Trust, the land that your squatter ancestors occupied for a time used to be called Pomerania. Before that, it was populated by several Slavic tribes, among them the Kascubians, from whom I am descended. My name was there long before the pagan Tuetons made you “Prussians”. And you know what –and I mean this from the bottom of my heart– I’m glad your country doesn’t exist anymore.

And to the Guardian: Poland was not “literally lifted from east to west and transplanted”. Its traditional eastern territories were carved-up to create Ukraine and Belarus. The Poles who were displaced from those territories settled onto Western lands generously donated by the Germans after their killing spree.

While Mr Schröder and his foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, have sought to distance themselves from any German claims on Poland, the lobby for the resettled Germans, led by the Christian Democrat MP Erika Steinbach, is pressing for compensation, and for a new museum in Berlin dedicated to Germany’s own “victims of ethnic cleansing.”

I’m sure that these people are merely oddballs whose absurd cause is given the slightest legitimacy because they occupy a seat in the legislature, but still, the question does require asking: Germany, do you need your pee-pee spanked again?

Newer articles »