European Political News

German Spectator is a regular survey of German mainstream media coverage of politics, religion and society, as well as of foreign policy, especially toward Europe and the United States.
 
Georgian Crisis Spurs German Identity Crisis
 
The Russian invasion of Georgia has opened yet another chapter in Germany’s decades-long self-identity crisis. German media are chock-full of armchair analyses that ponder whether Germany’s destiny lies with her “natural” partner, the Russian-led East, or with the “unnatural” American-led West…or perhaps somewhere safely in between. Myriad pseudo-introspective commentators are also advising readers on the role Germany could or should or may or may not have in resolving the conflict in Georgia.
 
Although German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been quick to condemn Russia, her efforts to play a meaningful part in resolving the crisis have been hamstrung by the junior partner in her coalition government, the left-wing Social Democrats, who believe that Russian imperialist aggression should be rewarded with brotherly love.
 
Merkel says Germany’s demand that Russia withdraw its troops from Georgia must be “credible.” But Merkel’s own credibility has been systematically undermined by her pro-Russian Foreign Minister, Frank-Walter (Superman) Steinmeier, who, by working single-handedly to save Planet Earth from a “new Cold War,” is also hoping to replace Merkel as chancellor in the general elections set to take place one year from now.
 
According to a new poll commissioned by Germany’s ARD public television, more than half of Germans are worried about a new Cold War between Russia and the West. Another poll, taken before the Russian invasion of Georgia, shows Steinmeier gradually closing the popularity gap with Merkel.
 
Meanwhile, the German military attaché in Moscow has this to say about the Russian bombing of Georgia: “The deployment of air power—despite the regrettable civilian casualties—can be seen as militarily appropriate.” Say what?
 
Some German media outlets have, not surprisingly, also taken sides with Russia. Deutsche Welle, for example, demands: “Stop the Russia Phobia.” Some German octogenarians are blaming democracy-obsessed Americans for provoking the authoritarian-nationalists running Russia.
 
The unspoken sentiment running through much of German commentary on Georgia is one of Schadenfreude that the Russians have finally taught the Americans a lesson about the futility of trying to spread democracy to states that Western European elites deem not to deserve freedom. The Financial Times Deutschland: “America Loses Control.” Die Zeit runs a piece titled: “America’s Weakness.” Der Spiegel says: “The sudden war in the Caucasus [has] dealt a blow to US prestige.”
 
Other German luminaries say (with a straight face) that this would be an ideal moment for Germany to carve out a morally neutral niche for itself as a permanent impartial intermediary between America and Russia. This, the postmodern logic goes, would enable a woefully energy-dependent Germany to finally break free from the inconvenient yoke of those pontificating Americans, who insist on holding Russia accountable for its actions.
 
Beyond the predictable charade of blaming the Americans and/or philosophizing about questions of world order, however, the overwhelming sentiment in Germany about Georgia is one of fatalism, based on the sober realization that Berlin actually has very little influence on what happens beyond its borders.
 
This, in turn, has led German media elites to seek false refuge in the (surprise, surprise) European Union. Many German newspapers are urging the chronically divided member states of the EU to join ranks around a common policy vis-à-vis Russia. In practice, this means that the authoritarians running the EU will be expected to issue demands against the authoritarians running Russia. The center-right Berliner Morgenpost warns: “Europe Must Give Russia A Clear Answer.” Has the EU’s superpower moment finally arrived?
 
And, sure enough, the EU has agreed on a united policy: There will be no EU sanctions against Russia. As the financial daily Handelsblatt reports: “Europe Barks, But Does Not Bite.” According to Der Spiegel: “Europe is Capitulating.” Deutsche Welle admits: “EU’s Options are Limited.”
 
But that has not deterred European federalists: Says the Financial Times Deutschland:
“Europe’s leaders have understood that they must act…but the complicated rules and regulations that govern the interplay of the 27 EU states are an invitation to distraction and quarrel. The war in Georgia shows that Europe urgently needs a president…and it lacks a common foreign minister who can forge a common foreign policy from among 27 national sensitivities. It is not impossible; the governments are ready…the Lisbon Treaty is written. The problem is not them up there, but us here below. We would have had our EU Treaty in January had the majority in Ireland not said ‘no’.” Democracy…it’s just so inconvenient.
 
Meanwhile, Der Spiegel argues that Germany’s number one priority is to keep the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from being drawn into the conflict. “As things now stand, the crisis has renewed debate on Georgia’s membership. At the NATO summit in April in Bucharest, Merkel and Steinmeier played a major role in preventing Ukraine and the Caucasus country from joining the alliance’s Membership Action Plan (MAP). Now that hostilities have erupted, the Germans are happy to keep as much distance as possible between them and Georgia.”
 
Spiegel continues: “Strong criticism [of the German position] has also emerged from the American election campaign. US presidential candidate John McCain has warned that withholding fast-track membership for Georgia might have been viewed ‘as a green light by Russia for attacks on Georgia.’ Somehow this makes Germany partly responsible for the war in the Caucasus, at least in McCain’s eyes, and that does not bode well for Germany should the Republican be elected president in November. Berlin actually had hoped that it only had to get through the last few months of the Bush administration, and then everything would get better. But, no matter who is president, Germany’s relationship with the US promises to be fraught with tension should America allow itself to be provoked by Russia.” As usual, it’s all America’s fault.
 
But as the crisis draws out, and the full implications of the Russian aggression set in, Merkel is, in fact, moving much closer to the American position. Indeed, she now seems more open to Georgia’s desire to join NATO. After meeting with Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili in Tbilisi, Merkel said: “I think that a clear political statement is once again very important in this situation: Georgia is a free and independent country, and every free and independent country can decide together with the members of NATO when and how it joins NATO. In December, there will be an initial assessment of the situation, and we are clearly on track for a NATO membership.”
 
Following Merkel’s comments, Financial Times Deutschland ran an essay titled: “Georgia Belongs in NATO.” Could this be the beginning of a European strategic rethink?
 
Star Wars in Poland
 
German media reaction to news of the agreement to base a US missile defense system in Poland has been strangely muted. The deal, which signifies a major augmentation in the ability of America to project power in Europe, may over time turn out to be far more significant to the future of European security than the crisis in Georgia. All the more puzzling, then, that German commentators have reacted to the news with a kind of fatalistic resignation.
 
The left-leaning Die Tageszeitung says: “Moscow’s military leaders are not really afraid of the US missile defense system. Ten US interceptor missiles stand against thousands of Russian warheads, should it come to that…. As usual, the main point is the respect and recognition of a Russia which still has not come to terms with its loss of superpower status.”
 
Only a few months ago, the same newspaper said: “There are so many unanswered questions, especially as to the purpose of the [missile shield]. Since Iran is obviously not yet capable of atomic weaponry, and the world community wants to prevent them from obtaining such weapons, which missiles is the anti-missile shield going to intercept? What is the nature of the threat? How much will it cost the German taxpayer? Will there be further armament projects?”
 
The leftwing Der Spiegel, in a surprising moment of introspection, admits: “Concerns about possible threats emanating from Putin’s unpredictable empire were never far from the minds of Warsaw politicians. After all, have its EU partners in the West not criminally underestimated this danger and left the countries of Eastern Europe to fend for themselves against the Russian bear time and time again in the past? Brussels did nothing when Russia beat up on the Baltic States with arbitrary trade restrictions, when it launched a full-scale cyber war against Estonia and when it used specious arguments to ban Polish food imports. And that’s not even mentioning the weak support given to the young, wobbly Ukrainian democracy as Russia attempted to strong-arm it.”
 
Only a few months ago, the same magazine said European leaders were “sitting out” the rest of the Bush Administration: “Behind the delaying tactics is the hope that a new US administration under Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will push the expensive missile defense with less determination than the Republican Bush.”
 
The financial daily Handelsblatt says: “In Eastern Europe, a new discussion about Russia is developing that considers both the domestic and foreign policies being followed in the Kremlin. This mindset does not necessarily mean a new split of the NATO alliance into the ‘old’ US-critical Europeans and the ‘new’ pro-American Europeans. But it does show that the large European countries like Germany and France must show more deference to the Eastern European worldview.”
 
The Financial Times Deutschland says: “Prague and Warsaw are betting that their countries will be strategically more important for the United States—and thus they will enjoy greater protection in the future. All this is happening because of fear of ever-more aggressive Russia. In Western Europe, which did not experience a Soviet invasion and martial law, this fear is often mocked as being outdated. But the recent Russian invasion of Georgia shows that it is a very relevant issue.”
 
One year ago, the same newspaper said: “Myths Burden the Debate About US Missile Defense.” The article called for a “factual” explanation of the anti-missile system.
 
At least the center-left Die Zeit is being consistent. An essay titled “Questionable Security” argues: “That Poland—considering its past history with Russia—lacks the will to structure its priorities in another way (let’s say: European) is understandable. But that the Administration in Washington at this point is pushing a Cold War mood and is further splitting the Alliance partners, can mean only one thing: That the current authorities have not learned from the mistakes of the past.”
 
Or maybe it’s the Germans who have failed to learn from history that appeasement never works.
 
The World Has Earned a New America
 
European media elites love to find Americans who can “confirm” that the United States is indeed as crappy of a country as Europeans say it is. And the editors of Handelsblatt are no different. In what must rank as one of the shoddiest pieces of German journalism in recent times, Katahrina Slodczyk tries to convince her readers that the 120,000 US nationals living in Germany (aka America’s 51st state) are suddenly proud to be American again. And it’s all because of Barack Obama.
 
In a “news” story titled “The New Pride to be American”, Slodczyk interviews one Sue Bergermann, who after divorcing her German husband decides to leave Munich to return to live in her small hometown in Ohio. But she soon discovers that she cannot adapt. So she transfers the blame for her self-imposed self-identity crisis to the man who is to blame for all of the world’s problems: George W Bush.
 
In 2004, Bergermann decides to return to Germany, the last true paradise on earth. She says: “I could not stand America. This president [Bush] has turned my homeland into a developing country. Everything is ailing: Infrastructure, schools, political institutions.” Bergermann is back in Munich because “I was happy to find an alternative to life in America.”
 
Fast-forward to 2008: Bergermann is once again homesick for America, thanks to (surprise, surprise) Barack Obama! “If Barack Obama wins the presidential elections, then sooner or later I will return to the USA,” she asserts.
 
Confirming that Bergermann is not the only American expatriate who shares the correct (ie German) perspective on America, Slodczyk also interviews Jerry Gerber, a New Yorker who has lived in Germany for more than 30 years. He says: “Obama makes us proud of our homeland. We now, once again, have a r reason to love our country.”
 
Slodczyk then writes: “Americans have high expectations for the successor of George W Bush…The United States, the greatest world power of all times, has lost its authority. Bush stands for the war in Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib, for legal inflection in Guantanamo, for a reckless environmental policy…The new president will have to clean up, repair, rectify. He will have to give the country a new direction—and the rest of the world as well.” To which one might reply: Are there any prerequisite qualifications to being a journalist in Germany? Any why is opinion being peddled as news?
 
The Frankfurter Rundschau takes a similar but slightly different line by publishing a commentary titled “European Americans” which asserts that Republican voters are largely uneducated and therefore “American” and Democratic voters are educated and therefore more “European.” Marcia Pally, a “multicultural studies” professor at New York University says: “McCain’s supporters are older, white and uneducated men. By contrast, Obama’s quasi-European voters are female, but especially young and smart.” She then advises: “If Democrats want to win, they will have to rid themselves of their European appearance.” By which she evidently means they should abandon their snobbish cultural superiority complex. Just for good measure, Pally concludes: “Hillary Clinton is simply the better American.” Ouch!
 
Not to be outdone in the effort to profile “disaffected Americans,” the newsmagazine Focus offers an interview with Michael Franti, a Californian hip hop musician who refuses to wear shoes as a way of expressing his solidarity with poor people (by the way, he is also for peace in the Middle East and in the whole world). Focus asks Franti: “You must certainly be supporting Barack Obama.” Franti responds: “I support ideas….For the rest of the world, Barack embodies a new America—and the rest of the world, as well as the USA, have earned a new America.”
 
Germany Way Too Conservative…for Gay Marriage
 
Brigitte Zypries, Germany’s leftwing justice minister, writes an opinion essay in the San Francisco Chronicle in which she apologizes to California’s gay community for her failure to achieve rights for same-sex partners that are equal to those held by married couples.
 
But she insists she is making big progress. Says Zypries: “A visible sign that the important thing in these deliberations is love is the rainbow flag that flew over the Hamburg City Hall from July 31 to August 3 to commemorate the local gay pride celebration.” That “event” was the result of a political agreement between the parties that form the local government, which is led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU).
 
She continues: “The CDU is Germany’s leading conservative party, and its attitude toward creating a legal foundation for registered same-sex partnerships has ranged from reluctance to rejection…. I am committed to attaining complete equality between married couples and registered life partners. But in Germany, the time for this unfortunately has not yet arrived…. In Germany, many conservative people attach every bit as much importance to the remaining legal differences between heterosexual spouses and same-sex partners as conservatives in the United States attach to the exclusive use of the term ‘marriage’ to describe the bond between a man and a woman.” Long live many conservative people!
 
In the effort to score some brownie points with San Francisco’s gays, however, Zypries concedes that Germany is not any more “progressive” than is America. Another pillar of European leftwing dogma goes up in flames.
 
“Ugly German” Seeks “Negro”
 
More news of Germans gone wild while abroad: The German consul general in San Francisco, Rolf Schütte, says a group of German MPs visiting the United States was more concerned about sightseeing and shopping for shoes than about scheduled meetings with American counterparts. And who can blame them? After all, San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities in America.
 
But Schütte’s complaint does not end there. In a report he prepared for the Foreign Ministry, and which was later leaked to the German media, the parliamentary group was due to take a sightseeing trip around San Francisco, when one delegate, Annette Widmann-Mauz, broke her foot. When Schütte provided her with a wheelchair, the MP complained that it was “a chair for the sick with small wheels, the kind you see in old US movies.” Her colleague, Randolph Krüger, chimed in by saying: “We need a negro who can push the wheelchair.” Come again?
 
When asked by Der Spiegel about the incident, Krüger said: “I would not exclude having said that, but if they are going to provide us with such a splendid contraption, they can at least help us out with it.”
 
So much bunk for the idea that Germans are more civilized than Americans. It looks like the “ugly American” faces stiff competition from the “ugly European.”
 

Heave-Ho Harry's Place

Here we go again; another random party using our atrocious Libel Laws to close down criticism and debate. In this case it appears to be Sheffield Academic Jenna Delich, or her supporters, making legal noises to intimidate the iSP hosting the blog Harry's Place.

 

Harry's Place comments:

Though we have not yet seen the complaint submitted, we assume it runs along the lines that pointing out that Ms Delich linked to the website of a known neo-Nazi figure and former Ku Klux Klan leader is defamatory.

 

This is extraordinary since Ms Delich has not denied that she circulated links to David Dukes website. There would be no point since the evidence is in the public domain.

They committed the unforgiveable sin of "publishing a fact", which means that any Libel Case is down the toilet for a start - if my legal head is screwed-on correctly tonight. And any iSP should know that, but the law makes it easier to give in. If allegation is not correct (I think it looks fine), then they (and the rest of us) may be skewered.

Leftish imbroglios and nuances are not my strong suit - but closing down debate by running squealing to an iSP using Britain's nonsensical Libel Laws is the best way to make yourself look ridiculous.

The actors in this case: Jenna Delich is an activist with a bee in her bonnet for the campaign for an Academic Boycott of Israel, and the UCU is one of the main Unions for staff in Higher Education.

No, it has nothing to do with the dead rising from the grave and eating brains convening a parliament. Rather, I presume that it is supposed to be a damning indictment of Cameron and the Conservative Party: This zombie politics offers rich pickings to a clever opposition. While the party in power gets on with the [...]

It is a little over a month since Cease and Desist notices were sent to a series of bloggers.

I want to look back on what has been achieved - in both concrete terms and "soft" terms.

You can get up to speed by reading my "Introductory Guide", or the list of people posting in support, or even the Press Room:

Dave Walker is a cartoonist who runs a popular website, which includes the blogs We Blog Cartoons, Cartoon Church and The Cartoon Blog.

On the morning of July 22nd 2008 he received a cease and desist letter threatening legal action unless he removed 75 posts from his Cartoon Church blog by lunchtime - i.e., half a day’s notice.

These 75 posts had reported the developing situation over a 2 year period in a UK book chain called SPCK, which had been taken over by a company run by Mark Brewer. Dave Walker’s was the main published source reporting the situation, asking questions about the management of the chain, and highlighting the treatment of the employees.

So, what has happened?

Perhaps the most revealing remark made during the crisis over South Ossetia was that by the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, who attacked Russia in very strong terms for having reverted to “a 19th century approach to politics”.
 
Milliband’s hatred of Russia is built into his political DNA. His grandfather, Samuel Miliband, was a Warsaw-born Communist who famously fought in the Red Army but who then left the Soviet Union for Belgium when Stalin became top dog in Moscow. As a lifelong Trotskyite and supporter of world revolution, Miliband was disgusted by Stalin’s decision to create socialism in one country alone and by his de facto restoration of Great Russian nationalism.
 
Samuel’s son, Ralph, the Foreign Secretary’s father (born in Brussels), became a noted Marxist political scientist. His son David’s embrace now of the neo-conservative project of creating a unipolar world based on American power and the ideology of human rights is therefore a typical illustration of something of which I have written on many occasions in the past, namely the way in which true Marxists find their natural political home in the project of “global democratic revolution” proselytised by George W. Bush.
 
Indeed, the Foreign Secretary’s remark about Russia reveals more about the speaker than about the matter in hand. Of course the remark is notable for its hypocrisy. Miliband, after all, is a member of a government which has invaded two countries which have in the past been classic destinations for the British troops in the heyday of Empire, Afghanistan and Iraq, and which has also energetically pursued the extension of Western influence into another part of the world famous for being the focus of Great Power rivalry in the 19th century, the Balkans.
 
But the remark is mainly notable for the mindset it reveals. From Miliband’s point of view, Western policy over the last fifteen years has not been a matter of brute force. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the bombing attack on Yugoslavia have not been military invasions, but instead selfless acts inspired by a desire to promote democracy and human rights, and therefore not even political acts in the classic sense of that term. Instead, they are (he believes) acts carried out in the service of humanity, acts which no reasonable person could oppose. Anyone who does oppose them is probably an enemy of humanity itself.
 
By contrast, continues his reasoning, Russia’s decision to protect South Ossetia from the Georgian attack on the night of 8 August is a cynical exercise of brute force designed solely to extend Russian power into the Caucasus. Indeed, although Moscow actually did react to human rights abuses and war crimes committed by the Georgians when they attacked Tskinvali, the language coming out of the Russian capital has tended to focus more on the country’s national interests and security, and less on appeals to universal principles of human rights. This is what Miliband cannot stand. When George W. Bush gave the order to invade Iraq, by contrast, there was of course a certain amount of talk about America’s need to protect herself from external attack (a threat which was purely invented). But the centre of gravity of the American arguments in favour of that war lay in universalist and unpolitical claims about democratising the Middle East and advancing the global democratic revolution.
 
The great and controversial German jurist, Carl Schmitt, famous adopted Proudhon’s dictum that “Whoever speaks about humanity is trying to deceive.” It’s a good one-liner but the remark is incorrect. Precisely the danger of the Miliband-Bush vision of politics is that it is not based on a conscious desire to deceive others but instead on self-deception – on a genuine belief in the rightness of the universalist and almost Messianic mission which they embrace. Like the liberal imperialists of the, er, 19th century, these people do really believe that what they are doing is selfless and essentially non-political.
 
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union – an artificial political creation based on a negation of Russian history and reality, on bogus internationalism, and on an allegedly universalist political creed which was supposed to embrace the whole of humanity – Russian politicians have long since abandoned any pretence that their own country has any such universal vocation. When I met President Putin last September, he specifically said that Russia had suffered greatly from having adopted Lenin’s universalist creed of communism. (“Vladimir Ilyich Lenin-Ulyanov said at one point: Russia matters nothing to me; what matters is to achieve world socialist revolution.”)
 
Not so the United States and Britain. The neo-conservative project of creating a unipolar world based on human rights and democracy (embraced energetically on both the Left and the Right of the American political spectrum, as the recent nomination of Joe Biden as Barack Obama’s running-mate sadly emphasises) does require brute force to implement it. Developments like the “independence” of Kosovo grow only out of the barrel of a gun. But the project is supported in London and Washington by people who have utterly deluded themselves about its truly political nature.
 
It is because the West still deceives itself on this matter, and because post-Soviet Russia no longer does, that East-West relations are a dialogue of the deaf. Both sides are speaking a language the other does not want to hear. The Western vision, based on self-deceit, is extremely dangerous; the Russian vision of politics is far more realistic. It is to be hoped, therefore, that the reassertion of a Russian presence on the international stage will force the Milibands of this world, obviously against their will, to realise a basic fact about the human condition. It is that the world has been divided into different states ever since the collapse of the Tower of Babel, and that politics consists therefore not in fantastic projects to construct a new tower in its place, but instead in making the best job one can out of the bricks which remain.

What happened to your email ... (click through)

Cartoon: Wellington Grey

I am doing an upgrade of Wordpress, so you may see some interesting changes while I am doing the process.

Victory for the Pommes! Congratulations to Sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe. His opposite number in Australia, Kate Ellis will now have to wear an England jersey to a sporting event thanks to our athletes not only getting more gold medals that the ever winging Aussies, but actually getting more medals over all. We have become [...]

[Ed: Er … no comment] <tabloid blogging> I’m not making it up. </tabloid blogging>

A quote from Cardinal Cardinal Sean Brady, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, in The Irish Times, 25 August 2008

As the recent referendum on the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland suggests, at least some of those who were previously enthusiastic about the founding aims of the EU, both social and economic, are now expressing unease. […]

Successive decisions [of the EU institutions] have undermined the family based on marriage, the right to life from the moment of conception to natural death, the sacredness of the Sabbath, the right of Christian institutions to maintain and promote their ethos, including schools – these and other decisions have made it more difficult for committed Christians to maintain their instinctive commitment to the European project. […]

[It is] quite natural to expect the US presidential candidates to answer direct questions about their commitment to faith, their willingness to support faith-based organisations, their position on moral issues and how it would affect their appointment of public officials. [I look forward] to the day we have the same level of openness and choice in our own elections here in Ireland and in Europe.

Without respect for its Christian memory and soul, I believe it is possible to anticipate continuing difficulties for the European project. These will emerge not only in economic terms but in terms of social cohesion and the continued growth of a dangerous individualism that does not care about God or about what the future might have in store.

 

Cartoon: Gaping Void

The Electoral Commission wants to close a loophole that allows donations to political parties without declaring their name - by doing it under a corporate guise. The new proposals would make organisations such as the Midlands Industrial Council list their donors and the amounts given by them. To be honest, the proposals seems pretty fair. If [...]

Barack Obama introduces Joe Biden, Senator for Delaware, as his running mate at a rally in Springfield last Saturday.

Is over at Amused Cynicism.

The roundup is a compendium of last week's outstanding posts in the British Blogosphere.

George Handlery about the week that was. Courses in terrorism might lead to pacifism. Accepting Jihad or being a racist. Sanctions should not anger the aggressor. The dangers of overreaction and under reacting. Atrocities pay. Are we in a process of strategic re-alignment? Fact and fiction: are only the rich getting richer?
 
1. Here a hilarious but also revealing tidbit from a small booklet “Die letzten Tage Europas/The Last Days of Europe” by H. M. Broder. Germany’s Minister of Justice, Brigitte Zypries finds it mistaken to prosecute individuals for having attended terrorist training camps. She feels that someone who participates in the program might react with a personal decision to renounce violence. (Such a person might even become a Quaker.) Later she altered her position. One should only punish those who take the course in order to become subsequently active. Broder concludes that, apparently, “one cannot know at the outset whether someone lets himself be trained as a terrorist because the Berlitz course in Esperanto at home was filled or because he simply wishes to measure up to his mother-in-law.” The sanctions for participation in terrorist training are therefore limited. An exception seems to be possible if someone enrolling sends Ms Zypries an affidavit. It should affirm that the enrollee not only wants training in terrorism but also intends to put the skills to be gained to practical use. No wonder that the book got the title it has.
 
2. Something comes to mind now that “the last days” have been mentioned. Public and private utterances show that, regardless of the context, certain circles resent the discussion of the Jihad. One reason is that in the two hundred and fifty years since the Enlightenment we were taught that politics and religion belong in separate spheres. Suggesting that for some, it is not so disturbs the worldview held by some of us. The more so since it is part of our secular religion’s dogma that we are alike. If religion is voluntarily politicized then we have identified a difference that should not be. The subject would elicit a more realistic reaction if a further prejudice would not stand in its way. In case the Jihadists would be berserk Scandinavians the phenomena would seem to be safer to discuss. (This ignores the fact that “insulted” Nordics would not express their dissent with violent means while radical Muslims are unlikely to limit themselves to critical letters to the Editor.)
 
3. Discreetly, it is being suggested that counter-measures and reactions to Georgia are to be of a sort that will not anger Russia. Absurdly, this self-created inhibition implies that strong aggressors (real or alleged) should only be criticized with their consent. Concurrently, this kind of squeamishness teaches the aggressor that he is to claim early, possibly before the fact, the status of the insulted party. It creates a welcome opportunity to become confused in the case of those who do not like clear-cut cases if these result in tough going.  Thereby the claimed victim status becomes protection against having to impose effective sanctions on the impostor.
 
4. Georgia is not “the case,” it is only a symptom. Therefore the trouble might be greater than we care to admit.
 
5. Reacting to Russia’s handling of Georgia sheds light on another inhibition. Suggestively we are asked, “are we overreacting to the crisis?” The question is made to imply that the dangerous error of exaggeration is being committed. No, in fact we are systematically under reacting. Here we should realize that it is exactly this manicured response that is the most dangerous one among our alternatives. How come that the mistake which we love to make is our typical response? The case is similar to the abuse of cold medicine that combats symptoms. We search for palliatives to counter-act an event that is firmly embedded in an unfolding reality.
 
6. Moscow’s hegemonial action in Georgia sent a message. Indeed, the message was intended and calculated by Moscow. The question is what we will learn from the un-coded smoke signals we have seen rising.
 
7. One reaction makes the demonstration of Russian might and its methods in Georgia to turn out to be the source of our luck. The 2007 cyber war against Estonia (another uppity ex-dependency of the USSR/Russia) hit a relatively qualified country to defend itself. The example of Estonia’s predicament has nudged NATO and its member states. The early warning prompted the creation structures and procedures to prevent the collapse of their communications, banking and industry through implementing counter measures.
 
8. Under the heading “reactions” there are also those that welcome Russia’s performance as a “peace enforcer.” An example is Assad as reported in the Isvestia newspaper of July 20. Visiting to negotiate cooperation and protection against “‘democratization’” as a piece puts it (August 21), Syria’s dictator found that Russia’s role in Georgia had been “entirely lawful.” She is “responsible for peace” in the Caucasus and, therefore, she had to “make order” there. He also discovered evidence of the cold war being reignited, of “anti-Russian” reactions (vast anti-Russian conspiracy?) and of dishonesty in the light of the Kosovo analogy.
 
9. Disproportionate as they were, Russia’s making order in Georgia by smashing it created a new strategic reality. Some of it corresponds to the Kremlin’s wishes. However, the intervention also revised the image Russia attempted to project and unmasked the illusions some of us (the writer is explicitly included) tried to nurture. The case that there is a new Russia became wobbly. Putin’s Russia has brought back the Soviet past that some of us had tried very hard to forget. A strategic re-alignment might be the result.
 
10. A consequence of Russia’s Georgian show is the instantaneous solution of US-Polish differences surrounding the missile defenses to be created against nuclear attacks by rogue states. Russia protests the missiles and lets it be known that with this Poland has become a target for her. The real threat to Russia of the ten defensive missiles when her offensive rocket forces dispose over thousands is negligible. Therefore, the real threat to Russian-Western relations will be as great as Russia chooses to make it. In this political and not security reasons will be decisive.
 
11. A crucial detail of the “Georgia business” tends to get lost in the selective reporting of the event. Not accidentally, this writer is alert to the matter that is easily repressed by most of us. The reason has to do with the conditioning that unusual backgrounds can give us. A policy of systematic atrocities against conquered enemy populations is part of the way some countries fight their wars. Russia is one of them. Mass rape, looting, the destruction of property can uproot conquered populations that are located in disputed territory. Well-planned spontaneous indiscriminate violence, if applied with stern vigor, produces high returns. It might make the victims submissive, demoralized and ultimately acquiescent when the conqueror imposes his system upon them. (As a child, I could witness this method indirectly. The “indirectly” has a good reason: two Soviet officers had been assigned to the protection of our mansion in 1945.) Also in this respect the WW2 past is – as referred to in last week’s report – still a component of the way wars are waged. Here a further link to the present might be pointed out. Especially the Serbian side resorted to this proven strategy in the wars that partitioned Yugoslavia. This policy, not the fighting in itself, is what made the conflicts of separation especially costly in human lives and livelihoods.
 
12. Slogans distort reality. Therefore, they are accepted to concoct a substitute world. A good thing about catchphrases is that we may lean on their distorting pretense without having to think on our own. Take the famous one that begins with “the rich are getting richer.” Yes, the rich are getting richer. So do the poor. Yet, while this happens, the poor are globally losing something. No, do not expect to encounter here an updated paraphrase of Marx’ famous “their chains” because it “sounds good.” What the poor are really losing is their share expressed in percentages of the world’s population. This ignored and in some cases, denied process raises a crucial question. In some instances, it is likely to provoke a pre-fabricated response designed to prevent the bubble carrying the jingle from bursting. The question to ponder is, whether making the rich poorer would help materially the destitute to escape poverty. Our experience gathered in the economic realm suggests the contrary. Meanwhile, instituting a government capable of such radical redistribution implies the surrender of freedom. As so often in comparable cases, the sacrifice would be ultimately made in exchange for nothing.

 

A quick post to say that I am continuing to find the odd glitch with the new template on the blog - especially in numbered and bulleted lists.

The Web Elves are working on it.

 

Carnage

Between Roppongi and Akasaka – the two fanciest precints in Tokyo -- there lies a somnolent spot, curiously underutilized for this, among the most expensive acres of land anywhere in the world. It’s the residence of a long-dead Japanese soldier, crouching under a shroud of weeping cherry trees in the shadow of Japan’s tallest and most fabulous building, the Midtown Project.

The opulent Midtown Project has a motto: “Introducing Japan’s newest significance to the world.” But right next to it, in this austere, smallish house built in 1902 with a red-brick stable and a compact garden, Japan’s oldest significance to the world may be found.

For Tom Cruise was not the last samurai. General Maresuke Nogi was.

Born to a samurai family in 1849, at the age of twenty Nogi embarked on a military career. Being of the first generation to come of age during the Meiji Restoration, he trained according to Prussian infantry procedures. In 1871, he was commissioned as a major in the unseasoned Imperial Japanese Army, with which he would fight in 1877 in a civil war, the Satsuma Rebellion.

For his valorous service in this campaign, Nogi was promoted to colonel. Around that time, he married Shizuko, a daughter of a Satsuma samurai. In short order, Shizuko gave birth to two sons.

In 1887, Nogi went to Germany to study European military tactics. From then on, his career would follow the fortunes of the expanding Japanese Empire. By 1894, already a major general, Nogi had the command of the First Infantry Brigade that bested Chinese defenses during the First Sino-Japanese War and occupied Port Arthur after only one day of combat. In 1895, now a lieutenant general, he was charged with the task of invading Taiwan, and a year later was appointed as the Japanese Governor-General of Taiwan.

Nogi had a good tenure in Taiwan, but in 1899 he was recalled to Japan and placed in command of an infantry brigade. His appointment with destiny would have to wait another five years.

Imperial designs by both Russia and Japan on Manchuria and Korea would come to a head in Manchuria. Manchuria’s key port, Port Arthur – now the Chinese city of Liaoshun -- lay along a natural harbor in the Liaodong Peninsula. Japan had been ceded this port in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki with China, but Russia would manage to lease it from China anyway. In February 1904, Japan gave notice that it would have none of it. Its navy launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at anchor in the Port Arthur bay.

In May 1904, the Japanese Second Army, 38,500 strong, landed on the Liaodong peninsula. The Russian forces arrayed against it consisted of 17,000 soldiers under the command of Major-General Anatoly Stoessel.

By 26 May 1904, the Japanese had fought their way to the 116-meter high Nanshan hill, which guarded the approach to Port Arthur. 3000 men of the 5th East Siberian Rifles were there, dug into fortified positions protected by mine fields, machine guns and barbed wire obstacles. Nine assault waves by determined Japanese troops failed to break the Russian defense. It was only when the Russians had run out of ammunition that they retreated toward Port Arthur.

A British officer, Captain F.R. Sedgwick, on site to observe the first “high-tech” war in history, wrote in his report:
 “(B)odies of gallant men dashed forward to the obstacles again and again, only to leave two-thirds of their numbers lying on the bullet-swept ground. All day forward and backward swept the lines of battle, charge after charge was met and repulsed.”(1) Capt. Sedgwick reported the Japanese losses at 4324, the Russian at 850.

Ten days later, the Japanese Third Army, led by General (and by now Baron) Maresuke Nogi, made landfall on the Liaodong Peninsula. Nogi already knew that his firstborn son had just been killed in the Battle of Nanshan. Nogi’s younger son was with him, among the 90,000 troops under his command.

Battered by Gen. Nogi’s troops, the rest of the Russian forces retreated to Port Arthur, where they consolidated under the command of General Stoessel. Nogi believed that he could take Port Arthur quickly, just as he had ten years before. He had a 2-to-1 advantage against the nearly 50,000 Russian soldiers, and he had 380 canons. But the Japanese general did not realize that the Port Arthur of 1904 was not the one he had known in 1894.

Port Arthur was a natural stronghold, surrounded by hills that protected against attack from all directions, including the sea. It was Russia’s only warm water port in the Pacific.  Since taking over in 1898, they had turned it into a giant fortress, with four major forts, Laoti, Chikuan, Erhlung and Sungssu in the east, and four major forts in the west.

All these were built of brick and stone on steep hills, with gun batteries, deep moats and ditches, bastions, firing parapets, blind turns and no-exit mazes. Such classic features of European fortification engineering were augmented by new defensive inventions: 6-meter wide belts of densely interwoven barbed wire, night illumination by powerful searchlight batteries and star shells, electric fences, plus such dual-use technologies as hand grenades, poison gas, machine guns and quick-fire howitzers, heavy mortars, bolt-action magazine rifles, and more.  

On 7 August 1904, General Nogi launched a frontal assault on the Russian positions. After bitter fighting in torrential rain, the Russian defenders were forced to withdraw, but only after inflicting heavy casualties on the attackers. The Japanese now attacked the northwest hill positions. Here, the barbed wire entanglements held up their advance at an effective Russian machine-gun range. By dawn, the entanglements had been buried under piles of Japanese soldiers’ bodies.

An assault on Erhlung and Chikuan put the Japanese force on a 1 km-wide strip between the two forts, where it was mowed down by Russian machine gun crossfire, even as the two forts were being turned to rubble by Nogi’s artillery. An attack on the Russian fort on the 174-Meter Hill replayed the Pyrrhic victory scenario of Nanshan. An attack on the 203-Meter Hill saw whole battalions of Japanese soldiers charging repeatedly with fixed bayonets up the 40-degree incline of the ramparts, to be cut down by machine gun and cannon fire.

After three weeks of fighting and not much territorial gain, the butcher’s bill for the Japanese Third Army was 16,000 casualties. The attackers now dug in for a classic siege. They built trenches perpendicular to the Russian forts, and dug tunnels under them. Despite their bravery, by September’s end they had conquered little new territory. The Russians, though weakened by many dead and wounded, dwindling food supplies and scurvy, were digging tunnels under the Japanese tunnelers. In some of those, the two sides met and fought with sapper’s knives and pick mattocks.

Nogi then resumed the assault on Erhlung and Chikuan. The Japanese had reduced Erhlung to a pile of rubble through heavy shelling and underground mining. Still, the remaining Russian defenders at the two forts continued to rake with dense fire, turning the approach slopes into blood-slicked killing fields. Repulsed, Nogi concentrated now on the 203-Meter Hill, which he intended to present to Emperor Meiji for the latter’s 29 October 1904 birthday.

Wave after wave of Japanese soldiers crashed onto the hill, using hand-grenades and bayonet-fixed rifles, under cover of dense artillery fire. It was hand-to-hand combat, six days and nights, with the latter illuminated by Russian searchlights.  Instead of the intended present, Nogi had to report to Emperor Meiji the deaths of additional 124 officers and 3611 soldiers.

But failure was unthinkable. On 17 November, the Japanese attacked Chikuan again. They were repulsed after a night of close combat. Again, fallback, artillery bombardment, renewed attack. The Japanese attackers on 26 November were showered with hand grenades and explosive charges, burning oil and firebrands. The maze works channeled them straight toward the business end of Russian machine gun nests. They sustained 12,000 casualties in that assault, with nothing gained.

Next day, Nogi resumed the frontal attack on the 203-Meter Hill. Again, columns of Japanese soldiers charged up the steep slope, led by volunteer units whose order was not to come back alive. The battle lasted 15 hours, and left the hill strewn with Japanese bodies.

By December 5, out of the original force of 5000, only 1000 Russian defenders remained on the hill, most of them wounded. The Japanese launched one more attack, at dawn. This is how Lt. Tadayoshi Sakurai, who took part in the assault, described the preamble to this battle:

“(T)he colonel rose and gave us a final word of exhortation, saying: ‘This battle is our great chance of serving our country. Tonight we must strike at the vitals of Port Arthur. Our brave assaulting column must be not simply a forlorn-hope, but a "sure-death" detachment. I as your father am more grateful than I can express for your gallant fighting. Do your best, all of you.’ (In) this particular battle to be ready for death was not enough; what was required of us was a determination not to fail to die.”

Out of ammunition, the Russians fought with rifle butts and swords, to the last man standing. By mid-afternoon, a Japanese standard was flying from the top of 203- Meter Hill. Among the dead, four layers thick that day, was General Nogi’s last surviving son.

15,000 Japanese troops had been killed or wounded in the final six-day assault on 203-Meter Hill. Nogi was so emotionally shattered that he asked for permission to commit the ritual samurai suicide, seppuku. Emperor Meiji’s direct order prevented him from carrying out his wish.

It was back to Chikuan and Ehrlung. More giant mines exploded under ramparts, hand-to-hand combat, soldiers killed and maimed by the thousands. Chikuan fought to the last man. Out of the initial 50,000, only 5,000 Russians were still capable of combat. General Stoessel surrendered Port Arthur on 2 January 1905. Rarely had so valiant defenders fought such brave attackers.

Expiation

The Siege of Port Arthur cost the Japanese 57,780 casualties, not counting thousands more dead from diseases.(2) The Russians had 31,306 casualties. Over 23,000 more were taken into captivity.  General Nogi had little time to contemplate this, as he now took his remaining soldiers north, to join the forces of Marshal Oyama against the main bulk of the Russian army.

Nogi’s breach through the Russian rear over the Hun River sealed the fate of the Battle of Mukden. It would be the last land battle of the Russo-Japanese War. There had been and there would be further sea battles, with the Battle of Tsushima ranking as one of the greatest naval battles in history. But we aim here to trace the fate of an infantry commander.

Nogi returned to Tokyo to a hero’s welcome and to great honors. But he settled with his wife as a now-childless couple in their spartan home in Akasaka, and became a personal tutor to the future heir to the Japanese throne, Hirohito. Late in his life, Emperor Hirohito would remark that Nogi had had a lasting influence on him, instilling precepts of frugality and stoic virtues of endurance, loyalty and dignity. (3)

Guilt over the carnage of Port Arthur and despair over the loss of his sons must have tormented the old general. He spent his personal fortune on memorial monuments for the Japanese soldiers killed during the Russo-Japanese War, and on hospitals for those wounded there. It’s a testimony to his character that he caused the Japanese government to erect a memorial monument in Port Arthur to the Russian fallen too.

On 13 September 1912 at 19:40, just as Emperor Meiji's funeral procession was getting under way, Maresuke Nogi and his wife seated themselves facing the emperor's portrait in the upstairs parlor of the home that now stands under the weeping trees. They had already bathed, changed into white kimonos, and shared a cup of sake. Then, Mrs. Nogi plunged a dagger into her heart, and the general disemboweled himself with his sword. In notes left for posterity, Nogi apologized for the tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers he had sent to their death in Port Arthur, and for other self-perceived failures in his military career.

The Nogis’ suicide was front page news for months in Japan. Many saw it as a warning from an exalted member of the last samurai generation against the rampant materialism and decline in moral values that had become evident since Japan’s opening to the West. But the establishment saw a golden opportunity in emphasizing Nogi’s loyalty to the emperor, for in his exit poem Nogi had expressed the wish to follow the emperor in death.(4)

Within days of General Nogi’s suicide, government propaganda commenced to enshrine it as the embodiment of the highest virtue – loyalty to the emperor. This loyalty-unto-death aspect would grow to mythical proportions – until it, and the emperor’s divinity, crashed in the embers of World War 2.

Today, the mention of Maresuke Nogi’s name in Japan elicits a mild embarrassment. The military-political junta that had led Japan to suicide in World War 2 had chosen to emphasize those parts of General Nogi’s life and death as would bolster its misbegotten aims. But the man who rendered judgment onto himself deserves better. To see how much so, one must compare him to his European peers.

Those who didn’t

Some aspects of General Nogi’s life story are impenetrable to the Western mind, starting with the idea of a divine emperor of a modern nation, and ending with the slicing of one’s own belly like a ripe pomegranate. It’s unwise, as well, to judge a man born in 1849 by the standards of 2008. But it’s useful to compare Nogi’s conduct to that of European generals who, merely two years after his suicide, would send millions of soldiers to their death in frontal attacks on fortified trenches in the hail of bullets and clouds of mustard gas of the Great War.

Nogi was the first commander to lead a major infantry campaign in the face of 20th century military technology. His Prussian training had emphasized massed infantry charges against defensive positions. Such tactics had led to his first easy conquest of Port Arthur, in 1894. But by 1904, firepower capability had doubled, and new defensive technologies had been implemented. Nogi was unable to understand the full implication of this in time to adapt his tactics. For that, 57,780 of his soldiers paid with their lives, and, by his own choice, so would he.

But the Allied generals of World War 1 had Nogi’s errors to learn from. Yet they ignored the Port Arthur lessons out of haughty stupidity and unwarranted hubris. The French in 1915- 1917, the British in 1916-1917, and the Americans in 1917-1918 would commit all the deadly tactical errors that the Japanese had committed in 1904 and 1905.  5.7 million Allied soldiers paid for this with their lives, and 4 million Central Powers’ soldiers too – the greatest carnage of soldiers in history, until World War 2 upped the ante.

It was eminently avoidable. For the siege of Port Arthur had been one of the first international mass media events ever. Reporters from the major Western newspapers had come to observe the fighting, and they described it in newspapers, magazines, and books. The Illustrated London News brought out on 7 January 1905 an extra double number, “Port Arthur: Its Siege” . Among its three special supplements, one was a detailed, illustrated history of the operations by Charles Lowe, a military historian. The Times’ reporters were so zealous that the Russians threatened to arrest them, citing security concerns.

Foreign military observers from all the Western powers were thick on the ground and at sea in all the large battles of the Russo-Japanese War. They saw and reported to their superiors what modern firepower from fortified defensive positions could do. They published voluminous accounts and analyses.

Then-Major General Sir Ian Hamilton witnessed the Japanese assaults on the 203-Meter Hill, of which he would write:

“(T)hese trenches and their dividing walls had been smashed and pounded and crushed into a shapeless jumble of stones; rock splinters and fragments of shells cemented liberally with human flesh and blood. A man’s head sticking up out of the earth, or a leg or an arm or a piece of a man’s body lying across my path are sights which custom has enabled me to face without blanching. But here the corps do not so much appear to be escaping from the ground as to be the ground itself. Everywhere there are bodies, or portions of bodies, flattened out or stamped into the surface of the earth as if they formed a part of it.”(5)

Yet, the same General Ian “Too Much Feather In His Brain” Hamilton would send division after British and ANZAC division, to storm over minefields bullet-spewing fortified Turkish positions on the cliffs and beaches of Gallipoli, wasting 141,000 soldiers in the 1915 Dardanelles campaign.

In 1915 too, General Douglas “Bottle For a Brain” Haig would state, "The machine gun is a much over-rated weapon,"  and would later send repeated charges of tens of thousands of British soldiers “over the top,” straight into entrenched German machine gun, mortar and howitzer fire. In the four months of the Somme campaign alone, by ignoring the lessons of Port Arthur the British high command wasted 420,000 British soldiers, and the French 200,000, to gain two miles of land. A generation of British women would be left to live and die as “Haig spinsters.”

It wasn’t necessary. Just a few years earlier, Captain Sedgwick had written of the Battle of Nanshan, “With regard to the tactics of the battle, the great value of machine guns in the defensive is to be remarked.”(6) Another British observer, Major J. M. Home, emphasized in his report “the crushing effect of modern artillery” that he had witnessed in Manchuria. This appeared in the multi-volume The Russo-Japanese War. Reports from British Officers attached to the Japanese and Russian Forces (7). The lessons were there, but the donkeys who lead the lions of World War 1 weren’t interested. 

The British were not alone in this shame. General Lombard, chef the French Mission Militaire attached to the Japanese Army, described in his reports a 2600-strong Japanese regiment that had been reduced to 30 soldiers and three officers at the Battle of Mukden, due to the power of modern firearms. (8) Yet, a few years later, the French General Robert Georges Nivelle could plan a 48-hour offensive against the German forces along the Western Front, with 10,000 projected casualties. The offensive lasted 23 days and resulted in 148,000 French casualties.

Throughout World War 1, Allied casualties were especially heavy among officers, who dressed in spiffy uniforms that German riflemen had learned to spot at a distance. Camouflage, crawling under fire, and other defensive methods were considered dishonorable, even though French military observers had concluded already in 1905, in Manchuria, that these precisely would be the indispensable methods of survival in the modern theatre of war. (9)

Nor were the Americans immune. Among the 17 American military observers in Manchuria was Captain John J. Pershing.(10) Yet, 13 years after Port Arthur, Pershing, now Lt. General and commander of the American forces in World War 1, allowed 1,811 U.S. Marines to be slaughtered and 7966 to be wounded in six foolhardy attacks against sweeping German machine gun fire at the Battle of Belleau Wood.

These bemedaled, calcified eminences went on to fame and glory after the war, with few exceptions like Hamilton and Nivelle, who were slapped on the wrist for having sent hundreds of thousands to their profligate death.  General Maresuke Nogi occupies a different moral plane, and for that he deserves remembrance and respect.

Once was not enough

What happened to General Nogi, to his troops, and to the valiant Russian defenders of Port Arthur, was a tragedy. But when tragedy repeats itself, the second time it’s as comedy. And the clowns on the second occasion, the Great War, would neither be held to account nor would they hold themselves to account like Nogi had done. It’s in this macabre farce, worthy of Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder and Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, that Europe’s first suicide was enveloped.

The trauma of mechanized slaughter of millions of cannon fodder conscripts, orchestrated by operetta generals in World War 1 was so great, that almost all the social pathologies of the 20th century may be traced to it. Communism, Fascism, Nazism, “democratic” socialism, pacifism, militant feminism, nouveau liberalism, false egalitarianism, aggressive Third-Worldism – all blossomed from the wreckage of this war.

George Orwell could thus write of an England ruled by “people whose chief asset was their stupidity,” and a generation of post-War writers, from PG Wodehouse to Evelyn Waugh, seconded him in this opinion. Orwell wrote of the British generalship: “The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit that the world was changing. They have always clung to obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of the last.” (11) Let it be said, however, that Orwell was advocating socialism as a panacea, even as an Austrian refugee in London was writing a treatise showing that socialism was the road to serfdom .

The Western system of values, its standards of merit and beauty, were destroyed too. An artistic movement called Dada, a urinal on a pedestal in a museum, would have been unthinkable prior to the Great War. The devaluation of manly valor, of honor, integrity, stoicism, fidelity, loyalty, patriotism, began when Europeans realized that millions of their kin had just been sent to automated abattoirs in foreign mud fields by inept, mustachioed martinets in cavalry breeches, spouting patriotic slogans in an unnecessary war.

People who had experienced the horrors of the Great War came to believe that nothing was worth fighting for. Even as Hitler arose amidst them, they would do nothing until it was nearly too late. Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, would mutate into the coward of Vichy. Neville Chamberlain would sue for peace before a shot had been fired. Western intellectuals were marching as one to the drumbeat of a psycho Georgian killer running Mother Russia the way Ivan the Terrible once had.

The Spanish writer, Sebastián Vivar Rodríguez, wrote that Europe died in Auschwitz. But Europe had already died in Somme, Verdun, Ypres and Passchendaele, twenty five years earlier, by its own hand. What incinerated in 1939 -1945 was just the new shoots that had sprouted from the stump of a felled tree.

A few such shoots survived, regenerated, and grew into a new Europe, again full of self confidence and vigor between 1946 and 1966. But this new tree too is being sawed through by the West’s “best and brightest,” though not of the beribboned kind now. Running as fast and as far as they can from the evils of the two world wars, they are dragging the West right into the opposite evil.

Like a pendulum that can only quantum-leap from one extreme of its arch to the other, the 2008 heirs to the mantle of 1908 politicians have become their cartoon antithesis. Though Europe’s 20th century suicide in two parts should have discredited militarism, pusillanimity, chauvinism, racism, colonialism, gender and class discrimination and nihilism, the bien pensant have harnessed the blowback to discredit war in self-defense, courage, patriotism, white ethnicity, the white peoples’ self-determination, white males, inequality based on merit, and Christianity.

The Anglican Archbishop of the former Rule Britannia is now a promoter of sharia. Spain’s prime minister wants the country that once reconquered itself from Muslim rule, to let itself be conquered again. The Dutch want to sue a man for loss of profits when he warns of their colonization by people who boil over for cartoons, but bowl over for beheadings.

The Vikings are now the obsequious servants of their women and their imported freeloaders. Not that there was true glory in being savage brutes; but being eunuchs is not much better. And the United States, once of ‘manifest destiny,’ has curdled into a “proposition nation” of no discernible borders, language, culture or continuity -- as though the people who founded and built it, their culture and their descendants, never existed.

From the self-confidence and sense of superiority of the 1900s and 1950s, the West has evolved into a groveling clump of meek masochists, worshipping false idols because they are not the old false idols. The political, intellectual and artistic elite in every country of the West is now fawning on its previous perceived lessers: the non-white, the foreign ethnic, the non-Christian, the female, the homosexual, the dumb and deviant. And it does so as though such “minorities” had the sole purchase on virtue.

Forever fighting the previous war when it’s no longer relevant, eyes firmly planted on the realities of 1915 and 1940, Western elites are busy combating “racism,” “orientalism,” “ethnocentrism” and “sexism” that no longer exist in Western societies but exist in all others.  And they do so by committing a dual act of treason. Its one prong is the forced dilution and suppression of the Western founding peoples’ racial, ethnic and cultural heritage and identity. Its other prong is the forced injection of the previously slighted “minorities” into the upper echelons of power, regardless of merit.

Just because a hundred years ago power was wielded by incompetent white males of dubious character, the main qualification for the new Praetorian Guard is to be a woman, a non-heterosexual, or a “person of color” of dubious wisdom. But only true meritocracy and ethnic cohesiveness can save the West from being destroyed by the spreading chaos from the Third World, and by the might of the East, where male oligarchies, tribal allegiance, and ruthless meritocracy still hold sway.

In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the West and Japan came to kiss the hand of the once-sleeping giant that they had formerly belittled and exploited, and now enriched and armed to the teeth beyond the wildest reaches of imagining. And China, the world’s most ethnocentric, racist, tyrannical and imperialist power, skillfully exploits their shame at having once been themselves ethnocentric, racist, tyrannical and imperialist.

Mouthing their mea culpa for Port Arthur and Nanking, opium and Hong Kong, the world’s leaders would have to pass under the giant portrait of Mao Zedong, to enter the Forbidden City. And Mao, proudly flaunted by the Chinese hosts, is the worst mass murderer in history, responsible for snuffing out at least 60 million Chinese lives, and by some accounts up to 80 million.

Then the great chiefs of the guai-lo, the white devils, would attend an opening ceremony in which a fake singer was lip-synching to the words of "Hymn to the Motherland” , and 56 children from the Chinese Han majority dressed in the ethnic costumes of the 56 Chinese minorities would be paraded to show the white fools that China too loves diversity.  And after that, the poor white devils went on to cheer at ball games and toast at 30-course banquets even as the Chinese continued working dawn to dusk and saving 35% of their income while the armored columns of another patriarchal, ethnocentric, racist and tyrannical empire, Russia, having planned for months for precisely this moment, smashed into Georgia.

There were lessons for the West to be drawn from the 2008 visit in China, just as there had been in 1904. But if the lessons of 1904 had fallen on the deaf ears of cocky chauvinists, the lessons of 2008 were lost on capon globalists.

Future historians will see the West’s postmodern regime of liberalism, multiculturalism, sham egalitarianism, tolerance of the intolerable, cowardice, one-worldism and stigmatization of the male and the white, for the suicide it is. It will be just as plain as our image of World War 1 is now. And just like then, by paying heed to lessons from the East, the Western self-erasure unfolding now could have been averted.

The greatest lesson, though, and one that is by now outer-space alien to the shallow midgets running the West’s countries on behalf of their devitalized demos, is embedded in the character of the man whom we seek to commemorate here. This is how war correspondent, Richard Barry, who was with General Nogi for nine months in Manchuria, eulogized him in the New York Times on 14 September 1912:

“Of all the human beings I have ever known he rises in my memory as the one superb, complete person. He was at once soldier and poet, statesman and artist. Always he was the gentleman -- wondrously gentle, and a man to the bone. That figure of a poised, intent, suffering, masterful spirit, tried alternately by desperate defeat and by tremendous triumph, neither deterred by the one nor elated by the other, will always stand before me as an ideal. He had learned that the hope of heaven and the fear of hell are vulgar vices and that the superior man loves right for its own sake. He was the arch-type of the old high order of chivalric thinking, of unshrinking living, and of stoical dying. Other great men may come, but such a great man as this we are not likely to see again.”

 

------- 

Takuan Seiyo is a multiethnic, naturalized American writer and former international media executive. His grandfather-in-law, fighting for Japan in 1904-05, survived the Russo-Japanese War. His paternal grandfather, fighting for Austria in 1914, died in the Battle of Galicia. 

 

Footnotes

(1) Captain F.R. Sedgwick, R.F.A., "1904 The Russo-Japanese War", quoted at http://www.russojapanesewar.com/sedgwick-3.html. Several volumes and editions of this work were published in the U.K. after the Russo-Japanese War.

(2) Approximately 25,000 Japanese soldiers fell sick with beri-beri alone, and were shipped home.

(3) Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, HarperCollins, 2000, pp. 42-43

(4) To stay with our main subject, it’s necessary to refrain from discussing the separate and unique significance of Mrs. Nogi’s suicide.

(5) Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Hamilton, K.C.B., A Staff Officer’s Scrap Book during the Russo-Japanese War, vol. 2, Chapter 36, Edward Arnold, London, 1907.

(6) Captain F.R. Sedgwick (ibid.)

(7) Published by Eyre and Spottiswood, London, 1908.

(8) Général Lombard, “Rapport d’ensemble du Chef de la Mission Militaire Française à l’armée japonaise,” décembre 1905, S.H.A.T., 7 N 1700.

(9) “Enseignements de la guerre russo-japonaise,” note n° 3, “Outils”, Décembre 1905, S.H.A.T., quoted in  Olivier Cosson, “Expériences de guerre et anticipation à la veille de la Première Guerre mondiale. Les milieux militaires franco-britanniques et les conflits extérieurs,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no50-3 2003/3, pp. 127 – 147, http://hairn.info/revue-d-histoire-moderne-et-contemporaine-2003-3-page-127.htm

(10) Quoted in Major James D. Sisemore, US Army, “The Russo-Japanese War, Lessons Not Learned” Master of Military Art and Science thesis, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2003, p.9, http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/p4013coll2&CISOPTR=113&filename=114.pdf .
 
(11) George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius,” originally published in 1940, reprinted in George Orwell, Why I Write, Penguin Books, year not indicated, p. 34.

This is Simon Sarmiento’s fourth Guest Column on the Wardman Wire, while David Keen is on holiday from the blog.

This week looks at American politics, and in particular at the Saddleback Forum - a debate hosted by one of the USA's Evangelical Megachurches. And he explains why he will be taking on the role of Fat Controller of St Albans in mid-September.

Continuing the experiment with Viral Videos...

Is we is? Or is we ain't?

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A cartoon from ASBO Jesus.

A weekly roundup of publications, reports, events & articles from the leading UK think tanks. Welcome to this week’s Think-tank Roundup. This week we have calls to scrap the next census, ‘Policy Exchange do Blade Runner’ and even the suggestion that all this web stuff is slowly throttling the very idea of think-tanks – your correspondent, [...]

The Carpet baggers aiming to turn sporting success into party political advantage have started already, and the ex-Sports Minister Richard Caborn MP is first out of the blocks with an article over at Labour Home.

This is annoying - a commenter on Political Betting had the right attitude with a comment that the best way for the Labour Government to benefit from the Olympic success is to keep quiet and bask in the reflected glory.

Instead, Mr Caborn has stuck his oar in, got a lot of things wrong and ended up looking rather silly - as well as being an opportunist out to exploit Olympic success in the course of grubby politics.

The fact that he is posting at Labour Home is interesting - there's an interesting debate to be had about how the relationships between official parties and grassroots websites will evolve - across all parties.

But for now, a little light rebuttal over afternoon coffee beckons.

A quote from the Italian press agency AKI, 22 August 2008

Morocco has recalled its Ambassador to Italy, Tajeddine Baddou, to protest against the imprisonment of a Moroccan senator Yahya Yahya in the Italian capital, Rome. […] [Moroccan-born Italian MP Souad] Sbai says that maybe Yahya was not in Italy to "do shopping", but instead to organise an "extremist group", something that she finds "extremely alarming."

Yahya Yahya was sentenced to two years and three months for 'breaching the peace' and for aggression against a public official in early August. […] Yahya Yahya represents Melilla, a city under Spanish control claimed by Morocco, and is known for his activism for Melilla's return to Moroccan sovereignty.

Yahya is understood to hold Moroccan, Spanish and Dutch citizenship. Last June in Spain, he was sentenced by a tribunal in the Spanish enclave of Melilla to one year and three months after attacking Spanish border police. At the time, the Moroccan government obtained his immediate release.

Even in the 21st Century, some people manage to make 1010 and 1101 equal 5.

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Cartoon: Wellington Grey

Many French websites have commented on the latest educational goals of Minister of Education Xavier Darcos, goals that should not really surprise anyone. Yet, every time I read such things I am shocked despite myself.

Here is Yves Daoudal's report. I especially like the last line.

"Within the framework of our role as educators, the fight against homophobia is in my opinion an essential issue," declared Xavier Darcos in the September edition of the gay magazine Têtu.
 
The Minister of "Education" points out that in his back-to-school circular he included an explicit mention of "homophobia" among the discriminations to be fought.
 
The intention is to launch a hunt for "homophobics" in the high-schools: the principals are "encouraged" to "keep us well-informed", so that we may have a "precise idea of the magnitude of incidents" of a homophobic nature, he said.
 
And he stresses that in September a publicity campaign will be launched in all high-schools for the purpose of disseminating information about the Azure Line [Ligne Azur], created to respond to "questions about sexual identity", in other words, to spread homosexual propaganda to adolescents who might resort to it for help.

He is saying that if a teen has questions he can turn to the Azure Line for a solution. The Azure Line is a phone service that dispenses information about sexuality. For those of you who aren't sure what sex you belong to, call the Azure Line and wonder no more.

The Azure Line is needed, says the minister, because "there is no guarantee that all our teachers and all our supervisors will be able to give useful information."
 
Indeed. They aren't all homosexuals, and some are even suspected of being secretly homophobic. Hence the call for denunciation, and we can assume that this targets teachers as well as pupils.
 
Asked why similar measures are not being used in the middle schools, Xavier Darcos replied that it was "a little difficult" since they are "younger children."
 
But they will be taken care of also: "The solution requires a person they can consult [...] the school nurses do a good job. We must put our trust in them, rather than on standardized prescriptives. Not everybody knows how to speak directly to a child of 13 about the awakening of sexuality, or the sexual choices that he has."
 
Sic.
 
There are days when one could say that with Ségolène things would have been less bad.

On this page of the Azure Line website there is a link to the Ministry of Education's document in PDF format entitled "Homophobie savoir et réagir" (Homophobia: be informed and react). French readers may be interested in reading it.

A quote from Andrew Tallman at Townhall, 21 August 2008

I think I’ve discovered something rather shocking: opposition to homosexuality must itself be genetic.

For as long as I can remember, homosexuals have been explaining why gay people have no choice about their orientation. And it finally dawned on me that their arguments explain why being anti-gay is also not a choice but an innate predisposition beyond our power to restrain. This led me to embrace my convictions and stop trying in vain to repress who I am.

Since millions suffer from this same condition, I’m hopeful that my epiphany will help others accept themselves and their convictions, too.

A quote from Lars Hedegaard at the Danish website Sappho, 21 August 2008

[The Danish publisher] The Free Speech Library has offered to publish a Danish edition of the American writer Sherry Jones' controversial book about Muhammed's favourite wife Aisha. […] In a mail to The Free Speech Library Ms. Jones' agent Natasha Kern expresses her appreciation that a Danish publisher is prepared to stand up for free speech after all that Denmark has already been through.

This is a bit old, but I've only just found it - being a Mac-o-Sceptic, I usually ignore the hype for a few months before taking a real look.

I am updating the theme of the blog view of the site, so things may be a bit changeable for a couple of hours.

You can read headlines and excerpts undisturbed in the Magazine View.

Completely and utterly deluded. Especially when polls are suggesting that after the next election, there may be a Conservative Commons majority of 260. That Brown thinks that Labour will win the next election really shows how separated he is from the real world. I agree with Eric Pickles, who says: The analysis is that it is now [...]