Of Niall Ferguson, Objective Criticism, and European Hatemongers

There has, of course, always been an undercurrent of anti-Americanism in European society. Our rapid expansion across the continent and rise as a potential competitor, our form of government, our heterogeneous mixture of races and ethnic groups, and religious idiosyncrasies, our geographic distance, and many other factors have acted to reinforce the sense that Americans were “others.” Our brains are hard-wired to have a dual system of morality, which I have elsewhere referred to as the Amity/Enmity Complex. We reserve “good” moral behavior for those in our “in-group.” The “other,” however, is perceived as evil, unclean, and contemptible. Ask the European Jews who survived World War II how that works. The collapse of the Soviet Union reinforced the sense of our power and significance. Instead of just one among several others, for many Europeans we became “The Other.” Predictably, human nature took its course, and hatred of Americans reached new extremes.

As I happen to speak German, I was able to watch the phenomenon as it developed in that country firsthand. It became impossible to overlook when the German mass media, with Spiegel magazine in the forefront, began to discover just how lucrative it could be to feed the growing undercurrents of anti-American hate. The rest of the media soon caught on. Towards the end of the Clinton administration, the German media started becoming choked with expressions of rage, hatred, and denunciations for any number of trumped up claims of US “immorality.” Spiegel’s editors became positively obsessed with the game, to the point that it became difficult to find any news about Germany on their website mixed in with the daily dose of intemperate railing against the USA. This quasi-racist Amerika bashing went on well into the Bush administration, until a growing number of decent Germans, and the few Americans who were paying any attention, started pushing back. David of Davids Medienkritik was prominent among them, and one can find some of the more egregious and vicious attacks documented on his website.

Gradually, the word spread, and more Americans began to notice, including influential players in our own mass media. It became increasingly obvious to the “respectable” elements in the German media that, if they kept it up, they would soon enjoy reputations similar to that held by Julius Streicher and “Der Stürmer” during the Third Reich. This, of course would not do. It might seriously jeopardize their chances of raking in any future international prizes for “objective journalism.” They began moderating their tone, until today one only sees the occasional chunk of red meat still tossed out to the legions of Amerika haters.

Of course, this remarkable change in tone makes it quite obvious that the editors of Spiegel and the rest were quite conscious of the game they were playing all along. If not from that, one could detect it in the day and night difference between the occasional English articles on their site and the German stuff intended for domestic consumption. While the unabashed hatemongering was still going on unabated, however, they were quite disingenuous about it. One of their favorite phrases was “objective criticism.” Any slanted, half-baked attack on the US was fobbed off as “objective criticism.” I don’t doubt that many Germans still rationalize their hate as “objective criticism.” To them, I can only recommend that they take a look at the real thing. They need look no further than Niall Fergusons, “The War of the World.”

The book is anything but a pro-US panegyric. On the contrary, we come in for some harsh criticism touching such matters as our pervasive habit of shooting enemy prisoners of war, our bombing of civilians in World War II, our less than generous response to the European persecution of Jews and other minorities before the war, and any number of other real or perceived shortcomings. There’s more than enough to make the more thin-skinned of my countrymen squirm as they read it. To read it, however, is to learn the difference between the “objective criticism” of the hate mongers and the search for truth of a conscientious historian.

Balance is always one of the best tip offs. Ferguson is well aware of the opposing arguments on either side of the issues he discusses, and has a deep grasp of the relevant history. No one can be perfectly objective. Our world view is bound to mediate the way we perceive historical facts to a greater or lesser extent. However, Ferguson doesn’t ignore half of the facts because they conflict with a preferred narrative. History plays a much different role in the “objective criticism” of the Amerika haters. For them, it is just a sewer one wades through to pick up choice tidbits that fit the narrative. To them, its end is to villify. Facts that conflict with that end are ignored. As a result, the hater’s grasp of history is necessarily shallow. Challenge one of their choice tidbits, and it’s obvious. They never waste much time trying to defend the indefensible. They just hop ahead to the next tidbit.  Read the book and you’ll see the difference.

There is another good reason for reading “The War of the World.” In the process of demonstrating the difference between a serious history and propaganda, Ferguson has created a virtual case study of the Amity/Enmity Complex in action. Of course, the manifestations of anti-American hate referred to earlier are an excellent example of a recent manifestation of this destructive aspect of human nature. “The War of the World” chronicles many more, although Ferguson himself hasn’t grasped the connection. The book cites instance after instance of slaughter and destruction inflicted on the “other” in recent history. The Jews are, of course, the quintessential “other” of our time, and Ferguson reveals the incredible and unforgivable misery they have suffered from the irrational hatred of their neighbors, not only in Germany, but in pogroms and murders that were every bit as vicious in Russia, Poland, Ukraine, and a host of other countries. Read the litany of horror, and it may begin to dawn on you why the existence of Israel is necessary.

The Jews had plenty of company in the 20th century. Ferguson tells us of the Armenian genocide, the rape of Nanking, the slaughter of Serbs by Croats and of Moslems by Serbs, and countless other manifestations of the Complex. Read his book. Then read what Robert Ardrey, Arthur Keith, and many others have been trying to tell us since the time of Darwin about the dual system of human morality, and think about it.  Unless you’re blind. You’ll see they were right. One day, perhaps in the not too distant future, they’ll be proved right. Wait and see.

Of Assassinations in Dubai and Ideological Narratives

In the ancient times before the blogosphere, when even Internet forums were still a novelty, and blogs nonexistent, one occasionally ran across mainstream media types who would hilariously claim, with a perfectly straight face, that their news reporting was “objective.”  Nowadays such specimens have become a great rarity, seldom encountered outside of circus side shows.  Even the lowliest of trolls are now well aware of the existence of what is referred to as the “narrative.”  The narrative requires that reality be “adjusted” to conform to a particular ideological point of view.  These adjustments are seldom applied in the form of blatant lies.  In these days of instant Internet fact checking, it has simply become too risky.  Rather, one only reports stories that conform to the narrative, perhaps after trimming them of certain “irrelevant details” and adding some “interpretation” by “experts” to make sure readers don’t miss the point.  In other words, the story is massaged until, as the Germans put it, “Es passt in den Kram” (It fits in with the rest of the crap).

Sometimes events of such a shocking nature occur that even the most carefully crafted narratives must be adjusted to account for them.  One such event was, of course, the demise of Communism.  As one might expect, it left the narrative of the “progressive left” in a shambles.  A new, somewhat ramshackle version had to be cobbled together, from such ideological flotsam and jetsam as bobbed to the surface after the Soviet Titanic slid beneath the waves, combined with some interesting new twists.  One of the more amusing of these is the left’s increasingly steamy love affair with the more extreme Islamists.  It seems odd on the face of it that ideologues who once posed as champions of women’s liberation and gay rights, and vehemently denounced the agenda of the Christian right, are now found in such a warm embrace with misogynistic, homophobe religious fanatics.  However, Homo sapiens has never really been a rational animal.  We are simply better than the other animals at using reason to satisfy our emotional needs.  When it comes to emotional needs, there are those among us whose tastes run to “saving” the rest of us and making us all “happy” by stuffing the messianic world view du jour down our collective throats.  These are the familiar types who love to strike heroic poses on the “moral high ground.”  Marxism scratched their emotional itch admirably for many years, but has lately fallen out of fashion.  When it did, it left something of a psychological vacuum in its wake.  Mercifully, no brand new surefire prescription for saving humanity was waiting in the wings to take its place.  Instead, radical Islamism has rushed in to fill the vacuum.  When it comes to messianic world views, it is, for the time being at least, the only game in town.  Incongruous successor to Marxism that it is, it still scratches that itch.  The “progressive left” jumped on board.  It should really come as no surprise.  After all, back in the day, they managed to convince themselves that they were “saving the world” by collaborating in the mass murders of Pol Pot and Ho chi Minh, not to mention Stalin. 

Artifacts of this Islamist – leftist love affair are not hard to find.  When it comes to the European news media, for example, it takes the form of anti-Semitism Lite, often euphemistically referred to as “anti-Zionism.”  It manifests itself in the form of obsessive, one-sided bashing of Israel for the slightest real or imagined infractions of the left’s version of “morality,” combined with a the turning of a blind eye to the far more egregious misdeeds of her enemies.  For example, deliberate attempts by the Islamists to murder Israeli civilians with barrages of rockets are reported with as much emotional detachment as the next day’s weather, but grossly exaggerated accounts of atrocities in Gaza and “blood libel” fables about the harvesting of organs from Palestinian victims become the stuff of persistent propaganda campaigns without the slightest shred of proof. 

The process is nicely illustrated by the manner in which the news about the recent assassination of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai has been reported in Europe.  There, as in the US, the “progressive left” tends to be over-represented in the legacy media.  It is overwhelmingly the case in Germany, where no equivalent of our talk radio or influential bloggers exists to restore a semblance of balance.  Consider, for example, the coverage in Der Spiegel, Germany’s leading news magazine.  A story about the assassination that appeared last week began with the ominous headline, “How Israel Covered Mossad’s Trail.”  The opening blurb reads, “The Israeli secret service will neither ‘confirm nor deny’ its involvement in the murder of Hamas weapons dealer Mabhouh.  However, the Dubai assassin who went by the cover name Michael Bodenheimer left a trail behind him:  In Cologne and in Israeli Herzliya.”  The rest of the article is a collection of circumstantial evidence combined with suggestions that the crime had all the earmarks of a Mossad hit. 

The “news” here is hardly that Mossad wasn’t involved in the hit.  It’s the disconnect between the way Spiegel reported on this story, which happened to fit its anti-Israel narrative, and the way it reports on similar stories that don’t.  Take for example, the involvement of Al Qaeda in 911.  This was a story that most decidedly did not fit Spiegel’s pro-Islamist narrative at the time.  It also came at an inconvenient time, as Spiegel was in the forefront of a quasi-racist German jihad against the United States that reached levels of obsessive viciousness at about the time of 911 that would scarcely be credible to Americans who can’t read German.   Nevertheless, all the same circumstantial evidence was there, complete with a trail leading back to Germany.  In this case, however, instead of accepting the obvious, Spiegel’s editors dug in their heels, and tried to create an alternate version of reality.  They began what I referred to at the time as the “Spielchen mit den Beweisen,” or “cute little game with the proofs,” coming up with ever more contrived reasons to dismiss the increasing mountain of evidence pointing to Al Qaeda’s guilt.  Even when bin Laden appeared on tape, practically jumping up and down and screaming, “We did it!  We did it!” the editors refused to throw in the towel.  They were nothing if not stubborn.  Reality was what they said it was, and the rest of the world be damned!  They pointed out that (aha, oho), the translators of the videotape had been in the employ of the evil Americans.  They produced their own “translators” from the enormous pool of experts they have constantly at their beck and call, ready to “prove” the most absurd concoctions.  These came up with a “corrected” translation on demand which (surprise, surprise) exonerated bin Laden.  Only after a chorus of native Arab speakers in countries that could hardly be portrayed as “friends” of the United States pointed out that Spiegel’s “translators” were sucking canal water, did the editors finally give over, muttering dark comments about the “exegesis of videotapes.” 

In a word, then, as far as ideologues are concerned, be they on the left or the right of the political spectrum, the “real world” is what fits the narrative.  When it comes to dishing out blame, let him beware whom the ideological shoe fits.

UPDATE:  It’s odd that Spiegel didn’t pick up on this.  Looks like prime material for another “Spielchen mit den Beweisen” to me.

Kant, Bernard-Henri Levy and the Obscurity of Philosophers

It appears that French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has committed a serious faux pas by attempting to debunk Kant based on the authority of a rather obscure 20th century thinker by the name of Jean-Baptiste Botul.  Unfortunately, as we are informed by the London Times Online (hattip Nick Gillespie at Hit & Run), “Botul was invented by a journalist in 1999 as an elaborate joke, and BHL has become the laughing stock of the Left Bank…”

I will refrain from kicking Mr. Levy while he’s down, but I point out in passing that it’s unlikely he would have made his attack to begin with if Kant had been capable of making himself comprehensible to more than a handful of people.  Had Kant been as lucid as, say, Voltaire, or Stendhal, or John Stuart Mill, enough people might actually have had enough of an inkling what he was talking about to make it risky for his detractors to launch such transparently flimsy assaults on his work.  While it’s not out of the question that the man was actually such a deep thinker that it was actually absolutely necessary for him to begin his books with sentences of turgid German a page and a half long, I suspect it is rather more likely that he lacked the ability to express himself simply and clearly, or perhaps thought it necessary to be obscure in order to be taken seriously in those days of extreme philosophical one-upmanship.  As this case illustrates, there are liabilities to being obscure.  People have trouble understanding what you’re talking about.

Post Bush German Anti-American Hate: Another Data Point

Not all Germans are obsessed with hate – only enough of them to make a lucrative clientele for the peddlers of hate, such as the editors of Spiegel magazine. If you thought the haters didn’t learn anything from the Holocaust, you would be wrong. It goes without saying that it wasn’t the seemingly obvious lesson that hatred of entire peoples is a bad thing that can lead to mass murder and self-destruction. Rather, they learned that open expressions of hatred directed at the Jews were inappropriate, and should take the form of “anti-Zionism.” One could, on the other hand, hate Americans, not only openly, but with impunity.

Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” So it is with the German haters. They have never been behind hand in coming up with flimsy rationalizations for their hatred. For a while, they fobbed off their obsessive interest in anything negative about America as “objective criticism.” When that became too ludicrous, even for them, they seized on the hapless George W. Bush. Every mindless, bitter, frothing-at-the-mouth expression of anti-American hate, no matter that it was directed at the American people as a whole, and not at any specific sin of the Administration, was glibly passed off as “opposition to Bush.” I suspect many of the haters believed their own lies. German haters have never been adept at looking at themselves in the mirror. Now Bush is long gone, but their hatred remains.

The latest artifact thereof is a charming piece that appeared on Spiegel’s website today entitled, “United Nightmares of America.” It is essentially a “68er’s” wet dream. The 68ers are the German equivalent of the “New Left” of the late 60’s in the US. As those of us who were around at the time will recall, they were noble idealists who served the cause of social justice by collaborating with Pol Pot and Ho chi Minh. One of these 68ers, a Dane by the name of Jacob Holdt, happened to become side-tracked in the USA while on his way to South America to bring a brave new world to Chile after the fashion of Castro’s Cuba. While here, he wallowed in every cesspool he could find, snapping pictures all the while. This, of course, became the substance of the “nightmare” referred to by Spiegel. According to Spiegel, “These are pictures that bear witness to poverty, violence, and despair: a prostitute giving herself a fix, a grim, aged white woman guarding the entrance to her hovel with a revolver, a young black, cleaning his valuable gun in the midst of poverty.” You get the idea.

One would think that the citizens of a country guilty of one of the vilest episodes of mass murder, destruction, and racism the world has ever witnessed would have been chastened by the event. One would think that, instead of attempting to relieve themselves of that historic guilt by obsessing about the sins of others, they would look for the reasons for that debacle within themselves, and seek to root it out once and for all. However, far from seeking to root out the hatred that once manifested itself as the Third Reich, they continue to cultivate it today. In Germany today, hatred is not a reason for shame. Rather, it is given free reign, redirected at Americans and tarted up in such threadbare garb as a “fight for social justice.”

One would think that, if the legions of haters in Germany were honestly concerned about social justice, they would look at problems closer to home, problems that they could actually do something to solve. Instead of obsessing about racism in the US, one would think that they would seek to fight their own far more blatant and open racism. Comparable in its contempt for minorities with anything ever encountered in the old South, it bars them from access to decent housing, and keeps them in their own mini-ghettos, euphemistically referred to as “quarters for asylum seekers.” Instead of obsessing about poverty in the US, one would think that they would work to alleviate poverty in their own cities, where one can find beggars on any street corner. Instead of obsessing about social inequality in the US, one would think they would seek to eliminate it in Germany, a country stratified into classes according to wealth and social status beyond the imagination of anything ever seen by Americans.

Spiegel has posted a whole series of the photographs of the noble Jacob Holdt, their facilitator of hate du jour. In response, I will post only one.

German Christians Escape Teutonic Oppression!!

Well, all right, maybe that title is a little bit over the top, but it so happens that a German family of evangelical Christians has actually been granted asylum in the U.S. after fleeing the country because of some unpleasantness with the police over their desire to home school their children.  The story has been pianissimo in the US, but its been front and center at the Spiegel website all day.  The Amerika haters who call the tune in the German mainstream media are surely gnashing their teeth, but still haven’t come up with a way to spin the story that will allow them to strike their customary pious poses from the moral high ground.  The story in Spiegel, for example, limits itself to quoting a diplomat to the effect that “Germany disposes of a wide range of of educational opportunities.  Parents can choose between public, private, and religious schools, including alternative facilities such as Waldorf or Montessori schools.”  The editors throw in a sneer about the Washington Post’s suggested pronunciation of Romeike, the family’s name.  Sure enough, it’s given (incorrectly) as (roh-MY-kee). What’s with that, Wapo?  Have all those layers of fact checkers and editors let you down again, or are you just giving us the pronunciation in Pomeranian dialect?

Germany’s evangelicals are having none of it.  Related stories on the Spiegel site have such titles as, “Fundamentalist Christians Celebrate Victory over ‘Embarrassing Germany,’” “Three Months in Prison for Home Schooling,” “Baptist Parents Lose the Right to make Decisions for their Children,” “Fine for School Boycotters,” and so on.  I can’t say as I blame them.  When I attended a German University back in the mid-70’s, the political activism of the students was much in evidence, in the form of posters, signs, and placards posted all over campus.  They were broadly and about evenly divided among pro-Soviet Communists and Maoists, normally in a state of bitter hostility to each other.  I happened to be taking Chinese, and our textbook was from Red China, back in the day before her leaders had discovered that what Marx really meant by “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” was laissez faire capitalism.  There were inspiring homilies about “Lenin’s Old Overcoat,” and the joys of life on a collective farm.  If our experience in the US is any guide, many of these young “idealists” are now firmly ensconced in positions of influence in the educational establishment.  It is unlikely that they are excessively delicate in their respect for the religious freedom of fundamentalist Christians.

Germany Ends the End of Nuclear Power

The editors of Spiegel magazine still think anyone who supports nuclear power is a minion of Satan bent on the destruction of humanity, but according to this article, at least some Germans are beginning to see the light. Under the byline “End of the Atom Shutdown,” and the lugubriously disapproving headline, “The Federal Government wants to leave Ancient Reactors Online,” we read:

The atom lobby got its way: Spiegel has learned that the federal government wants to leave all 17 of Germany’s reactors online, including the ancient reactors at Neckarwestheim and Biblis – that will continue in operation by virtue of a trick.

Hamburg – For the time being, it’s the end of the atomic shutdown: According to Spiegel’s information the federal government has decided to leave all 17 of Germany’s nuclear reactors on the net for the time being following a meeting with energy concerns in the chancellory. Even the ancient Neckarwestheim 1 and Biblis A, which would soon have been required to shut down according to the red-green consensus on atomic power, are to remain in operation until the black-yellow government has agreed on a new energy policy. This might take until October…

…Sigmar Gabriel, the head of the SPD, expressed outrage, and accused the government of “dirty deals.”

Well, you can see which way the spin blows, but apparently a good number of Germans, with the obvious exception of Spiegel and the wildly misnomered “Greens” are beginning to realize that taking nuclear plants offline means keeping coal plants online. It is difficult to imagine why this makes sense in a world in which our number one environmental problem is supposed to be global warming, but human beings can convince themselves of anything if they happen to be wearing the proper ideological blinders.

The German government is to be congratulated for putting common sense over ideological purity. Meanwhile, here’s a clue for the editors of Spiegel. In addition to being world champion air polluters and prodigious producers of greenhouse gases, coal plants are also a greater radioactive hazard than nuclear plants.

Republicans take Kennedy’s Seat: The German Reaction

Reactions in the German news media to Sam Brown’s victory in Massachusetts today are in line with the “Obama as failed, weak President” meme that has been dominant there for some time. Spiegel’s reaction:

Bitter setback for Barack Obama: One year after his inauguration the Democrats have lost the Senate seat that once belonged to Edward Kennedy, and with it their strategic majority in the Senate. Now the prospects have dimmed for the Presidents Great Project: health reform.

The take at Focus, another major news magazine:

Barack Obama: The Fallen Messiah

The Republicans shouldn’t be credited with the loss of the stronghold of the Democrats in Massachusetts: it was the US President. Obama has fallen out of favor with his fellow citizens because only humdrum politics as usual followed their initial euphoria.

To make sure readers get the message, the article is set off by an image of Obama with a Hitler moustache over the slogan, “I’ve changed.”

Stern has more of the same:

A slap in the face for Obama: It’s a shrill wake-up call. The setback in the Senate election in Massachusetts shows how much the US President has lost his magic aura and distanced himself from his voters. Now the fate of his Presidency is at stake.

It’s “all about Obama” for the right of center Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as well:

Setback for Obama on the first anniversary of his inauguration: One year after his inauguration, Barack Obama has lost his strategic majority in the Senate.

And so on, and so on. When it comes to coverage of the US, there’s not much difference between “left” and “right” in the German media.  A few brave little bloggers buck the trend, but, other than that, there are no powerful alternative voices on the Internet or any equivalent to our talk radio or Foxnews to counter the prevailing narrative.  The attitudes of “well-informed” Germans about the US are usually an uncritical reflection of that narrative.

Haiti: “Between a Helping and a Colonial Power”

According to Gene at Harry’s Place:

The latest meme from the “anti-imperialist” Left is that the US government is more interested in repressing the Haitian people in the wake of last week’s catastrophic earthquake than it is in assisting them. Unsurprisingly Hugo Chavez was one of those leading the rhetorical charge against the nefarious Yanquis.

Gene is apparently so outraged that he doesn’t stick at comparing Hugo to Rush, who stands somewhat to the right of Beelzebub in Harry’s political spectrum. Don’t look now, Gene, but the “anti-imperialist” Left in Europe is looking more mainstream all the time. I’ve already linked to Spiegel’s drearily predictable “analysis” that confirms all Hugo’s worst fears about the “nefarious Yanquis.” Things are no different at the other major “serious” German news magazine, Focus, where we learn that the US is “Between a Helping and a Colonial Power in Haiti.” According to Focus,

The US sprang to devastated Haiti’s side with breathtakingly massive aid. No other country provided more help. Help that isn’t completely selfless.

Regional politics is another area in which Obama wants to distance himself from Bush. He wants to improve ties to the countries of central and South America. However, very little of a concrete nature followed his first charm offensive, according to Jonas Wolff of the Hessian Peace and Conflict Research Foundation. Now the US President has signaled via his aid to Haiti that the US interests are not limited to Iraq and Afghanistan. Its help will be extended to its own continent as well.

How’s that for German subtlety? As we learn from the BBC, the French have also been in a huff about the situation in Haiti lately. According to the Beeb, France’s “International Cooperation Minister,” Alain Joyandet, was aggrieved that the US was stealing his thunder:

Mr Joyandet – who was in Haiti – said he had issued a formal protest to the US authorities via the French embassy, and that his actions were backed by Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner. He was quoted as saying: “This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti.”

The Beeb’s take:

Underlying the episode is a tangible sense of hurt pride that France is being relegated to a secondary role in a country long regarded as part of its own sphere of influence.

Non Pasaran links to a French cartoon that sets the appropriate tone of hurt infantile pride. Not to worry, though, as it appears Obama and Sarkozy have patched things up and are, once again, best of buddies.

German Anti-Semitism circa 1870

Charles Ryan

Some of the best and most interesting books I’ve ever read were those I’ve randomly picked out while wandering through the stacks at university libraries.  Occasionally you’ll find nuggets of information and forgotten stories you never would have gone looking for intentionally.  One book, in particular, made a lasting impression on me.  It was entitled, “With an Ambulance during the Franco-German War,” and was published in 1896 by Charles Edward Ryan.  In those days an “ambulance” was a sort of mobile field hospital, occasionally, as in this case, manned by volunteers.  Their neutrality was respected by both sides, and, occasionally, as the lines moved one way or the other with the fortunes of war, they would find themselves under a different flag than the day before.  In fact, this happened to the author at the decisive Battle of Sedan, where Napoleon III and his entire army were surrounded and forced to surrender, and on several other occasions.  War was a great deal less professional in those days.  Instead of shooting the author as a spy, the Germans gave him a pass to travel through France and Germany at will, requisitioning billets and train passes as needed to tend the sick.  So it was that on one occasion he found himself on a train in the same compartment with some German officers and a hapless Jew. 

I have occasionally read and heard claims to the effect that the German officer corps was not tainted by the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.  See, for example, the memoirs of von Papen, a conservative who agreed to serve as Vice-Chancellor in Hitler’s first government in the fond hope that he could be “managed.”  Based on Ryan’s account, however, that wasn’t entirely true.  I will let him speak for himself.

I had seen Ferrieres, the palace of a Frankfort Jew, with admiration, all the more that it had been respected as a sanctuary by orders from the Prussians. Yet it was during this same journey that I witnessed an incident in which a Jew was the hero or the victim, that filled me with astonishment, as it may do my readers who happen not to be acquainted with the ways of the Fatherland. I had frequently heard the Jews spoken of by my German friends in language of supreme contempt; but never did I realize the depth of that feeling until now.

In the railway compartment in which I travelled, all were German officers except myself and one civilian. The latter had got in at a wayside station, and sat at the furthest corner opposite me. My companions began without delay to banter and tease him unmercifully, all the while addressing him as Lemann. He was a small stunted person, in make and features an Israelite, and not more than twenty-five. The behavior of his fellow-travelers seemed to give him no concern ; as they fired off at him their sneering jests, he scanned them with his sharp eyes, but did not move a muscle.
I inquired of the officer next me, who spoke English well, how it came to pass that they knew this stranger’s name. He explained that Lemann was the common term for a Jew in their language, going on to describe how much the sons of Jacob were detested throughout Germany ; and for his part he thought they were a vile horde, who laid hands on everything they could seize, in a way which we English were incapable of fancying. The officers, he added, were all getting down to have some beer at the next station, and by way of illustration he would show me what manner of men these Jews were; and as he said the words, he took off his hairy fur-lined gloves, and threw them across the carriage to our man in the corner, remarking, “There, Lemann! it is a cold day”. The Jew picked up the gloves eagerly, which he had missed on the catch, and pulled them on. When we were nearing the station, the officer who had thrown the gloves at him, took off his fur rug, and flung that also to the Jew. Once more he accepted the insulting present, and quickly rolled the rug about him. Finally, a third threw off his military cloak, and slung it on the Jew’s back as he was passing out. This, again, the wretched creature put on ; and their absence at the buffet left him for the next ten minutes in peace.

Presently the horn sounded, and our Germans came back. One seized his rug, another his cloak, and finally, my first acquaintance recovered his gloves by one unceremonious tug from Lemann’s meekly outstretched fingers. My own face, I think, must have flushed with indignation ; but the others only laughed at my superfluous display of feeling; and Lemann, shrugging his shoulders, — but only because of the sudden change of temperature when his wraps were pulled away,—took out of his pocket a little book with red print, which he began to read backwards, and, turning up the sleeve of his coat, began to unwind a long cord which was coiled round his wrist and forearm as far as the elbow. Every now and then he would stop the unwinding, and pray with a fervor quite remarkable, then unwind his cord again, and so on till the whole was undone. For a time the officers resumed their jeering ; but, seeing that it was like so much water on a stone, they turned the conversation, and allowed the unhappy Jew to continue his devotions unmolested till he got out at Strasburg. What would these officers have done, had they travelled in the same railway carriage with M. de Rothschild?

Evidently, anti-Semitism was alive and well in the German officer corps long before the rise of the Nazis.  I had often thought of scanning Ryan’s book myself to preserve this and the many other interesting historical anecdotes it contains, such as his account of one Dr. Pratt, a former large slave owner who had served with the Confederate medical staff, and was now in exile along with one of his slaves, who had joined him to serve as cook for the ambulance.  When I found the book in the stacks of the University of Maryland, I found its pages badly deteriorated because of the acid paper they were printed on.  The initial printing had been very small, and I suspect very few copies remained by the time I discovered the book.  However, as can be seen by the link above, Google has already preserved a digital copy.  I don’t know how or why they undertook the massive effort of preserving so many valuable old books, but, regardless, I am grateful to them for it.  In this day of Holocaust deniers, 911 truthers, and assorted other tribes of historical revisionists, the more source material we preserve, the better. 

In answer to your question, by the way, no, I am not Jewish.

Of Haitian Aid and US Conspiracies: Spiegel’s Hate Pedlar Pitzke Carries On

Germany is a country where anti-American hate goes hand in hand with “progressive” ideology. The editors of Spiegel magazine were among the first to discover just how lucrative it could be to exploit the phenomenon. They were in the forefront of a campaign of quasi-racist hatemongering that reached its climax in the final years of the Clinton and the first years of the Bush Administration. Some of its nastiest manifestations have been well-documented at Davids Medienkritik, where you will find an occasional comment by yours truly. In those days, Spiegel’s virulent anti-Americanism became so obsessive that occasionally it was hard to find any news about Germany on their website. Their hate pedlar in chief was Marc Pitzke, who could always be relied on to throw out red meat to Germany’s legions of Amerika haters thinly tarted up as “analysis.” Eventually, people on the other side of the Atlantic began to notice what was going on, and Spiegel’s claims of “objective criticism” no longer passed the “ho ho” test. Spiegel put Pitzke back in his jar and throttled back the hate campaign. Manifestations of anti-Americanism have been more “tasteful” since then, but they’ve hardly disappeared. The haters haven’t gone anywhere, and they are still more than willing to pay good coin to anyone willing to feed their prejudices. Spiegel still uses Pitzke to give them an occasional “fix.” It helps the bottom line.

The content of his latest “analysis” is no less predictable than any of his other offerings over the last decade and more. It appears the rapid mobilization of US aid to Haiti had nothing to do with any praiseworthy motive, but was all part of a dark conspiracy to promote US imperial ambitions in the region. Surprise, surprise! Some money quotes from Pitzke’s “analysis:”

Here “help” doesn’t just mean help – but rather invariably a complex fabric of geopolitical interests and self serving.

This time, too, the US military took the lead.

(at UN Headquarters in New York) Bill Clinton appealed before the General Assembly for international help and aid, and then made the rounds of the TV news shows. “Only five dollars can make a difference,” he said… As President he made sure via an American intervention that Haiti’s deposed chief of state, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, was returned to office, in the hope that he would be a vassal.

You get the idea.  Remember the old saying, “No good deed goes unpunished!”  I often wonder what Pitzke gets for this kind of “analysis.”  Spiegel probably pays him too much.  Let any reasonably competent journalism undergraduate read four or five of his articles to get the general idea, supply them with the topic of the day, and they could surely reproduce this sort of ”analysis” virtually word for word.  It’s about as predictable as the sun rising in the morning.

You “old German hands” out there will no doubt remember how the apologists and rationalizers assured us that German anti-Americanism was “all about Bush.”  Well, Bush is long gone, and German anti-Americanism is alive and well.  They didn’t give Obama much of a honeymoon, did they?  How very disappointed the apologists must be to discover that, after all, he’s just like Bush.

Pitzke ends his latest offering with some pious pontifications about televangelist Pat Robertson’s take on Haiti.  It turns out Pat has stepped in it again, characteristically attributing the disaster to divine vengeance.  Apparently he wasn’t too finicky about historical accuracy in the process, claiming that the Haitians made a “pact with the devil” when they were “under the knout” of Napoleon III, instead of Napoleon I.  Pitzke’s “zinger” sentence at the end of his “analysis:”

But the Americans have never been too exact about history when it comes to Haiti.

There you have it, dear readers.   You thought you were individuals.  In fact, you’re all just so many Pat Robertsons.