The Amity/Enmity Complex: Another Data Point in Kyrgyzstan

I’ve written about the Amity/Enmity Complex in earlier posts.  The term describes the dual nature of the innate human behavioral traits generally associated with morality.  Simply put, it describes our tendency to associate other human beings with “in-groups,” which are associated with good, and “out-groups,” which are associated with evil.  The moral rules one is expected to observe in interactions with members of ones in-group are generally those we associate with moral good.  Completely different rules apply to the out-group, whose members are generally viewed with hostility and can be treated accordingly.  Occasionally this takes such extreme forms as mass murder and genocide, as, for example, in the case of the Jews during the Holocaust, or the “bourgeoisie” under Communism.  In America, the phenomenon commonly manifests itself as irrational hatred of those with opposing political beliefs, as the “liberals,” or the “tea-baggers.”

For those still having trouble seeing the obvious, the “enmity” side of the Complex is once again on display in Kyrgyzstan, where, at last report, 75,000 members of the Uzbek minority were fleeing their homes, and scores were killed and hundreds injured.  It is another data point to add to the many thousands of others that have occurred throughout recorded human history.  One would think it had happened enough by now to convince even the most obtuse among us that human morality is a dangerous nostrum to apply in dealing with the relations between nation states, ethnic groups, political parties, and the other types of social groups of unprecedented size that have emerged very recently in human history. 

Morality is, inevitably, a two edged sword.  For every “good” defended, an “evil” must be identified and defeated.  The identification of those who are “evil” is typically arbitrary, and can quickly change to include those who were previously seen as “good.”  Consider, for example, the Jews in Israel, who were the darlings of the left, and “good” at the time the movie “Exodus” was made, but have now become “evil” for those of the same political persuasion because they are no longer well suited to play the role of “victims” to be “saved.”  Similarly, those who were only considered different a few years ago can quickly be perceived as the evil enemy in response to any number of stimuli in the form of social or political change, heightened competition for resources, ideological and religious propaganda, etc., and, literally overnight, become the victims of bloody witchhunts. 

This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time, and is becoming increasingly murderous and destructive.  Is it not high time for us to finally learn to know ourselves and climb off the treadmill?

The Turkish Definition of Murder

At 95 years and counting, Turkey cries “murder” over a propaganda stunt, but continues to deny responsibility for the genocidal murder of 1.5 million Armenians in World War I. Those murders are amply documented, for example, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

According to the Turkish regime, this is murder:

This is not murder:

The Western Media and Hamas Propaganda

If you’re interested in the dead tree media’s narrative of the day, just check The Washington Post’s designated propaganda column on the upper right of the front page. You’ll usually find all the talking points that are fit to print. The headline of today’s column sums it up in five words; “Nations decry blockade of Gaza.”

The article might have been written by a Hamas press agent. The byline; White House Urges Change. Right, we all know how that “change” thing works. In this case, “change” means the unchecked flow of rockets and other war material into Gaza from the sea, to supplement the more limited supply coming through tunnels from Egypt. The first sentence reads,

Israel’s botched and deadly commando raid on an aid flotilla has set off widespread international criticism of the Gaza blockade, with popular opinion in many countries swinging heavily against Israel and even the United States urging its ally to find new ways to allow aid shipments to reach the Palestinians.

The Post doesn’t further describe the magical and instantaneous polling process that allowed it to discover that “popular opinion in many countries” was “swinging heavily against Israel” a mere one day after the incident. There is no mention of the responsibility of Hamas and its dupes in the “peace movement” for deliberately provoking a violent incident that cost the lives of nine people. It is all the fault of Israel and its “botched and deadly commando raid.” No mention is made of the fact that the promoters of this propaganda stunt made no attempt whatsoever to negotiate with Israel on the delivery of aid, and that Hamas is refusing it in spite of Israel’s agreement to let it pass through the checkpoints. It’s all Israel’s fault. It must “find new ways” to get the aid through in spite of the demonstrated intransigence of its enemies.

Reading on we find that the raid “has endangered the push for sanctions against Iran and peace efforts in the Middle East,” as if such sanctions weren’t an effort in futility that will have zero effect on the government of Iran whether “the push” succeeds or not, and as if the “peace efforts in the Middle East” were not pabulum for idiots who can never seem to grasp the fact that there would be peace in the Middle East tomorrow if Israel’s enemies conceded her right to exist, and that any “peace process” that doesn’t insist on that right is nothing but a charade.

We learn that the raid “tarnished Israeli relations with onetime allies, especially Turkey,” as if the Erdogan regime hadn’t been leading Turkey away from secular democracy towards an Islamic theocracy for years. There’s the usual, mealy-mouthed he said, she said,

Israeli officials say the demonstrators attacked the commandos with axes and metal rods, while flotilla organizers say the troops used excessive force on unarmed civilians.

No matter that video footage of the incident clearly shows these “unarmed civilians” swarming the Israeli boarders and beating them with iron bars and clubs. As usual, Israelis aren’t allowed to act in self defense, no matter that six of her soldiers were hurt, including two with life-threatening injuries.

We get the usual imbecilities about the “legality” of the Israeli blockade, as if international law were not perfectly clear on the point:

Central to the criticism of Israel were questions about the legality of its actions. The raid took place on a ship that was apparently unarmed, in international waters. But Allen Weiner, a former State Department lawyer and legal counsel at the U.S. Embassy at The Hague, said Israel was technically operating legally.

Israel wasn’t “technically operating legally.” It was operating legally, period. The last time I looked, the international law relating to sea blockades had changed very little over the last 150 years, and it unequivocally supports Israel’s right to blockade Gaza.

It goes without saying that WaPo “doesn’t notice” the strong support for Israel in venues such as the blogosphere, talk radio, and Foxnews. That would only confuse her readers, who are expected to believe that “peace activists” with big mouths have a monopoly on deciding “world opinion.”

In a word, the narrative hasn’t changed. Regardless of the facts, it’s always Israel’s fault, her enemies share none of the blame, she has no right to defend herself, the fact that hundreds of rocket attacks were launched against her from Gaza doesn’t matter, nor does the fact that her enemies have the power to bring peace to the region immediately, simply by accepting Israel’s right to exist. Many inside and outside Israel have been pointing out that her leaders should have known the purpose of the flotilla was not to deliver aid, but to provoke an incident that could be exploited for propaganda, and reacted accordingly. True, but that’s not really the story here. The story is the willingness of the western media to serve as uncritical propaganda mouthpieces for people who have launched thousands of attacks deliberately intended to murder civilians. The story is that media’s studied indifference to those crimes as long as their intended victims are Jews.

Israel has a right to exist. Unless she prevails, her people face another Diaspora in an increasingly hostile world at best. If the “peace activists” have their way, it is more likely that they will face another Holocaust. I and many other gentiles may not count in the Post’s assessment of “world opinion,” but we wish her well, for all that. May her people never lose their nerve or their courage.

Of National Debts and Train Wrecks

One hears much hand wringing of late about the national debt, and the catastrophe it portends unless we bring it under control. Everyone has an opinion about it, but very few seem to actually understand what it is, or the extent to which it is really out of control, or even unprecedented. Based on the recent data point represented by the experience of Greece, we can safely conclude that excessive debt is potentially problematic. The trick is in determining whether, as the prophets of doom would have it, the particular train we are riding will encounter a brick wall around the next bend, or will continue to wheeze along as before for the foreseeable future.

Certainly, the train wreck hasn’t happened as quickly as some of the Jeremiahs expected. Paul Krugman, for example, predicted runaway interest rates and hemorrhaging inflation as long ago as 2003, in the expectation that the government would try to print its way out of the problem. The printing presses have been busy enough, but so far we’ve been spared a repeat of the Weimar Republic in 1923. Of course, the New York Times’ nobel laureate may yet be vindicated, but we’re not there yet.

If you try to get a handle on the problem, you soon realize just how slippery it really is. Take, for example, one of the more commonly used diagnostics in the field, public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product, or GDP. According to the CIA, in 2009 the figure for the United States was 52.9%. This compared with 192.1% for Japan, the developed country at the top of the list. The current interest rate for home mortgages in Japan is just over 2%. The reason often given for such apparently counterintuitive facts is that Japanese citizens save more than their US counterparts. It would seem, however, that it is possible for a nation to carry a much higher public debt than the United States and still not suffer exploding interest rates.

There are often great disparities in the numbers one sees bandied about on the Internet, even on pages that quote the same source. Economicshelp.org, for example, quoting the CIA figures, gives the “national” debt of Japan as the same 192.1% cited above, but lists the United States at a mere 39.7%. The same site, however, pegs the “gross” debt of the United States, which includes such things as internal pension and social security obligations, at 90.8%. According to usgovernmentspending.com, which lists the numbers going all the way back to 1792, that number has now risen to 94.27% compared to a historical post-war maximum of 121.25% in 1946. Checking these numbers at Wikipedia, it appears that the 39.7% number was taken from the CIA list for 2008, not 2009. The comparable number reported by the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation for the same year was 70%, and the International Monetary Fund had it at 61.5%. Pick a number, any number.

Moving right along, the usually conservative Washington Times projects a public debt vs. GDP of 90% a decade from now in the year 2020. That still looks positively rosy compared to Japan’s current rate of more than twice that amount. On the other hand, we are told that Spain will soon follow Greece into the abyss, but the CIA put its public debt in 2009 at 50%, more than 2% less than that of the US.

Obviously, we are comparing apples and oranges here. For example, how does one roll the combined debts of the States of the United States into the numbers so that they can be compared with the debts of the Departments of France or the Lands of Germany? How does one compare the internal debt of the US to its Social Security trust fund to its Japanese equivalent?

All these obscure numbers and incoherent outcomes are fertile ground for alarmists of every stripe with ideological axes to grind. Sometimes the results are amusing. For example, in a recent article that appeared in the leftist German Spiegel magazine, Marc Pitzke, who specializes in Amerika bashing, seemed to be channeling conservative talk show host Sean Hannity. Their messages are identical; the US debt is out of control and we face imminent disaster. Pitzke trots out the usual fare about the recent growth in the deficit one usually hears from such odd bedfellows as Hannity and Limbaugh, but is short on numbers that make any rational comparison between the United States and Europe. According to the closest attempt to such a comparison I could find,

Europe’s national debt seems positively harmless in comparison to the USA. The total indebtedness of the Euro-zone in 2009 amounted to around seven trillion Euros, just 70 percent of the American amount.

Pitzke doesn’t explain why the US debt is a cause for hysteria but an amount 70% as great is “harmless,” nor does he elaborate on the fact that the public debts of Italy, France, Germany and the UK, the four biggest economies in the Euro-zone were 115%, 79.7%, 77.2% and 68.5% of their GDP’s, respectively, in 2009, compared to 52.9% for the US.

And the upshot of the sport? I suppose that we can keep muddling along as we are for quite some time before the “Desasters, Debakels, and Katastrophes” that Pitzke and the editors of Der Spiegel so eagerly hope will be our lot finally overtake us. I certainly don’t find the situation attractive, but there you have it. To a large extent, a modern economy is a con-game. When the suckers lose confidence, the train will hit the wall. When that will happen is anybody’s guess.

Afghan Corruption: New Memes and Old Ploys

Memes; it’s amazing how fast they spread these days.  Today’s meme du jour was “Afghan Corruption.”  You couldn’t miss it.  I happened to stroll past the newspaper stand at the local drugstore, and saw the headline, “In Afghan trip, Obama presses Karzai on graft” on the grey lady.  The Wapo chimed in with, “Obama presses Karzai for cooperation; U.S. wants government cleanup in Afghanistan.”  There was a picture of Obama wearing the stern face he likely uses to lecture his children accompanied by a chastened Karzai.  Beneath this some “news analysis” bearing the headline, “For the U.S., Afghan corruption is an elusive target,” was thrown in for good measure.  I almost swallowed my gum when I saw that Newsweek had an “Afghan Corruption” cover, in perfect harmony with the dailies.  Now that was fast!  Sure enough, when I got back to my computer I found “Obama calls on Karzai to push reforms” on the front page of the LA Times, and so on down the list of the usual suspects. 

I can only recommend that Karzai get over the humiliation of being treated like a schoolboy instead of the leader of an independent state.  He’ll have to get used to it.  It’s one of those “change” things that comes with the new dispensation.  Benjamin Netanyahu could have told him.  If the US happens to have a firm grip on your country’s balls, you’ll just need to deal with being humiliated and treated with contempt. 

Meanwhile, he might consider polishing up his resume.  As those governments of yesteryear sanguine enough to trust the United States as an ally have learned, charges of “corruption” are the traditional rationalization for throwing our “friends” under the bus as we, once again, skedaddle.  This time around, I’m sure Obama is in no mood to be trifled with.  He needs big dough to finance health care “reform” and “job creation.”  Where’s it to come from if we don’t extract ourselves from all these silly wars?  And, after all, he’s been conscientious, hasn’t he?  He already tried the surge thing.  The stage will soon be set for him to exit, stage left.

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.

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.

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.

Michael Zantovsky and The End of The End of History

Hattip to Matt Welch at Hit and Run for linking this brilliant essay, entitled “Resumption:  The Gears of 1989,” by Michael Zantovsky, Czech ambassador to the UK.  Matt’s introductory paragraph:

Writing in the World Affairs Journal, Michael Zantovsky, the former Czech ambassador to the U.S. and longtime former wingman to Vaclav Havel, has an interesting and hard-to-define essay that ruminates on the collapse of communism, Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, evolutionary biology, Sept. 11, Hayek, and much else besides. Any excerpt will be an injustice; here’s the closing paragraph:

I suggest you take the time to read the whole essay, and not just the closing paragraph.  It will be worth your while.  I agree with Matt’s caution about excerpts, but, just in case you’re too lazy to follow the link, here’s a nugget to whet your appetite.  It refers back to a previous paragraph about the failed theories of Communism:

Based on the known record, history is more likely a complex stochastic process in which each event is to a larger, smaller, or infinitesimal extent the result of everything that has happened before combined with a healthy dose of randomness. As such, it carries forward and perpetuates, at least for a time, not only human growth and human achievements but also our weaknesses, fallacies, inconsistencies, and failures. That is why it comes back to haunt us so often. One can only ask whether the post–Cold War world would be any different if Communism was smashed to dust and eradicated the way Nazism was. In the event, to the vast relief of people in the West and East alike, it imploded peacefully. But perhaps in doing so, it was also allowed to scatter tiny bits of its tyrannical self, its messianic arrogance, its ignorance of human nature, and its fundamental immorality to the ends of the earth. It is gone but not dead. In any case, democracies seem to have been much more aware of their fundamental values and the price of liberty when the totalitarian threat was still around.

Can you imagine an American ambassador writing anything like that?  Neither can I.  Sad, isn’t it?