EL PAIS SLUR AGAINST MERKEL: Why German politicians need a reality check

The Slog

by John Ward

“Another boy did it and ran away” simply isn’t going to cut it any more for Berlin. History is repeating, and the German government must moderate its actions.

“Merkel, like Hitler, has declared war on the rest of the continent now to secure their economic living space” wrote Spanish newspaper El Pais this morning. “You started it – you invaded Poland,” said Basil Fawlty in the famous British sitcom. The Germans will never live down their past if they continue to relive it in the present.

Just as, for many decades, it was impossible to suggest that the Jews might be wrong about something, some time around 1980 it became infra dig to mention Germany’s past. These two matters are in the same territory as suggesting that Black rule in Africa hasn’t exactly been an unqualified success, large parts of Islamic belief are misogynist, and British soldiers committed atrocities in Korea.

I read this afternoon that El Pais has withdrawn its headline. I truly do not know why, beyond pressure from all the usual gangsters in the EU.

I am an empiricist who hopes for better human behaviour, and a revival of civilised culture. Fluffies are denialists who pretend horrid things didn’t happen and nasty people are nice. They believe that if you stick ‘peace flotilla’ on an obviously arms-laden and aggressive armada designed to cause flashpoints, that’s fine. Sociopaths are people who use Fluffies. Lenin called Fluffies “the useful idiots”. For years from 1965-1985, Fluffies insisted the Soviet Army and the KGB had no designs upon the West. When the KGB files revealing they’d been useful idiots were released after the collapse of the USSR, the Fluffies were silent on the subject. They have been ever since….as they are on the corruption in South Africa.

For some time now, Angela Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble have been taking advantage of useful idiots on the subject of where the responsibility lies for the eurozone mess. The answer is that it lies slap bang with the human hubris that thought such a potty idea for 27 radically different economies could ever work. Every eurozone member bears the responsibility for that tragic error. But not one of the participants outside ClubMed displays the slightest doubt, flexibility or remorse about the suffering their collective pissing contest has caused – least of all Brussels-am-Berlin.

All the major players in this farce have lied, obfuscated, spun and distracted with unparalleled hypocrisy about the so-called PIIGS. All their mendacity has been found out – on this site, and millions of others like it. But the biggest lie of all is that bigots are somehow using unfair historical archetypes to blame poor, innocent Berlin.

I want to compare two almost exactly parallel events in 2013 and 1938. All I propose to do is present two accounts of what seems, beyond the spin-bollocks, to have actually happened in each case. I ask Sloggers only to compare the diplomatic style involved, and then decide for themselves.

2013

‘In the end, as a representative of Mr Anastasiades told the German newspaper Bild, ‘the Germans held a gun to our chest.’ It was at some time after a meeting of the inner core of the eurogroup which began in another room at 1 a.m. that Mr Asmussen of the ECB pulled out the gun. He told Mr Anastasiades that either he agreed to the deal on bank deposits, or EU funds would be cut off to the country’s two main banks.

Just to ramp up the 3 a.m. terror, Mr Asmussen then rang Mario Draghi, president of the ECB, in front of Mr Anastasiades. The German warned Mr Draghi that the ECB might have to deal with the collapse of the Cypriot banks on Monday. The eurogroup came out and announced that the Cypriot president had agreed that there would be a levy on all bank deposits.’

So if you believe this Daily Mail blog, it least it looks like Draghi is alive. Unlike much in the Mail, this piece is well-researched and based on a variety of reliable and objective sources.

1938

‘On March 14, on command from Berlin, President Hacha and Dr. Frantisek Chvalkovsky, Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, arrived in Reich capital. They met with the Führer for three hours. There followed a communique declaring that President Hacha had trustfully laid the fate of the Czech people and country into the hands of the Führer of the German Reich….’

That was the official version. Germany’s “patience was exhausted”, and so the wicked persecution of Sudeten Germans had to be brought to an end. But this is what really happened:

No comment, beyond:

“By shrewd and constant application of propaganda, heaven can be presented to the people as hell and, vice versa, the most wretched existence as a paradise”.                    Adolf Hitler in “Mein Kampf.”

“Deprive a person of sleep, and you have them under your thumb”.                    Mao Tse Tung