Europe has a history of these things.

When it's done to a dictator it's called revolution.

This is also a revolutionary act. But when "democracies" object to killing of leaders it becomes "anarchy".

The person who did this was justified. I don't give a damn who Fortuyn would have slept with. He was going to deport not only immigrants but Jews and Muslims who were citizens as well.

Fortuyn's gayness is also interesting in light of another thing not being discusses" gayness has often been a trait of some very rabid dictators and fascists. One example that comes to mind is Eric Rohm , the initial leader of the Brown Shirts. There are rumors, not entirely unfounded, that Goebells and Hitler were both gay as well.

There are a difference between "butch" gays, who tend to be right leaning and want to give it, and "pinko" gays, who are left leaning and love to take it.

I do not condone his killing, of course.

But that would have been scary if he had come to power.

The Two Sick Men of Europe via FreeRepublic.com, Mr. Paul Johnson surveys Germany and France at Forbes.com and finds France in a pre-revolutionary stage. Danton lives?

The recent French runoff election reminds me of the gubenatorial race in Louisiana some years ago, with a runoff between David Duke (a former Imperial Wizard of the KKK) and Edwin Edwards (long suspected of corruption, and now on record as having been convicted of same). One bumper sticker I remember reading about from that race read, "Vote for the crook. It's important." Edwards won, BTW.

On 2002-05-11 10:22, JayN wrote:
Europe has a history of these things.

When it's done to a dictator it's called revolution.

This is also a revolutionary act. But when "democracies" object to killing of leaders it becomes "anarchy".

The person who did this was justified. I don't give a damn who Fortuyn would have slept with. He was going to deport not only immigrants but Jews and Muslims who were citizens as well.

Fortuyn's gayness is also interesting in light of another thing not being discusses" gayness has often been a trait of some very rabid dictators and fascists. One example that comes to mind is Eric Rohm , the initial leader of the Brown Shirts. There are rumors, not entirely unfounded, that Goebells and Hitler were both gay as well.

There are a difference between "butch" gays, who tend to be right leaning and want to give it, and "pinko" gays, who are left leaning and love to take it.

Believe you mean Ernst Rohm, not "Eric" (and his last name is sometimes spelled Roehm). He was liquidated not for his sexual orientation (a picture of him appears in a 1932 issue of Reader's Digest, captioned "Queer Captain Roehm"), but because he took the "Workers" in the title "National Socialist German Workers' Party" a bit too literally. Under Rohm's direction, the Sturmabteilung (Storm Troopers) represented the "left wing" of Nazi thought (at least on economic issues), and they had to be purged to secure the cooperation of the hereditary Prussian aristocracy (represented by the likes of Hjalmar Schacht, the Krupp dynasty, etc.).

And another observation about the relationship between "gayness" and the far right: Only in America - where right-wing ideology is so heavily informed by fundamentalist/evangelical Christianity - is sexual orientation that big a deal on the right, even the far right; thus Fortuyn's position was not all that surprising. What's more, Jews may now become "socially acceptable" throughout much of the hard right - especially if leftist support for the Palestinians continues and intensifies (even those right-wing extremists who have remained rabidly anti-Semitic are showing no sympathy whatsoever for the Arabs).

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Johann Riebmann on 2002-06-15 07:19 ]</font>

Just want you all to know I'll be on vacation for awhile.
See ya.

On 2002-06-22 09:55, Justin wrote:
Just want you all to know I'll be on vacation for awhile.
See ya.

In a few days he'll regenerate under a brand new handle. :smile:

On 2002-06-22 18:52, Heliotrope wrote:

On 2002-06-22 09:55, Justin wrote:
Just want you all to know I'll be on vacation for awhile.
See ya.

In a few days he'll regenerate under a brand new handle. :smile:

He already has. In less than 24 hours. :lol:

Newsflash! Germans are depressed and/or fanatics!

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.p...-06-08&id=1932

Entire article posted because of a high chance of disappearing

The British monarchy is ridiculous and the Queen will probably be the last of her line to reign over us. For all her sense of duty, she has never known how to win her people?s love, and she is disastrously resistant to change. She has lost her empire, and the younger members of her family are a catastrophe, unfit to succeed her because they are ?incompetent, unwilling or on drugs?.

It was in this somewhat disobliging tone that Der Spiegel, Germany?s leading weekly magazine, chose to mark the Jubilee. The article was very long and was buttressed by comments from Christopher Hitchens, who described the monarchy as ?incurably absurd?, and Norman Davies, who said its ?chosen way of life? ? that of the British aristocracy ? was nowadays seen as ?at best old-fashioned, at worst parasitic?.

On occasions like this it is virtually impossible to restrain the editor of this magazine from clambering into the cockpit of his Lancaster bomber and heading off across the North Sea to give the Jerries hell. He knows quite well that many Britons, including some readers of this magazine, will think it is an insufferable cheek for the Germans to attack our beloved Queen. Who saved the Germans from fascism? Who saved most of the Germans from communism? Who led them in the ways of justice and truth after the war? Who bought Mannesmann? Who beat them 5?1 at football?

Germany, in the opinion of many Britons, is an insufferably dowdy country, inhabited by perpetual students with bumfluff moustaches and satanic fetishes, who cannot even get out of bed in the morning, who are alternately hysterical and depressed, and whose layabout lifestyle is paid for by a dwindling number of diligent metal-bashers who, unfortunately for them, are expert at manufacturing heavy goods for which there is less and less demand. The Germans are the second fattest people in the world, and yet the food is poor, the service in restaurants is unbelievably slow, the shops are shut half the time, the schools are mediocre, asylum- seekers are burnt alive in their hostels, the motorways are jammed, and only a few years ago one of their trains crashed killing 100 people, which makes Hatfield look like a tea party. German jokes are thin on the ground. As for that gangster Helmut Kohl, he was bankrolled by arms dealers and others who secretly handed his minions briefcases full of banknotes.

Far be it from me to seek to undermine the finest traditions of British journalism, or to disagree with much of the above, especially the bit about Mr Kohl, but I am an admirer of Germany and have many German friends, and what follows is written in sorrow rather than anger. It seems to me only fair to let us acknowledge that the Spiegel piece in no way reflects German public opinion, which looks on our monarchy with at least as much respect and affection as we do ourselves. Nor does Spiegel?s effort reflect the generally high standard set by the German journalists who report on Britain, almost all of whom are perfectly well aware that in recent months this country has seen a revival, not a decline, in monarchist sentiment. Yet the article is still fascinating for the way it betrays, with an almost touching unselfconsciousness, the fears which members of the German intelligentsia have about their own democracy. It is a common human failing to accuse others of one?s own worst faults ? those, for example, who level the charge of ?snob? usually turn out to be raving snobs themselves ? and seldom has this characteristic been more clearly visible than in Spiegel?s attack on the Queen.

For, as anyone who looks at the two countries dispassionately ought to be able to see, it is German democracy that is ridiculous. It is there that we find the truly miserable triumph of duty over natural human inclinations, the outcome of a system of government that has never won the people?s love. The absurdity of Germany?s so-called democracy lies in the plain fact that it is astoundingly undemocratic. The same can be said of all so- called democracies, including our own, but it is hard to find a political class which has played the whole farce out with quite such solemn, self- deceiving thoroughness as the remote, complacent, self-serving cliques of Germans who gathered after the war in East Berlin and in Bonn.

When the easterners finally wanted to be free, on the night of 9 November 1989, they walked through the Berlin Wall. It was one of the few genuinely democratic moments in German history, but what the easterners found on the other side of the wall was in some ways a disappointment. West Germany was not quite the school of liberty and virtue that its propagandists proclaimed it to be. From the earliest years of the republic, the political parties received not only large amounts of state funding and many legal private donations, but also great amounts in illegal donations, a practice that has continued to the present day, the only rule being that one should try to avoid being found out. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder?s Social Democrats were only last week sentenced to a fine of about ?300,000 (493,000 euros) for taking undeclared donations in Cologne between 1994 and 1999.

This sort of thing starts to undermine people?s faith in democracy. They begin to think the whole thing is a fix, with politicians subject to the party machines rather than to the people. The political class, they observe, looks after itself more and more comfortably from a financial point of view, and prefers toeing the party line to performing the more awkward task of articulating the people?s concerns. Professor Davies?s term ?parasitic? comes in useful here, while Hitchens?s courageous sense of the absurd is also needed.

But at least the West Germans made a success of their economy. This was incontestable, and was something of which ordinary Germans were justly proud. It helped to vindicate, or legitimise, the whole system. Here were no hyper-inflation and mass unemployment of the kind that helped undermine Weimar. Within a few years the German mark rose from nothing to become one of the world?s great currencies. Then Germany?s politicians gave it away. The German people would not have voted for this, so they were denied a referendum on the subject. From time to time during my six years in Berlin I would find myself asking distinguished Germans whether they thought it in any way regrettable that this extraordinary project was being driven through against the people?s wishes. To a man they answered no, and some of them maintained that to defy the German people showed how high-minded they were. Edmund Burke is not much read in Germany, but if he was they would have quoted his Speech to the Electors of Bristol at me.

All of us agree with Burke that part of the point of a representative democracy is that the representatives are at liberty to defy their constituents. The problem in Germany is the motive from which the political class has chosen to do this. It is terrified of being German. Many educated Germans feel this fear, and one can understand why. Sebastian Haffner, a man of brilliant insight, decided in 1938 that he must leave Germany in order to keep faith with German civilisation, destroyed in his opinion by the ?poisonous? German nationalism which had first manifested itself in the liberation wars against Napoleon in 1813 and 1815 and had then triumphed in the unification wars of 1864 to 1870. Haffner?s account of his life as a young man in Berlin as the Nazis took over, written in London in 1939, has only just been published under the title Defying Hitler (Weidenfeld, ?14.99), and in it he describes the Germany that he and others like him felt that they were losing:

It was characterised by certain distinctive attributes: humanity, openness on all sides, philosophical depth of thought, dissatisfaction with the world and oneself, the courage always to try something fresh and to abandon it if need be, self-criticism, truthfulness, objectivity, severity, rigour, variety, a certain ponderousness but also delight in the freest improvisation, slowness and earnestness but also a playful richness of invention, engendering ever new ideas which it quickly rejects as invalid, respect for originality, good nature, generosity, sentimentality, musicality, and above all freedom, something roving, unfettered, soaring, weightless, Promethean.

Haffner sets a high standard, but the trouble with Germany?s present political class is that in its panic-stricken determination to avoid sounding unduly nationalist, it has become incapable even of defending German civilisation. The baby is thrown out with the bathwater and ordinary Germans sense that this is happening. They know they are being betrayed by a political class which, far from representing, or at least respecting, all that is finest in the German tradition, is instead given over to a cowardly and venal flight from responsibility. The lavish subsidies paid to German artists in no way release the politicians from the charge of philistinism, for this money purchases a cringing conformity from the ?creative? sector and the universities, rather than any of the qualities enumerated by Haffner. Germany has no film-makers of any interest, no successors to Herzog and Fassbinder, and no rock music whatever. The pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine and of some other German newspapers still transmit a knowledge and love of high German culture, but the political parties have long been in the hands of semi-educated brutes such as Kohl and Schroeder. To be sold out by them is humiliation indeed. At least Bismarck, the greatest brute of his age, knew how to write.

This is more than can be said for a growing number of German 16-year- olds, who came well below the average in a survey of the 31 OECD countries. British children were the fourth highest achievers in science, with the Germans 16 places behind. Britain came seventh in maths and reading, well ahead of Germany. These surprising results are attributed to the increasing German reliance on half-day schooling, caused by the expense of full-time employment. Nor is the economy quite the force it was. Schroeder promised to get unemployment below 3.5 million by the end of his first term in September this year, and he will fail. Unemployment has been stuck on 10 per cent in Germany, while it is 3 per cent in this country. Germany has the lowest growth rate in the EU, and has lagged behind France and Britain since the mid-1990s. Economic freedom is crushed in Germany by regulation and by a vast welfare state paid for by taxes on jobs. Unemployment is inevitable until someone has the courage to make free-market reforms of the kind once introduced by Ludwig Erhard, but the political system favours immobility disguised as endless debate about what exactly needs to be done.

The Germans are going to have to sort this out among themselves, for whatever they do will involve pain, some of which will be borne by the hypochondriacs who are bankrupting the health system, and some by the army of the old whose pensions are paid for by the declining proportion of people in work. Yet as long as the unthinking assumption is that Germany needs to be bound ever more tightly into Europe, how can the national task of sorting out Bismarck?s conflict-suppressing welfare state even begin?

It is true that we might see a new chancellor in the autumn. An opinion poll has just given Schroeder and his Green allies only 39 per cent of the vote, while the coalition assembled by his Bavarian adversary Edmund Stoiber has 52 per cent. Stoiber likes to present himself as a traditionalist, and his fondness for being photographed wearing folk costumes exceeds the fondness of any Scotsman for the kilt, but like almost every other German politician he lacked the courage to keep the national currency. His junior coalition partners would be the Free Democrats, who are at present the subject of obsessive argument in the German press after their most gifted self-publicist, Juergen Moellemann (who plans to make 18 parachute jumps during the election campaign), accused a prominent member of the Central Council of Jews in Germany of encouraging anti- Semitism.

This was clearly an attempt by Moellemann to pick up nationalist votes by attracting Germans who feel angry that they are continually having to say sorry for Auschwitz. Rushing into the gap left by the German political class?s inability to express an honourable and sober patriotism, Moellemann flirts with the politics of Haider and Le Pen. Once this sort of row has started in Germany it soon becomes wearisome, not just because of the dreadful history which casts its noxious light down the decades, but because the arguments, or debates, seem to go on for ever. You can go away for a few years and come back and find them still talking about exactly the same things. Hitler is back on the cover of the latest Spiegel (the issue after the Queen), with a lighted match billowing smoke round his chin and the headline ?Playing with fire: how much past can the present bear??

The question for the Germans is how much of this pious mixture of pseudo-politics and pseudo-morality they can bear. Ordinary Germans yearn for a patriotism which is not the property of party politicians. This is not a question of trying to evade guilt for the horrors of 1933?45, but of trying to get on with life without recourse to the demeaning lie of pretending not to be German. A constitutional monarchy, deprived of real power but able to act as a focus for patriotism, would be one way to help reconcile the Germans ? who, like us, take an innocent pleasure in hierarchy and ceremonial ? to the tedium and humbug attendant on the operation of a pure democracy. This is, however, a suggestion which democratic theorists will take great pleasure in ridiculing, in order to hide from themselves how ignorant they are of the inclinations of the very people in whose name they presume to lecture us.

On 2002-06-23 12:34, Chris Loyd '82 wrote:

This was clearly an attempt by Moellemann to pick up nationalist votes by attracting Germans who feel angry that they are continually having to say sorry for Auschwitz. Rushing into the gap left by the German political class?s inability to express an honourable and sober patriotism, Moellemann flirts with the politics of Haider and Le Pen. Once this sort of row has started in Germany it soon becomes wearisome, not just because of the dreadful history which casts its noxious light down the decades, but because the arguments, or debates, seem to go on for ever. You can go away for a few years and come back and find them still talking about exactly the same things. Hitler is back on the cover of the latest Spiegel (the issue after the Queen), with a lighted match billowing smoke round his chin and the headline ?Playing with fire: how much past can the present bear??

This underscores a basic error being made world-wide, and especially on the Left.

Germany CANNOT be held accountable forever for the Holocaust, because those Germans born after the event are simply not guilty of it. The idea that all Germans are subject to some bizarre collective responsibility for events that occured before their birth is lunacy, and dangerous lunacy.

There will come a day when younger Germans, one, two, or more generations removed from the horrors, will reach the point of being tired of being expected to be ashamed of being German, or being told that they are forever tainted.

Trying to attaint a family line, either a single family line or a national one, is a primitive and destructive action. It's also self-defeating, since the resentment it breeds tends to produce reactions of the 'might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb' variety.

On 2002-05-09 10:45, walterhoch wrote:
The Germans are talking about banning "violent video games" as a response to the school shooting in Erfurt, along with even tougher gun control laws.

They still don't get it. It's as if they are on a sinking ship that's just sprung another leak, so the order goes out: "Repaint the bow!!"

On 2002-05-09 16:42, alan wrote:

On 2002-05-09 06:18, Virgil K. Saari wrote:
It seems that the killer of Mr. Fortuyn was a vegetarian animal-rights whacko who found mink rearing reprehensible, but putting a few bullets in his fellow man just.

This guy is precisely equivalent to the guys who shoot abortionists in America.

There has been next to nothing in the way of media coverage of this assassination and of the beliefs of the assassin out here in Seattle. Almost all of what I've read has been from the internet. This is rather interesting considering that we've had a number of arsons and other destructive actions from the Earth liberation Front. Last year they burned down a research center at the UW. Makes me wonder whether the media in the Northwest is afraid of being politically incorrect or of encouraging them to do something out here again. I would guess that the killing of a right-wing/gay/anti-immigration political candidate by an animal rights extremist would be an item of interest, but I guess I could be wrong.

I doubt if it ever occured to the American media that such actions are really all that big a deal. After all, they're just misled liberals, not really bad people.

French bashing is in style again, this article from the National Review by Jonah Goldberg is bashing at the French at furious speed. Frankly I do not like the French people that much.


Frogs in Our Midst
Beware fellow hoppers.



A neo-Nazi fired a rifle at French president Jacques Chirac over the weekend. In what many observers called a surprising turn of events, the French politician did not respond to the gunfire by giving the young man the keys to the city and raising a neo-Nazi flag up the Eiffel Tower.

This is just one sign of how times have changed. Oh, I don't mean that the cheese-eating surrender monkeys are, all of a sudden, the sort of hamburger-eating heroes who leap recklessly into the fray with no regard for their personal safety. For all I know, saying gesundheit ? or anything else in German ? is still the best way to get a table at a French restaurant.

But, from my own personal perspective, the frog-bashing business has changed a lot since I first started just a few years ago.

Obviously, I'm hardly the first guy to chronicle France's status as the Boston Red Sox of military history or to ridicule the Frenchman's proclivity "to eat with his hands and make love with his mouth." People have been mocking the French since before the French were even, well, French. Recall, if you will, that in 49 B.C. the Gauls folded faster than a Vietnamese "masseuse"'s massage table when you hear your wife's car in the driveway when Julius Caesar came a-knockin'. Afterwards, he was reported to have said to the generals of Gaul, "Get off your knees, my sandals are clean enough. Go make me some lunch? something light." And this is how the Caesar salad was born. (Alas, the original recipe was lost until Caesar Cardini, a descendant of the emperor's, rediscovered the method while sorting through some family records in the 1920s.)

Indeed, other nations have long recognized the cultural, ummm, uniqueness of the French. The Dutch, for example, have a saying, "It took no more effort than casting a Frenchman into hell." The Italians: "Attila, the scourge of God; the French, his brothers." The Germans have innumerable phrases about the French, which only make sense because people love to talk about their waiters. "The French write other than they speak, and speak other than they mean," goes one German saying. "The friendship of the French is like their wine ? exquisite, but of short duration," goes another. "May the French ulcer love you and the Lord hate you," is an old Arab curse. The Russians noted long ago, "A fighting Frenchman runs away from even a she-goat," though I suspect this sounds better in the Russian.

And the English language is soaked through with anti-French bile. Phrases like "to take French leave" (to depart without permission, or less charitable but more apt: to flee) are less prevalent these days, but that has more to do with the fact that people speak English poorly. Much of our English heritage is derived from our forefathers' eagerness not to seem French. Dr. Johnson, for example, remarked that he'd read that Englishmen preferred their weathervanes in the form of roosters, or cocks, as a subtle jab at the fickle Gauls, who turned whichever way the wind blew ? Gaul being a play on Gallus, meaning cock (this, no doubt, will be great news to highbrow limerick writers as Gallus and phallus can now be rhymed).

All of that aside, it seems incontrovertible that these days, French-bashing is as "in" as women's jeans that show more butt than a plumber touching his toes. Indeed, in this decade, mocking France's poor hygiene, its contempt for Hebrew Semites, its enabling of non-Hebrew Semites, and its penchant for capitulation at even the slightest whiff of the Teutonic have become as run-of-the-mill as jokes about lost socks in dryers and shopping carts with one bad wheel were in the 1980s. Saturday Night Live, various comic strips, and a host of websites ? of varying degrees of maturity ? have all gotten in on the act.

Even the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is now used as often as the French say "screw the Jews." Oops, sorry, that's a different popular French expression. I meant to say "pass?." [NOTE: I am not the author of the term. Again: It's from The Simpsons. But I do take some pride in its wide currency, as I believe I am its most successful popularizer.]

So the question remains: Why is French-hating so popular today? It's not like they've denied us fly-over rights recently. We haven't had to liberate Paris again (yet). French forces haven't fired on us like they did during Operation Torch in North Africa. They haven't stuck us with Vietnam, or propped up Carrot Top's career the way they kept Jerry Lewis going all those years. And yet, if Major League Baseball goes on strike, smacking frogs with heavy sticks may finally become the national pastime, as God no doubt intended.

I think the answer is simple, though perhaps not as simple as Al Bundy's epigram, "It is good to hate the French."

When terrorists from the most French-coddled and French-influenced region of the globe blew up the World Trade Center, any number of commentators noted that the "End of History" thesis was over. History, many of us said, had come back with a vengeance ("And this time, it's personal!" screamed my couch). Long-simmering differences between Christendom and Islam reignited with the end of the Cold War.

Well, it would only make sense that such fires ignited elsewhere as well. Remember, our differences with France ? much like our differences with the Arab world ? were always visible to those willing to see, even during the Cold War. The French maintained military independence from NATO. They regularly annoyed us in the U.N. and made our foreign policy more difficult, denying us air rights and whining about how our movies were more popular ? with Frenchmen ? than theirs were. Indeed, if the French had had their way when the Berlin Wall fell, East Germany would have remained a separate, and socialist, country.

But we overlooked all of that for two important reasons. The French didn't matter, and we had better things to do ? like win the Cold War over French objections. Both of these things are still true in an absolute sense, obviously. But, with the Cold War over, the French matter more today in a relative sense ? even as they matter less and less in an absolute sense.

While most of the West, if not the world, is Americanizing for good and for ill, France remains determined to stay French. The beautiful jabbering they call the French language is disappearing like an ornate sandcastle washed over by the global English tide. French officials debate for years over whether words like CD-rom are acceptable cultural imports (It's not. "Cederom" is the accepted form), while the rest of the world increasingly treats France as the Betamax of world history ? an interesting alternative, but no less irrelevant for it.

This would be touching, save for the fact that France increasingly defines being "French" as disagreeing with the United States. We support Israel, so the French hate Israel (and they really do hate it). McDonald's is American, so noodle-armed French intellectuals flex their wine muscles by tearing apart a few Mickey D's (even as France remains among the biggest consumers of Big Macs in the world). We say the war on terrorism is important, so they say it isn't. We say Osama bin Laden launched the attack on 9/11, and so the number-one bestseller in France says the Pentagon attacked itself.

You can see the problem here. If you want a culture which is defined by thinking and doing the opposite of another culture, that's fine. The British played this game with the French and became the pedestal upon which liberty, the rule of law, and the free market rest while France, in the words of Thomas Carlyle, remained simply a long despotism tempered by epigrams.

But this tendency becomes troublesome when a culture moves beyond the aesthetic and the culinary to the epistemological and the geopolitical. France can grumble about how much they hate our movies and food, as they spend their euros on both, all they like. Matters of taste are inherently subjective. But when the French start claiming that America is an imperial conqueror because we want to eliminate the terrorists the French have bought off for decades, well, them's fighting words. When politicians start making apologies for the murder of Jews because they want Arab votes; when French diplomats start setting up roadblocks in the U.N. because it's fun to embarrass America; when one froggy intellectual after another starts lecturing the United States on how to do things when so many of the world's problems can be laid at unwashed French feet ? well, that's when frog-bashing is going to become an American pastime again.

THE ENEMY WITHIN
Though not for all Americans. Increasingly, France is becoming the North Star for domestic America-haters. The French have long said that being French is a state of mind, not an ethnicity (which is why they made Algerian students recite "Our forefathers the Gauls?" every day). Well, if you go by French attitudes alone, America has the largest population of Frenchmen never to have surrendered to Germany.

Cynthia McKinney, that awful woman, cribs most of her conspiratorial nonsense from French best-sellers and newspapers ? even if she's too dim to know it. America's lefty intellectuals, long convinced that anything said with a French accent must be true, serve as a transmission belt for any and every anti-American pronouncement that comes out of Paris.

It's funny: The assumption that France is more "progressive" than America is widespread among American liberal cosmopolitans, even though France in many ways represents everything American lefties are supposed to dislike about America. France was a colonial power, and still is far more of one than America. If you think dropping bombs in Puerto Rico was bad, consider that the French dropped a nuclear bomb in a minority neighborhood of the globe not too long ago. The French use nuclear power, torture animals to make their food tastier, laugh at sexual harassment, and have absolutely no racial affirmative-action programs whatsoever. French families are abandoning their older relatives at French hospitals so they can take extended vacations. French schools have been forced to issue "bully insurance" because playgrounds have become so dangerous. Over a hundred candidates in France's parliamentary elections were under criminal investigation.

When you think about it, there are four possible explanations for why American leftists love France so much (aside from France's historical love affair with Communism and Stalinism). First, the French are trying to outlaw hard work and, perhaps eventually, work entirely. Government agents stake out companies suspected of working their employees more than 35 hours a week. Some exiting employees are searched to make sure they don't bring any work home with them. If you believe that requiring work is a form of discrimination against those who want to live well without working, then you've got to love France.

Second, the only sexual preference France doesn't celebrate is heterosexual monogamy.

Third, France has always treated its intellectuals like celebrities, a seductive practice for American academics forced to drive around in old VW buses and live next door to men who actually work with their hands.

But, finally, the most important reason American leftists love France is that French elites say bad things about America. French intellectuals call us racist, stupid, imperialistic, simplistic, etc. ? and that alone is proof of their intellectualism. So long as you call America "racist," you could add that an enema is as good as a toothbrush and some professor of "communications theory" would applaud.

I've grown tired of these French-bashing columns because there's not much left to say about a nation of 200 cheeses and one kind of toilet paper. Besides, the real threat isn't the frogs across the pond. The real threat is their fellow hoppers here at home.

The view from La Tour Eiffel and Notre Dame was quite good, and Sacre Coeur is also very impressive. The Paris Metro, while it does truly go everywhere but to the very top of Monte Marte, needs to buy new trains, and get rid of its advertising. And why on earth does one need to pull a lever to get the friggin' doors open? The Madrid Metro did everything automatically.

Oh yeah, and beware the dog poop and the Gypsies. And those damn Benatton ads are everywhere.

On 2002-07-16 19:14, Tristan Jones wrote:
French bashing is in style again, this article from the National Review by Jonah Goldberg is bashing at the French at furious speed. Frankly I do not like the French people that much.



Obviously, I'm hardly the first guy ... to ridicule the Frenchman's proclivity "to eat with his hands and make love with his mouth."

That would be in contrast to the portion of Americans who draw their sustenance by sipping on a straw and fornicate with their fellows with their fists.


The French make very good sparkling wines; and I have a very nice pair of Herm?s suspenders.

On 2002-07-17 05:53, Virgil K. Saari wrote:

That would be in contrast to the portion of Americans who draw their sustenance by sipping on a straw and fornicate with their fellows with their fists.

Geez, it's early in the morning, Mr. Saari. I did not even get what you wrote until the second time I read it. Yet you are right on the ball.

On 2002-07-03 23:10, HopefulCynic68 wrote:

On 2002-06-23 12:34, Chris Loyd '82 wrote:

This was clearly an attempt by Moellemann to pick up nationalist votes by attracting Germans who feel angry that they are continually having to say sorry for Auschwitz. Rushing into the gap left by the German political class?s inability to express an honourable and sober patriotism, Moellemann flirts with the politics of Haider and Le Pen. Once this sort of row has started in Germany it soon becomes wearisome, not just because of the dreadful history which casts its noxious light down the decades, but because the arguments, or debates, seem to go on for ever. You can go away for a few years and come back and find them still talking about exactly the same things. Hitler is back on the cover of the latest Spiegel (the issue after the Queen), with a lighted match billowing smoke round his chin and the headline ?Playing with fire: how much past can the present bear??

This underscores a basic error being made world-wide, and especially on the Left.

Germany CANNOT be held accountable forever for the Holocaust, because those Germans born after the event are simply not guilty of it. The idea that all Germans are subject to some bizarre collective responsibility for events that occured before their birth is lunacy, and dangerous lunacy.

There will come a day when younger Germans, one, two, or more generations removed from the horrors, will reach the point of being tired of being expected to be ashamed of being German, or being told that they are forever tainted.

Trying to attaint a family line, either a single family line or a national one, is a primitive and destructive action. It's also self-defeating, since the resentment it breeds tends to produce reactions of the 'might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb' variety.

The day may come more quickly as increasing numbers of German citizens are no longer ethnically German, but rather Turkish, Iraqi, etc. Maybe someday German nationalism won't have to be tied so much to German ethnicity. Sort of like what has happened in Britain.

On 2002-07-17 15:29, Neisha '67 wrote:


The day may come more quickly as increasing numbers of German citizens are no longer ethnically German, but rather Turkish, Iraqi, etc. Maybe someday German nationalism won't have to be tied so much to German ethnicity. Sort of like what has happened in Britain.

As it does, though, expect a backlash, one worse than is currently occuring in Europe.

(Rather mildly Right-leaing parties win power in various national parliaments, and the intellectual class of Europe screams and faints in terrified horror. :lol: If you ever want to annoy an EU bureaucrat, just say "Thatcher" in a loud clear voice and watch him (or once in a while her) go into freak-out mode. :lol: )

The very term 'nation-state' derives from Europe, where the nations were, and to some degree still are, defined by ethnicity. In Europe, the lands are named after their people.

The English are not named for England, England is named for the English (or rather the Angle-ish). Gotland is named for the Goths, France for the Franks, Jutland for the Jutes, etc.

(Contrast that to Americans, a people named after their land. That's an important psychological difference between Europe and America.)

Right now, if I'm right, and S&H's theory is even half-right, Europe is the depths of 3T, some years behind America in the cycle. I'm afraid the Adaptive-ish intellectual elites of the EU may be in for some more dismaying shocks down the road.

My favorite T-shirt in England is the one worn by ethnic Asian and African Brits --"We're here because you were there!" That probably helped the process along in England, so that people who are not ethnically English, but whose anscestors were colonials, are more readily viewed as British by most people.

The same is true, but to a lesser extent in France. But there is no real comparable phenomenon in Germany.

On 2002-07-18 17:55, Neisha '67 wrote:
My favorite T-shirt in England is the one worn by ethnic Asian and African Brits --"We're here because you were there!" That probably helped the process along in England, so that people who are not ethnically English, but whose anscestors were colonials, are more readily viewed as British by most people.

The same is true, but to a lesser extent in France. But there is no real comparable phenomenon in Germany.

Maybe the desire to live down and move beyond the collective taint of guilt many feel the German people have inherited from World War II will provide a substitute. As it may for White Americans, too.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jds1958xg on 2002-07-18 21:48 ]</font>

Possibly, but it may take time. My husband is half-German and he works for a German company at which the average age is 26 (making him an old fogey at 35). The German nationals with whom he works talk about how it is impossible to display any sense of German nationalism because of the horror associated with it. It's really sad. These people are our age and their parents were children during WWII, with their own awful memories. But they live in a culture where it is tremendously distasteful to be patriotic. That's really hard.

That's why I think German patriotism will be revived by non-ethnic German citizens and by people, like my husband, who are only part German.

On 2002-07-19 10:55, Neisha '67 wrote:
Possibly, but it may take time. My husband is half-German and he works for a German company at which the average age is 26 (making him an old fogey at 35). The German nationals with whom he works talk about how it is impossible to display any sense of German nationalism because of the horror associated with it. It's really sad. These people are our age and their parents were children during WWII, with their own awful memories. But they live in a culture where it is tremendously distasteful to be patriotic. That's really hard.

That's why I think German patriotism will be revived by non-ethnic German citizens and by people, like my husband, who are only part German.

You may well be right. Or else, the EU itself may provide the German people with a focus and outlet for the patriotic instinct in all of us. After all, if one is taught to be ashamed of one's identity, it becomes a lot easier to look for ways to shed said identity in favor of another the person can take more pride in. Especially if the sense of shame is either partially or completely justifiable. I should know. I have some German in me, too.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jds1958xg on 2002-07-19 11:42 ]</font>

On 2002-07-19 11:38, jds1958xg wrote:

On 2002-07-19 10:55, Neisha '67 wrote:
Possibly, but it may take time. My husband is half-German and he works for a German company at which the average age is 26 (making him an old fogey at 35). The German nationals with whom he works talk about how it is impossible to display any sense of German nationalism because of the horror associated with it. It's really sad. These people are our age and their parents were children during WWII, with their own awful memories. But they live in a culture where it is tremendously distasteful to be patriotic. That's really hard.

That's why I think German patriotism will be revived by non-ethnic German citizens and by people, like my husband, who are only part German.

You may well be right. Or else, the EU itself may provide the German people with a focus and outlet for the patriotic instinct in all of us. After all, if one is taught to be ashamed of one's identity, it becomes a lot easier to look for ways to shed said identity in favor of another the person can take more pride in. Especially if the sense of shame is either partially or completely justifiable. I should know. I have some German in me, too.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jds1958xg on 2002-07-19 11:42 ]</font>

This might be all the easier for the Germans in that the EU has a distinct potential to become German-dominated in a very soft sort of way. Germany is arguably the strongest member-state of the EU economically and in terms of population, so the more democratic the EU ends up being, the more it tends to reflect Germany.

Historically, the EU was once centered on a 'special relationship' between France and Germany, back when it was the European Community, and into EU times as well. Now, there are signs that the dominant force may be shifting to a German-British partnership, or a German-(several small states) relationship. Note that Germany is a partner in each scenario.

If the EU does end up expanding eastward in the next few years (that's in doubt either way), then Germany gains the additional advantage of being centrally located within the EU.

Combine central locality, largest population, strongest economy (generally), etc, and the EU starts to look, as one writer put it, 'like the German Empire without the Kaiser'.

Germany has always had this peculiar problem, all the way back to the beginning of modern Germany under Bismark. A unified Germany tends to end dominating Europe's middle reaches just by virtue of its size.
But it's never been so strong that it could hold off all her rivals in combination, which is the the exact situation that tended to arise whenever Germany unified itself.

(Germany is an ancient nation, but a very young state.)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: HopefulCynic68 on 2002-07-19 21:53 ]</font>

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: jds1958xg on 2002-07-20 14:02 ]</font>

Grief and Shame
Remembering the Irish famine.

"Exactly how much blame is a matter of lively argument among historians. There is an extremist position ? not held, I think, by any honest scholar ? that the famine was an act of British policy. That is preposterous. The personalities of the political actors involved are all well known from their own letters and writings, and from the reports of their contemporaries, both friend and foe: none of them was of a type to contemplate anything so monstrously wicked. Incredibly, though, this demented version of the famine story is the one required by law to be propagated in the public schools of New York State. "History teaches us," said Governor Pataki, signing the relevant law into effect in 1996, "that the Great Irish Hunger was not the result of a massive failure of the Irish potato crop but rather was the result of a deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive." What history actually teaches us that amoral shyster pols of the Pataki type will do absolutely anything to curry favor with a noisy faction."