I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that by people with a great deal more political savvy than I have.  Not infrequently the folks I hear that from are people who in fact make their lives in politics, and more particularly the politics that plays out beyond the klieg lights, which is to say where the bulk of the sausage is made.  So-and-so is going to happen, so you may as well get the best bargain you can and wait to chip away at the more obnoxious aspects of whatever It is.

That point is valid for many issues at many levels.  I mean, other than to the guy who runs the local liquor store, does it really matter that they’re selling wine down at the local big-box grocery store?  As nearly as I can tell from the sidelines, a great deal of legislation introduced is driven by grandstanding or someone getting in a particular legislator’s ear.  Harry Reid and sundry others are trying, depending on which side one listens to, to ban online gambling except for poker, or to ban all forms of online gambling, or whatever.  Does it really matter a damned bit, except to the gambling addicts?  Yes, it’s a needless constraint on the inherent human right to do stupid things with one’s money, and any needless constraint on liberty is a precedent for other, future such constraints on liberty, constraints which actually do harm to ordinary people.  By making part of the socio-political background noise the assumption that anything which some subset of the legislature doesn’t like can be banned for no reason other than they think it’s (i) good for us, or (ii) good for their pet constituencies, we increase, at some marginal level, the likelihood of future passive acceptance of genuinely egregious intrusions on liberty.  Can’t recall off the top of my head who first made the point, but it is in fact correct that it is only seldom that a society loses all its freedom all at once.

However, it’s precisely these drip-drip-drip erosions of liberty that Are Going to Happen, because enough of the unthinking can be mobilized in their support.  Yes, you can fight them tooth and nail, every time.  But fighting them tooth and nail will burn bridges, use up political capital, and perhaps make the forces of freedom less able in the future to resist something that really is a die-in-the-last-ditch issue.  And of course other It’s Going to Happen issues don’t implicate liberty interests at all, like how the governing board of a local water utility district is selected, or whether the local school superintendent is popularly elected or appointed by a board of education.  Whether a particular interstate spur is built on one side of a hill versus the other just is not going to make much in the nature of permanent impact beyond the people immediately affected.

Other issues, Big Issues, that Are Going to Happen are different.  There are certain measures that once adopted become bells which cannot be un-rung.  I’m quite comfortable that not a few votes in Congress for that monstrosity of a health care “reform” act were cast on the assumption of let’s just get it on the books so we can say we supported “fixing the broken system,” and then later we’ll come back and fix all the potholes.  Except it’s not going to work that way.  Individual mandate or no, the inevitable consequence of requiring insurance companies to insure everyone for everything at any time, and at the same time prohibiting them from pricing adequately for it, will be to destroy the private health insurance industry.  Oh sure, the companies may survive, but if they do it will be as de facto public utilities, in which the operations and expenses of government are off-loaded onto non-governmental actors, but the policies and preferences are selected by people inside government.  Once you destroy the structures for the private payment of health care insurance you will never re-create them. 

Outright nationalization of industries also seems to work very similarly.  Once you take them over and run them as branches of the government it’s extraordinarily difficult to reconstitute them as private enterprises.  They never seem to regain the ground lost.

And of course we sometimes have the Truly Important occasions on which giving in to what someone else describes as inevitable is nothing short of disastrous.  I’d argue that Dear Leader’s take-over of the health care industry was one of those occasions, if only because it will wreck no less than 20% of the national economy, and maybe more.  But he’s really not the Exhibit A I was thinking about today.

You see, 80 years ago today, Paul von Hindenburg bowed to the “It’s Gonna Happen” of the National Socialists taking over the Germany government.  Oh, to be true there were others in the cabinet as well, non-Nazis, people who could be counted on to contain Adolf Hitler as chancellor, people who could show him how politics worked, how to go along to get along, how not to Upset the Apple Carts of People Who Mattered.  The Nazis didn’t have a majority (they never were voted an outright majority in any arguably free election) but they were the largest party, and certainly the loudest.  They were unstoppable; they were inevitable; the hour for the redemption of Germany had struck, and this funny-acting Austrian corporal was Going to Happen.  The Schleichers, the Papens, the Neuraths, the Brauchitschs, the Schachts . . . they all figured they’d go ahead and work with the man because he was Going to Be Appointed, and anyway once they had him penned up in the Chancellory they could draw his sharpest teeth.

What they didn’t appreciate until it was too late, way too late, was that they weren’t even playing in the same ballpark as Hitler.  Silly people, they thought they would absorb and digest him, and spit back out a nice, conforming, squishy-edged politician.  So why not go along with something that was Going to Happen?  Hitler had no interest at all in becoming a powerful chancellor of the German Republic; wasn’t even mildly curious about it.  He wanted to — had announced, years before, his intention to — seize the republic by the throat and strangle it, then erect himself and his movement astride its corpse.

Which is exactly what Hitler went out and did.  And all those people, the political sages, the Deep Thinkers, the nudge-nudge insiders, the people who — carefully preserving their airs of jaded weariness at the tumults of the masses and those ignorant sods’ belief that Their Boy was going to be any more than one more pebble in the pond — had assured each other that since it was Going to Happen Anyway, they may as well make the best of it and ride it for what it was worth.  Run a Wikipedia search on Kurt von Schleicher (who was instrumental in engineering Hitler’s appointment in the first place) and see how he fared.  Or the same on Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, and see where he ended the war (and what he was doing in November, 1946).

Whenever I hear my friends and acquaintances who Know Better allowing that, well, so-and-so Is Going to Happen, so you may just as well get used to the idea, I want to beat my head against the wall.  Because nothing in politics is inevitable.  Tyranny is a choice, as is decline, as is prosperity, as is freedom.  In the end, nothing at all Is Going to Happen unless it is permitted to happen.

And sometimes, Letting It Happen, or not, makes all the difference in the world, as it did 80 years ago today.

Update (02 Feb 13):  Ilya Somin over at the Volokh Conspiracy has a spot-on post on What Happens When Illiberal, Anti-Democratic Forces Take Power Through the Democratic Process.  It’s about Egypt, which went to the polls and elected the Muslim Brotherhood to replace Hosni Mubarak, an outcome at which Dear Leader expressed “relief.”  Somin excerpts and links to some commentary in Bloomberg by Noah Feldman, identified as a Harvard Law School professor (which alone should alert Gentle Reader to the weight to be attached to it).  The money quote:

“If Egypt’s democrats want to avoid becoming another Pakistan, in which democracy is never more than a few shots from military dictatorship, they have just one path available to them: take a deep breath, go home, and let the democratically elected government try to do its job. Mursi and his government may do well or badly. But as long as they are up for re-election in a few years, they will have laid the groundwork for democratic transition.

Patriots of Tahrir, ask yourselves: You may not like Mursi. But would you really rather have the army?

You have to figure that some fellow who landed a job at HLS is pretty keen as a legal mind.  Feldman seems to fall on his face pretty hard as an historian, though.  Mursi simply decreed himself effectively unlimited power some time ago.  Oh sure, he’s promised to surrender it when the time comes.  And learned folks like Feldman bite down hook, line, and sinker on that promise.  I would point out to the Learned Professor Feldman that the Ermächtigungsgesetz — the Enabling Law — of 1933 was passed by a majority of the Reichstag and came with a built-in sunset clause of 01 April 1937.  Maybe the good professor could remind us how that worked out, again?

Feldman’s error is to assume that legitimacy of government has nothing at all to do with what that government does.  Over at Instapundit, Reynolds points out, “But those rights [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] are unalienable — incapable of being alienated, that is, bought, sold, or given away — which means that even if you live in a democracy, you haven’t surrendered them to the majority. A majority that wants to take away your unalienable rights isn’t a legitimate government. I’m gratified by how many Egyptians seem to grasp that; it’s more than I expected, though perhaps not as many as it needs to be. It’s clearly more than the Muslim Brotherhood expected, too.”

By the way, Feldman also tips his hand when he presents the Egyptian military as being the worst of all possible outcomes, even measured against the Brotherhood.  Is it, one asks, because of the Egyptian military’s actual track record, or is it because it is a military, and in Feldman’s world and lexicon “military” is co-extensive with “the most unspeakably brutal, oppressive, murderous thugs you could possibly imagine to yourself”?  He hints at the answer to that question when he starts his article by observing that he hates to agree with “an Egyptian general about anything.”  Is it the Egyptian he doesn’t want to agree with, or the general?  He obviously has no problem agreeing with the Egyptian members of the Muslim Brotherhood that they ought to be running the joint according to their own visions (see the quoted langauge above; ought the SPD in February, 1933 have taken a deep breath, gone home, and let the new Reichskanzler try to do his job?), so what is the source of the repugnance of this Egyptian general’s opinions?

Feldman must be a perfect fit over at Harvard.

Which is to say, they’re all over the map.

When we first got Internet access in our office, a dozen or more years ago, I used CNN as my start page.  Come into the office in the morning, fire up the coffee machine, crank up the desktop, and see what’s going on in the world.  It was all the more helpful because I don’t have a television at home.  I very clearly recall that on September 11, 2001, I couldn’t get to their site for some reason.

And then came 2006.  If Gentle Reader will recall, that was the year Al Qaeda made a propaganda film.  We know it was a propaganda film because they announced it as such; they stated that they had compiled it and released it in hopes of affecting the outcome of the 2006 mid-term elections.  It was a compilation of video of terrorist snipers shooting American soldiers, marines, and airmen.  CNN, knowing what the film was, and why it had been produced, and understanding that Al Qaeda believed its release would product electoral effect favorable to it, ran the film.  And ran it.  And ran it. 

To get an idea of the morality of what CNN did, imagine if you will that, during the Battle of Hürtgen Forest, the longest land battle the U.S. has ever fought, and which began in September, 1944, the Nazi camera crews had shot footage of American soldiers stepping on land mines, or being shredded by artillery shells bursting in the tree canopy, or hosed down with flamethrowers, or caught in interlocking machine gun fire.  I have a history of the battle (annoyingly, while the book is packed with place references, as any tactical level military history will be, there are almost no maps at all anywhere in the book, so unless you grew up in the place, or have handy some official map publication, you’re at sea trying to understand the ebb and flow of the battle), and it was impossible to avoid the impression that the American command seriously mismanaged it.  In the event, several infantry divisions got fed into the battle, piecemeal, and chewed to bits.  Over a quarter of the forces engaged on our side became casualties.  Now imagine that Goebbels decides he’s going to try to meddle in the 1944 presidential election by putting together this film in an effort to show the American people that Roosevelt’s a callous bastard who’s just Squandering Your Boys’ Lives and his party’s no better.  And now imagine that Movietone Newsreels decides to show that film in every theater in the country.  What would be the reasonable citizen’s reaction?

I decided then that it was true what some were saying about the mainstream media in America:  They’re not anti-war; they’re just on the other side.  So I decided that if I was going to get my daily dose of hostility to America I would do so without the alloy of treason.  From then until now I’ve used the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s website as my start page.  It helps me keep up my German, acquired with such effort, and it provides a helpful cross-reference on issues that affect us all.  They’re usually described as a center-right publication, but in truth I’d say they’re left of center by a comfortable margin.  Not as much as most of the American media, but still perceptibly so. 

From time to time I’ll run across articles on things that don’t directly have anything to do with the U.S., but which relate to issues and arguments current here.  Not having the same historical and cultural reference points, you can find things said there which would be assiduously suppressed here (and vice versa, by the way).  I recall a report on a lengthy study done on what things have measurable positive effects on student performance in public schools.  If memory serves it was actually a European-wide study.  Among the things they found had no discernible positive effect on measurable student performance:  increased spending per pupil; increased teacher pay; reduced class size.  I can’t recall if technology spending was also examined.  Interestingly, one of the things the study did recommend was to leave the students together longer.  In Germany students are divided after a few years into those who will attend the Hauptschule and be essentially done after tenth grade, and go become blue-collar workers, farm hands, or whatnot; the Realschule, who attend I think through 12th grade and who are targeted for the lower white-collar jobs in industry, trade, and government bureaucracy; and, last, the Gymnasium which runs through a 13th year and in which in one’s final two years one selects two main subjects for concentration.  Those final two years really are more like the first two years at an American university (in fact they’re actually more demanding than that, by a good margin).  Only the Gymnasiasten are eligible to attend the universities and their technical equivalents, the technische Hochschulen.  The study recommended deferring the point of division for a year or two.  But for me what was interesting was its finding that the usual NEA-espoused nostrums just don’t seem to work.  As mentioned, stuff like that I find helpful because it’s a cross-reference that you can’t tar with the brush of Bush, or Halliburton, or MoveOn.org, or the Koch brothers, or whoever is your particular bugaboo.

In this morning’s edition there’s a report on German opinions of America and Americans.  Specifically they report on what has every appearance of being an actual permanent shift in their perceptions of us, their liking of us, their willingness to emulate us, and their understanding of the nature and desired direction of their relationship with us.  The results discussed are the most recent results of a battery of questions that’s been asked periodically and to a greater or lesser extent since the 1950s (at least for some of the questions).

The article reports that since the early 2000s, particularly since 2003 and the invasion of Iraq, the Germans’ overall good opinion of the U.S., the percentage identifying the U.S. as Germany’s closest friend, the percentage seeing us as that country with which it is desirable to work closely, the percentage seeing us as a place of opportunity, have all plummeted, in some cases by two-thirds or more.  The Germans still think Dear Leader walks on water and parts it for those who can’t; he polls better than JFK after his visit to Berlin in 1963.  But the article reports what it bluntly calls markedly increasing anti-Americanism among the Germans. The percentage that perceives us as a land of high criminality, social injustice, inequality, superficiality, uncultured, a land with low quality of life, represents a majority, in some cases a huge majority, of the German population.  For example, only 19% described the U.S. as a place where one may enjoy a good quality of life.  Only 17% of the population expects to find gebildete individuals here (Bildung, in German means something quite different from “educated,” “accomplished,” or “talented”; I’m not even sure “refined” or “cultured” even quite capture what they understand by it; the topic gets a good airing in The German Genius, a book to which I’ve previously linked several times).  A high level of culture is anticipated by every bit of 8% of Germans.

The country which seems to have taken America’s place in German hearts, by the way, is France.  That’s encouraging.

Those last two data points cited by the article’s author are juxtaposed with what he calls the “enormous scientific and cultural achievements” of the U.S., together with, just as another example, the library system here which is explicitly favorably compared to that in Germany.  The author references those and then allows that the Germans’ perceptions of us an ungebildetes Volk and uncultured “can only indicate expression of a massively distorted perception” of the U.S.  This massively distorted perception exists side-by-side with the data point, also referenced by the author, that fully one-quarter of the German population has friends or relatives here.

The author proposes that the German-American relationship has been inadequately fostered in the last few years.  He notes that public expression of clichés and stereotypes of ethnic, religious, or other groupings in Europe is widely condemned.  “Apparently there is little contradiction when Americans are publicly and categorically described as dumb, asocial, and uncultured.”  Well, but of course.

Does this all matter, and why?  I think it does, because as the rest of Europe slides into insolvency and is swamped by would-be Islamofascists, among the continentals only Germany seems to be holding out for some degree of fiscal sanity.  Only Germany has taken the position that, well, yes, you’re welcome here and you’re welcome to practice your religion here, but you’re by Allah going to become Germans while you do it (note the diametric opposition of this position to the Nuremberg Laws, by which Jews could not ever be “German”).  Within the past couple of years a cabinet minister (I think it was the cultural minister, but I can’t recall exactly) came right out and said that separatism was to be resisted, that assimilation was and had to be the formal goal of public policy.  This is good; as American society and politics is driven ever further down the road of Balkanization by — among others — Dear Leader himself, we need a close friend who’s looked into that dark pit and decided not to jump in.

I’ve always thought that, after its language and literature, the most precious gift England gave us was the concept of “reasonableness.”  That does not mean reasoned.  Reason drives a concept to its logical conclusion, however absurd that may be when fitted around the odd shapes and contours of human nature.  It produces silliness like the French Revolution and its train of horrors.  Reasonableness tells us not to take ourselves so damned seriously; it reminds us that everything’s got its limits, and that if two is good three isn’t necessarily better.  Reasonableness reminds us that just because we can doesn’t mean we ought to.  It reminds us to seize the chance to shut up and mind our own business.

By like token, Germany has given the U.S. many precious gifts in its cultural legacy.  Too many to go into here, but there are more than sufficient to justify regarding America’s relationship with Germany as every bit as special, in its own way, as ours with Britain.  The coming years will be years of great trial, I am afraid, as we struggle against a world-view which thinks the Seventh Century is to be reimposed on the globe, and we try to maintain that struggle with the shackles of socialistic organization about our ankles.  We will need every bit of help from every willing hand.  With the degree of estrangement described the FAZ article one would be forgiven for questioning whether if we stretched our hand out to Germany, we would find theirs in it.

Today’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has an article on why sanctions only help tyrants, specifically the Iranian ones.

This seems to me to be a rather curious position to be taken by folks who twice in the past century were brought to and in fact past the brink of starvation and collapse precisely by successful efforts to intercept their trade relationships.  In both those situations the Germans were the subject of dictatorships, in the Great War a military dictatorship run through the mouthpiece of a monarch and in the second round by a political dictatorship.  In both instances the final collapse of the system was brought about by battlefield collapse which had its origins in economic collapse.

By March 20, 1918, the German civil populace had survived the “turnip winter,” in which that’s exactly what they were reduced to eating in their freezing houses, coal being almost unobtainable across wide areas.  But they’d knocked Russia out of the war and in fact were in the process of establishing military occupation of parts of the country to ensure the timely delivery of supplies which the Bolsheviks had agreed to fork over.  That military occupation wasn’t just a bunch of desk-jockeys, either.  The Germans, down to their last throw of the dice in the West, devoted dozens of thousands of troops (and their associated supply chains) to that occupation of a defeated enemy.  Why?  The British blockade had reduced their war-making capacity that far that the Germans absolutely, at whatever cost, had to have those supplies.  It was a race to see whether they could get them flowing in time.

The thousands upon thousands (I’m thinking it was well over 100,000, but I’ve slept since I last read the specifics, so don’t hold me to that) of coal-scuttle helmets remaining in the East to pacify and plunder prostrate (but thoroughly chaotic) Russia were not in the line on March 21, 1918, when Ludendorff launched his last gambit against the Western allies.  He almost won the bet, too.  Exhausted, famished, unreinforced, the German offensive petered out just a couple of miles from breaking the line between the British and French.  German soldiers were literally stopping in the middle of battle to raid Allied kitchens, they were that hungry.  What difference might — say, another 50,000 — fresh troops have made?  How different might European history for the last 90 years have looked with the British pinned against the Channel ports, and French armies collapsing back on Paris (sort of like what happened in 1940), and the Kaiser in a position actually to negotiate if not from a position of strength then at least not from desperation?

Fast forward to 1944.  Albert Speer has taken over German war production.  It’s going through the roof.  There are more guns, more tanks, more aircraft coming off the assembly lines than ever before.  Production would continue to rise until the very end, by which time, with the transportation network wrecked by Allied air forces, the factories literally choked on their own output.  But there was a problem:  Germany couldn’t make enough synthetic fuel to run its tanks or aircraft.  It had no domestic supplies of chromium and several other strategic minerals.  When it lost access to Ploesti (the Romanian oil fields) and imports of Turkish chromium, Speer went to Hitler and explained to him, down to the day, how long Germany’s war effort could continue.  By the end Germany’s armies were reduced to foot and horse transportation.  A good part of the reason that the Western allies so rapidly advanced across France was air superiority.  When they didn’t have it, as in the Ardennes in December, 1944, they didn’t do so well.  And it took Hitler just about siphoning gas from every tank he could lay hands on to scrape up the fuel to launch the offensive we know as the Battle of the Bulge.

Compare and contrast:  In Italy, where the terrain was much less favorable to the material preponderance the Allies brought to bear, and aircraft, while important and operational, could not exercise nearly the dominance of the battlefield they could on the open plains of northern Europe, it took the Allies nine months to advance from the Straits of Messina to Rome, and then even by the end of the war, nearly ten months later, they’d still only fought their way into the northern reaches of Italy.

To put a bow on it:  Both World Wars were first and foremost battles of material.  It took a lot of bleeding and dying by the “P.B.I.” (as the other British services called the “poor bloody infantry”), but in both cases the winner was the guy with the biggest shopping basket.

The FAZ article, written by some fellow identified as a German-Iranian political scientist currently earning his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, recites all the usual theoretical objections to sanctions — they hit the “innocent” civilians; they only widen the disparity in power between the tyrant and his subjects; they don’t even stop the tyrants from in fact achieving the material advances in aggressive capacity which is the principal moral foundation for them; by demoralizing the civilians they make it less likely rather than more that the middle orders which have without exception been the backbone of democracy everywhere will rise up against their tormenters.  The author observes (truthfully) that thirty years ago when sanctions were first pasted on Iran, it had no centrifuges; now it has thousands.  He recites (again, truthfully) that the Revolutionary Guard, far from being hollowed out, has taken over enormous swathes of the Iranian economy.

The author allows that with sanctions, the West has constructed a “narrative” under which both it and the Iranian regime may “conveniently” live.  From the regime’s side arises the author’s objections that sanctions don’t work.  From the Western side arises the objection that it’s a question of “human rights” which are being denied to the Iranian people, and the author turns his cards face-up in rhetorically asking whether everyone, no matter under how oppressive a regime, has or does not the same human rights.

As an initial matter, the reader can draw some very useful conclusions about this author’s understanding of the world in his pretty-much explicit  moral equation of the West with the Iranian theo-criminal thugocracy, which has announced as its objective of state the eradication of Israel from the map and the slaughter of every Jew it can lay hands on.  He sees no worthwhile distinction between the two sides, or at least not one he thinks sufficiently exercised to comment on.  He points out that the Iranian populace suffers under the regime, and it suffers under the sanctions.  Therefore both sources of its suffering are morally equivalent.  I’m sure there’s an expression in formal logic for this sort of fallacy, but I prefer Lincoln’s comments:  “‘Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.’ If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

Allow me to repeat a point I made a number of years ago to someone, genuinely pious, who stated, in exactly so many words, that there was “no difference” between “Christian fundamentalists” and “Muslim fundamentalists.”  Seriously; this person actually said that.  I allowed that I was not (and remain not) interested in any god who cannot discern any distinction between a group of people on the one hand who express the opinion that homosexuality is sinful and should be discouraged, or that abortion is the killing of a human being, or that the Ten Commandments should not be hustled off from every location where they might be seen by a random passer-by, and on the other hand people who will slaughter a fifteen year-old daughter (mom doing the holding down, dad doing the stabbing) because she dated someone from another faith, or will strap a remotely detonated explosive vest to a retarded child and send him into a crowded market place, or throw sulfuric acid in a woman’s face because she had the effrontery to show it in public.  I’m not interested in that god; I’m not interested in his teachings; I’m not interested in worshipping him.

On a more practical level, I’ll just observe that nothing works that is not taken seriously by the person doing it.  You’d think that dynamic would be sufficiently obvious that someone getting his doctorate would have tumbled to it by now.  But no.  And here we must ask just how seriously has the West taken its sanctions against Iran?  Well, not very, if what you’re thinking of is the € 25 billion in business that Germany has done with Iran just since 2005.  It’s currently running at € 3 billion per annum.  And Germany’s not the only sinner, not by a long shot.  The Chinese are propping them up, as are the Russians.  In fact, Germany’s not even the only Western country merrily doing business while wiping the blood off the currency they get.  Through the end of 2009, the EU had done € 65 billion of business with Iran in the preceding three years.  Top traders?  Germany, Italy, France, Holland, Spain, and Belgium.

The author of the FAZ article mentions none of the above in his denunciation of sanctions as ineffective.  Of course they’re not effective, if your own side is undercutting them.

In terms of whether the populace is so demoralized as to be incapable or unwilling of uprise, the author also (“conveniently,” to use his own expression) omits to mention the massive uprising of summer, 2009.  Millions of Iranians took to the streets, at first to protest vote fraud in elections, but then rapidly expanding their demands for fundamental changes in government.  And what did the West do to help them?  Beyond words, nothing of any substance.  It came out later that Dear Leader at the time was trying to initiate negotiations with the folks killing the protesters (much in fact as he’d announced as a candidate, to meet with them “without preconditions”).  This past fall Romney foolishly claimed Dear Leader had been “silent,” when in fact — after dithering for weeks, while the Revolutionary Guard slaughtered the protesters in the streets — he offered them . . . words.  No, what Romney should have claimed was that Dear Leader was inert.  But Dear Leader was in good company; no one in the West did a damned thing to help the people in Iran throw the bums out.

It’s those two omissions in the FAZ article which reveal it to be no more than propaganda.  In tyrannies the effectiveness of propaganda relies on deprivation of alternative sources of information; in societies which at least nominally endorse freedom of speech its effectiveness must rely on ignorance.  Fortunately for our German-Iranian omissionist, he’s got extremely fertile soil to plow in that respect.

While we’re at it let’s . . . ah . . . contrast how the West responded to civilians trying to overthrow an overtly Islamist regime (nothing more than words) with how it responded to Islamists trying to overthrow non-Islamist regimes (active military intervention in support of the terrorists, expressions of “relief” by Dear Leader, and money, always money).  The U.S. is in the process of handing over top-of-the-line F-16 combat planes to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in fact.  A man (former Sen. Hagel) is presently still in the running to be appointed Secretary of Defense, when he has a long, long track record of vehement anti-Israel statements and actions to his credit. 

Dear Leader and his ilk can’t quite seem to make up their mind on Syria, though.  The people on both sides want to slaughter Jews.  It must be so confusing for the Deep Thinkers in the West.

I don’t know whether the author of today’s FAZ article is just a conventional lefty Jew-hater, or whether he’s a paid stooge for the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Someone’s paying his tuition, after all.  Maybe he’s working down the local Tesco’s.  Maybe not.  But no matter his motivation, his article is demonstrably nonsense.

Is the title of this piece in The American Interest.  Generally I read TAI in connection with Walter Russell Meade’s blog, but the link in a side-bar caught my eye and — thanks to the wonders of the internet — hey presto! I was there.

A couple of quick thoughts:  I’d known that Angela Merkel was the daughter of a Lutheran pastor in the Soviet Occupation Zone East Germany but hadn’t understood that the new Bundespräsident is himself a former pastor, likewise from the old zone.  This might well be a coincidence.  On the other hand maybe not.  Among my favorite reads of the last several years is rather thick book titled The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century, by Peter Watson, which is an intellectual and cultural history of the area known now as Germany from 1750 to just recently.  The author (British) starts his foreward with the observation, backed up by survey data, that at least in Britain the twelve years of the Nazi era have pretty much eradicated awareness that long before the Austrian corporal emerged from the grit and slime there was German thought, philosophy, literature, science, music, industry, and innovation.  Up through 1933 Germans had won more Nobel prizes in physics and chemistry than all other nations put together.  The modern university, especially the research university, is a more or less Prussian institution.  In short, there are way more moving parts to Germany, what it was and what it is, and how it got both ways, than you can comfortably fit inside a gas oven.  Watson’s book, like Paul Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern, is a tremendous source of for-further-reading inspiration.  In any book of that scope there won’t be space enough fully to submerge oneself in the details of what might interest, but its scope will (i) plow up enough subjects that the reader will find multiple topics to explore in greater detail elsewhere, and (ii) if the endnotes are consulted, provide some good hints at where to start looking for those greater details.

In any event, one of the interesting factoids to which Watson calls attention, more than once, is the frequency with which the drivers and visionaries of Germany thought and progress all have, somewhere in their biographies, the data point that they were children of Protestant pastors.

The other interesting point made in the linked article is the difference between the ages of the principals: Benedict was born in 1927; Gauck only in 1940.  While at their respective ages one might think 13 years not too significant, its true importance becomes apparent when you consider how old each was in 1944-45, as Everything Went to Pieces in the Reich.  Joseph Ratzinger was 18 in 1945, nearly a full-grown adult, and while not possessing an adult’s full measure of adaptive capacity, at least sufficiently aware of the world to make some kind of sense of it.  Gauck, however, was among the very youngest Kriegskinder, those children who — especially in the east — were exposed to the horrors of industrialized warfare without emotional defenses of any kind.  I’ve already posted on what has been called the “forgotten generation,” and the damage those children took with them into later life.  What is the likelihood that Gauck’s approach to politics is not to some degree colored by his partially-processed, overwhelming recollections of the war’s end, and his father’s arrest and enslavement by the communists?

Is it, in other words, wholly surprising that two “old Germans” of their respective generations and backgrounds would both perceive the de-Christianization of Europe to be among the more important issues facing Western Civilization?