Wednesday, December 21, 2011

The German Fixation

Angela Merkel may be an Ossie, but she was definitely channeling American emperors on Monday, telling the German occupation garrison in Kosovo that Germans "should always remember that our security and our peace back home are down to troops serving their country here."

Pray tell, Angie, how does re-enacting the Third Reich's Balkans adventure contribute to Germany's security and peace? It is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that such an argument is nonsensical - and then there is proof, too.

Equally obvious is that Germany gets off on bludgeoning Serbia. This goes beyond realpolitik and eternal interests, too. German companies already own much of the Serbian media and the banking sector. If they wanted a client state, Serbia was theirs for the taking - Djindjic was a Germanophile, and the Tadic government literally took groveling to a whole new level. No, there is clearly more at work here than political and economic interests. It could be historical memory - blaming the Serbs for thwarting German designs in both world wars, for example - or, more likely, an attempt to exorcise Germany's own ghosts through transference: if the Serbs are genocidal aggressors, surely the world can stop going to the Nazi well for the standard of villainy, right? (Yeah, good luck with that.)

Part of the trouble is that the victorious Allies chose to impose victors' justice at the Nuremberg trials, rather than try to explain to the Germans why the Nazi ideology was evil. In effect, Germans were to consider the Nazis evil because the powers that defeated them said so - and that's been their ongoing frustration ever since. It wasn't until recently, with Oliver Hirschbiegel's Der Untergang (2004), that the Nazis were approached as three-dimensional human beings rather than cardboard cut-outs, their villainy actually shown and explained. I dare you to watch the part where Frau Goebbels murders her children and make apologies for National-Socialism afterwards. If you are somehow able to do so, then seek help.

Yet it does seem that the Germans have "learned nothing and forgotten nothing", to borrow a phrase from Talleyrand. How else to explain the fact that Berlin, no matter the party in charge, thinks nothing of overtly supporting Hitler's henchmen (see here, with photos, and also here)? Far more troubling is that the British, the French and especially the Americans not only don't object, but actively support such policy. The only ones to object are the Russians - but they are shrugged off as impotent Cold War losers. Indeed, the Soviet contribution to defeating Hitler (90% or so of the war effort in Europe) is routinely minimized, and the Eurocrats are now endeavoring to equate Nazism and Communism. Russian support for the Serbs is dismissed as irrational feelings of ethnic and religious kinship, while Western support for Serbenrein Croatia or Magna Albania is supposedly noble, pure, and the paragon of humanitarianism (!?)

Germans understandably want to avoid constantly being compared to the Nazis. Don't act like the Nazis, then. Bombing Belgrade, supporting a Serb-persecuting chauvinist regime in Croatia and the establishment of a greater Albanian state, occupying Serb territory with tanks and troops, and insisting that Serbia become a member of the "European family of nations" but only if it gives up much land and its own identity - those are all things Germany did not just back in 1941-45, but again from 1991 onwards.

Want greatness again? Remember Bismarck. He wanted friendship with Russia, thought the Balkans wasn't worth the "bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier", and (reportedly) died with "Serbia" on his last breath.

Speaking of grenadiers, I'd like to remind those German (and Austrian) troops in Kosovo that, before they act on any desires they may have to shoot those pesky Serbs refusing to roll over and die, they ought to remember their Bible:


Da sprach Jesus zu ihm; Stecke dein Schwert an seinen Ort! denn wer das Schwert nimmt, der soll durchs Schwert umkommen.(Matthaeus, 26:52, Martin Luther's translation)
And with that in mind, fröhliche Weihnachten!

2 comments:

Eugene Costa said...

Indeed, though an Ossie by nurture, born in Hamburg and both Christian and Capitalist, yes?

Indeed, wasn't her father a pastor who moved from West Germany to East bringing the little angel along?

Such a curious direction at the time, if you have have swallowed too large a dose of western propaganda, including who defeated whom in World War II.

Was she bundled up in a Turkish rug and thrown over walls and fences? Carried over the border in a papoose through dark underground passageways lit by torches?

Perhaps a possible subject for Serbian film--the sequel. Underground railway and all that, coming in from the cold, pursuing Border Guards from both sides--with vicious German shepherds, it almost goes without saying.

A mix of Brecht and Brooks perhaps with a few showstoppers a la Weill?

balkaninfo said...

This is the third attempt of Germany to destroy Serbia. In 1992 the former BND chief and German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel declared: "We must force Serbia to its knees." In 1993 he wrote in an article for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: "outwards it is essential to achieve something whereby we have failed twice before". Todays Balkans are the result of the openly revanchist and pro-nazi policy of Germany and they won't stop till nothing is left of Serbia.
As long as Serbia is controlled by NATO collaborators like Tadic things will only get worse. Becoming part of the EU dictatorship is not desirable(see for example Greece). Search for "Return of the German Army 1995" and "Neo-Nazis fought for Croatia" and "Serbia be divided up into five autonomous regions" for more information.