Merkel’s dwindling interest in foreign policy: Together, the chancellor and Westerwelle have weakened Germany’s international standing

The slump in the popularity of [Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle] and the Free Democrats is bad news for [Chancellor Angela Merkel], especially when the Christian Democratic Union is also smarting after big setbacks in recent regional elections

writes Judy Dempsey (while, in an unrelated story, Michael Kimmelman discusses the latest revelations regarding the "dark secrets" linked to Adolf Eichmann's post-war escape to Argentina.)

For Germany, Mr. Westerwelle’s weakness is compounded by Mrs. Merkel’s dwindling interest in foreign policy at a time when Europe is in desperate need of strong leadership to deal with the immense changes sweeping across the Middle East. Together, say analysts, Mrs. Merkel and Mr. Westerwelle have weakened Germany’s international standing.

In March, they snubbed their French, British and U.S. allies by abstaining in a U.N. Security Council vote authorizing a no-flight zone over Libya. “It was the wrong decision. It damaged Germany’s reputation as a reliable ally,” said Elmar Brok, a European Parliament lawmaker and leading foreign policy expert in Mrs. Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party.

“The point is that Germany did not bring anyone else along,” said Heather Grabbe, E.U. expert and director of the Open Society Institute in Brussels, which promotes democracy and human rights. “Maybe it was a justified decision but there was no strong moral argument communicated either to the domestic audience or Germany’s E.U. partners.”

…With Europe confronted with upheaval in the Middle East, a continuing war in Afghanistan and unresolved issues in the Balkans, Germany can ill afford a weak foreign minister.

“Germany has often acted as a moral conscience of Europe in foreign policy,” said Ms. Grabbe. “To play that role, Germany’s foreign minister has to take a lead and articulate the foreign policy dilemmas facing all of Europe.”

It was Mrs. Merkel who tried to do just that during her first term as Chancellor from 2005 to 2009. She repaired the rift between Berlin and Washington after former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, had opposed the U.S invasion of Iraq. With Russia and France, he established an anti-war “alliance” which in turn deeply divided NATO and the European Union

Mrs. Merkel also became a beacon for human rights campaigners in Russia, China and Iran by speaking out for the values of an independent news media and basic civil and human rights.

But since being re-elected, she has shown scant interest in foreign policy. It is the euro crisis and the future of nuclear energy that have monopolized her time, leaving little time even for fundamental issues like the war in Afghanistan or the Arab revolutions.

So Jump Already, Dammit

Van Rompuy thinks he knows what’s wrong with European innovation:

Van Rompuy said that "societal problems in Belgium and elsewhere" in the EU mean that people "live in a climate of despair and are depressed."
But in order for Europe to remain at the cutting edge of innovation in areas ranging from energy to agriculture, services and digital technologies, "we need a dynamic and positive society," based on competition "but also on generosity."

In other words, the problem with European society is that there are too darmed many Europeans involved.

"But crisis can be very depressive. Only negative messages from leaders are the wrong message coming out of the crisis. The positive outlook is key for a dynamic society," he stressed.

Maybe Mother’s little helper isn’t doing what it’s supposed to, but this sounds like license to give the ugly masses a palliative little white lie here and there.

Commemorating Mitterrand's Liberalizing of France's Broadcast Media

As France enters a seemingly never-ending commemoration of the 30th anniversary of François Mitterrand's election to the Élysée Palace (the only time during the Fifth Republic that a socialist has won an election to the French presidency — something to ponder for the 2012 elections one year from now), the Parti Socialiste creates an app of Mitterrand quotes on the iPhone; Plantu draws a cartoon of Socialist bigwigs knocking on the door of (the late) "Dieu"; and, in an interview with Le Monde's Jean-Baptiste de Montvalon, Jean-Noël Jeanneney reminisces about the subsequent liberalization of broadcast media.

As the historien spécialiste des médias points out, however, once the left started losing popularity, along with points in the polls, its leaders started rethinking the good of media liberalization.

On assiste dans l'ensemble à une libération incontestable, mais aussi à la redécouverte d'un principe ancien, connu jadis par la presse écrite : lorsqu'on se libère du pouvoir de l'Etat, on rencontre celui de l'argent...

Cette question s'est posée très vite, au sujet de la radio. Une fois affirmé le principe de l'ouverture de la modulation de fréquence aux radios locales privées, beaucoup ont pensé qu'elles pouvaient fonctionner grâce au bénévolat. On s'est aperçu que c'était illusoire, et que si l'on voulait garder des radios privées fortes, il fallait les ouvrir à la publicité. …

Les décisions prises en 1984 et 1985 sont davantage contestées...

… Les sondages deviennent mauvais et, comme souvent en pareille circonstance, le pouvoir a tendance à se crisper. Laurent Fabius se montre plus interventionniste que Pierre Mauroy. Un premier clash important se produit avec l'éviction du président d'Antenne 2, Pierre Desgraupes, dont l'indépendance irrite l'Elysée et Matignon, puis son remplacement. Il y a une vraie fronde au sein de la Haute Autorité, dont la présidente, Michèle Cotta, fait alors savoir avec courage qu'elle ne votera pas en faveur du successeur qu'impose l'exécutif, Jean-Claude Héberlé.

Dans cette même période, le pouvoir -décide de créer des chaînes privées, avec le -secret espoir — assez vain — qu'elles ne seront pas malveillantes à son encontre en cas de cohabitation. Canal+ a déjà été confiée à Havas, dirigée par André Rousselet, un ami de Mitterrand. Les cinquième et sixième chaînes sont également attribuées, de façon régalienne, à des proches du chef de l'Etat : deux pas en avant quant à l'offre de programmes, un pas en arrière du point de vue des libertés publiques.

Préfiguration d'Arte, la Sept commence à apparaître, par compensation, mais sa diffusion est alors sans commune mesure avec l'audience des nouvelles chaînes privées.

Take the François Mitterrand 1981 election quiz…

For the 25th anniversary of François Mitterrand's election five years ago, members of La Baf perturbed the Socialist Party headquarters' commemoration of the leftist icon who, it was not revealed until the end of two terms in the Élysée palace, had worked for the collaborationist Vichy government in the early 1940s…

Mitterrand-homage par Labaf

Phriday the Phirteenph Phunneez

From LIFE magazine, 16 September 1940



Given the species in the photo and its’ description, what human(s), living or dead, would you associate with it?

“The weasel is a cunning and courageous beast with such a lust for killing that he kills for the love of it, even when not hungry. He first sucks victim’s blood, then eats its brains.”

Le Monde Publishes a Full Page of Letters on Bin Laden's Death, Most of Which Are of the Typical Smug and Condescending Kind

Les principes

Tout le monde se réjouit de la mort d'Oussama Ben Laden, certains déclarent même que justice est faite. L'atrocité des crimes de ce dernier légitime-t-elle pour autant l'usage de la violence et ici de la mort pour rendre justice ? Que les plus hautes autorités américaines se réjouissent d'un tel événement est intelligible, eu égard au fait qu'elles défendent en politique intérieure la peine de mort comme une réponse pénale.

Mais nous, Français, attachés, je l'espère, à l'abolition de la peine de mort, n'avons-nous pas le droit de signaler que nous aurions préféré que Ben Laden soit traduit devant les tribunaux ? Cette simple remarque doit-elle faire de nous l'allié des terroristes ? Si tel est le procès que l'on prépare à ceux qui oseront élever la voix, nous devrons rappeler qu'il est de notre devoir d'affirmer qu'aucun crime ne peut donner à la société le droit de prendre la vie d'un homme. Si Oussama Ben Laden a été assassiné, et s'il s'agissait par ce truchement de rendre justice, alors nous devrions avoir le courage de ne point accepter les sermons des défenseurs de la realpolitik, ceux-là mêmes qui font primer la force sur le droit, alors que nous savons bien qu'il ne peut y avoir force légitime sans droit établi, un droit que nous pouvons espérer émanciper de nos instincts de vengeance pour s'approcher de nos idéaux de justice.

Romain Cujives, Toulouse

Le Monde has a full page of letters from readers (such as Emmanuel Fruchard, Patrick Haussmann, Jules Guyard, Laurent Opsomer, Charles Rossetti, Romain Cujives, Jean-Marie Parent, Christian Ruelle, Jean-Marc Schuller, Daniel Schettino, Philippe Colmet Daâge, Christian Vezon, Paule Khodabandeh, and André Salinas), many of which are smug and self-important as they express "controversy" over the killing of Osama Bin Laden while "bemoaning" the title chosen for the daily's headline ("Justice est faite" was a quote from Barack Obama's speech announcing the 911 mastermind's death).

This squares totally with reactions from elsewhere inside Europe's pity-for-Osama lobby, with its "uncomfortable" moral handwringers such as those described by David Mills (merci à Instapundit):

They would suggest that the United States acted too quickly, or without enough thought, or without proper consultation, or without thinking of the future, or just in that simple-minded, violent, cowboy way those simple-minded violent American cowboys always act when not restrained by European moral sensitivity. Or, and this image doesn’t contradict that one, in that big, bumbling, clumsy, childish way Americans always act when not restrained by European experience.

And they were going to be ever so disappointed in Barack Obama. Why, he’d been practically European himself, and now they find him almost . . . Texan.

And so it happened. You can find examples everywhere. Most of these examples I’ve taken from Brendan O’Neill’s analysis in Spiked! of the sources of these reactions, which he argues are “fuelled by self-loathing more than justice-loving” and by “a discomfort with decisive action, a fear of what such action might lead to in the future, and a belief that people in the West should douse their emotional zeal and learn to be more meek.” He’s not happy with them, as you might guess.

…The problem, let me be clear, is not their concern for law. The problem is that they turn to the law without taking pleasure in the justice they could see had been done.

For good measure, Le Monde adds a column by Percy Kemp called J'Accuse !, purporting to be the Al Qaeda leader's testimony had he been taken to trial… (Naturally, and to no one's surprise, it transpires that it is all the fault of the United States, which "created" Osama, and then discarded him…)

Esprit texan

Les cow-boys de notre enfance ont peut-être conquis l'Ouest américain en zigouillant les Indiens ; il serait étonnant qu'ils conquièrent le monde, car la force et l'astuce de services " spéciaux " ne sont pas encore ce qui convient. Dans ses Pensées, Blaise Pascal affirme : " La justice sans la force est impuissante : la force sans la justice est tyrannique. La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu'il y a toujours des méchants ; la force sans la justice est accusée. Il faut donc mettre ensemble la justice et la force ; et pour cela faire que ce qui est juste soit fort, ou que ce qui est fort soit juste " (Pensées V).

La méthode cow-boy, aussi habile soit-elle à manier le lasso, n'est guère prometteuse d'avenir, et l'on peut espérer qu'un jour ce soit l'Europe qui réunisse justice et force, ce qui est loin d'être le cas.

Charles Rossetti, Paris

Brendan O’Neill, again:

It is extraordinary, and revealing, how quickly the expression of concern about the use of American force in Pakistan became an expression of values superiority over the American people. The modern chattering classes are so utterly removed from the mass of the population, so profoundly disconnected from ‘ordinary people’ and their ‘ordinary thoughts’, that they effectively see happy Americans as a more alien and unusual thing than Osama bin Laden. Where OBL wins their empathy, American jocks receive only their bile.

There is nothing principled or properly anti-imperialist in the speedily rising critique of the killing of OBL. Indeed, many of those currently attacking Obama would have preferred it if bin Laden had ended up in one of the international courts, which themselves are political theatres for the expression of Western superiority over foreign peoples (usually black ones).

Actually, the international courts that most leftists have in mind — see the Percy Kemp column in Le Monde called J'Accuse !, which imagines Osama Bin Laden's testimony in court — is the sort of political theater that allows for the expression of Western guilt over the innate victimhood of innocent third-world people. Back to Brendan O’Neill:

… the now widespread ‘uncomfortable feeling’ with the shooting of bin Laden is really an expression of moral reluctance, even of moral cowardice, a desire to avoid taking any decisive action or expressing any firm emotion that might have some blowback consequences for us over here. It is the politics of risk aversion rather than the politics of anti-imperialism, the same degraded sentiment that fuelled the narcissistic ‘Not in my name’ response to the Iraq War in 2003.

… The post-OBL ‘uncomfortable feeling’ is really a quite craven sentiment, a fear-fuelled desire for self-preservation over anything else, which is dolled up as a principled critique of American militarism.

Osama Bin Laden to Be Met in the Afterlife by 72 Virgins

It's confirmed, then… Like all other jihadists, Osama Bin Laden has 72 virgins waiting for him in the afterlife and the late Al Qaeda boss can look forward to — wait a minute!

Is it 1939 yet?

EUtopia: opinions are now subject to criminal prosecution.

At any rate, Chancellor Merkel is now in hot water for “endorsing a crime” after she said that she was “glad” that Osama bin Laden had been killed by US forces.

A Hamburg judge has even filed a criminal complaint against her because of this “tacky and undignified” remark that only an American could love.

Because, as we all know, reason and taste can be easily categorized by nationality. Ergo, I may only drink Coca-Cola and eat Corned Beef, etc. Europeans know this, because everyone else is so stupid and predictable, and they think that they aren't, when you and I know that you could smell this kind of thing from a mile away.

Elsewhere: Germans are always right about everything.

Yesterday a German news station had a major image fail. While covering the US Navy SEALs operation to kill Osama bin Laden they mistook a Star Trek fan-made emblem for the Maquis for the actual SEAL Team Six emblem. […]

Locher even commented (translated from German) on the emblem: „And they also have the ‘Team Six,’ that carried out the mission. They don’t have the skull in their emblem for nothing.“

The West is acting out of fear, lest our conduct become grounds for fresh violence

…the President announced that he had decided not to release the dead jihadist's photo

notes Frank Gaffney, Jr.

As with the handling of bin Laden's burial, the justification given was concern that the picture's dissemination would only inspire more violence against us and our forces overseas. The truth of the matter is that the more we signal our fear of the violence of shariah-adherent Muslims, the more certain it is to be visited upon us.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday an appeals court in Denmark convicted one of Western civilization's most courageous defenders — Lars Hedegaard, president of the International Free Press Society. His crime? He gave offense to Muslims. Yes, that's right, a Danish judicial panel effectively enforced shariah blasphemy law. In the process, the court violated one of the most cardinal pillars of freedom: the right to free speech.

If allowed to stand, the ruling in the Hedegaard case will be used to abridge fundamental civil rights throughout Europe, and possibly far beyond. Yet, there has been remarkably little outcry about the defendant's plight - most especially from journalists who have as much to lose as anybody.

In this instance, as in the foregoing ones, the West is acting out of fear, lest our conduct become grounds for fresh violence. This is an enduring legacy of, among other things, the manufactured outrage and mayhem over the Danish cartoons a few years back. It gives ominous new meaning to the expression "Something is rotten in Denmark."

Unfortunately, our own judicial processes seem increasingly susceptible to Islamist intimidation, as well. …

… We need to stand up against shariah, not submit to it — at home or abroad. We must demonstrate that we are, to use bin Laden's term, the "stronger horse," by touting our victories and power, and not convey the opposite impression by obscuring or apologizing for them. And we must see the paperwork that precipitated the declination to prosecute CAIR and its Muslim Brotherhood friends — and then get on with putting them out of business.

European Obamamania: a Bad Romance

Is there really a self-desecration dividend for America? Andy Markovits, scolar and observer of European anti-Americanism doesn't seem to think so.

The massively positive reaction to the appearance of Barack Obama on the international political stage, however, seems to have run directly counter to this massive anti-Americanism. Indeed, Obamamania, as enthusiasm for Obama has been aptly termed, spread rapidly throughEurope and the world seemingly negating the previously widely extant anti-Americanism.

Thus, his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize nary one year after having been elected President and barely ten months into holding this uniquely important office, testifies to this man’s singular popularity among the world’s publics, but most notably—and importantly— West (or, actually, in this case North) Europe’s political and cultural elites who, after all, comprise the crucial decision makers that choose the recipients of this prestigious prize. Crudely put, had Barack Obama been less
beloved by Norwegian, other Scandinavian and West European elites—and had George W. Bush not been as reviled and disdained—Obama would not have won this award so early in his presidential incumbency.

Then, I noted that the more societies in Europe detested the United States, the more they "loved" Barack Obama.

This remains true, to an extent. But the global popularity of Obama's passive-aggressive view of the United States is growing increasingly less useful to him, and as was predicted, not useful to the people of the United States.

At first sight, this seems to contradict the notion of widespread anti-Americanism;
the German print media as well as pundits have been quick to predict that European anti-Americanism will soon or may already have come to an end. Our purpose in this article is to question such assumptions, rebut such statements, and present them as wishful thinking at best or—more likely—post hoc self-exculpatory statements designed to minimize a continuously extant anti-Americanism.

And the beat goes on.

Thus, for example, while in the context of the war against Iraq the engagement of the United States has been denounced as too aggressive, in the context of the long-lasting wars conducted in Lebanon, the American reaction was criticized as being to meek and timid. Once again, we have a fine manifestation of what Markovits has termed the “damned if you do, and damned if you don’t” syndrome that is so crucial to the logic of any prejudice, that of anti-Americanism included. Critics regard America as being too cowardly and self-interested by not preventing the genocide in Rwanda, and by rescuing the Bosnian Muslims and their brethren in Kosovo way too late. Yet, at the same time, often the very same critics blame America for being the actual culprit by exhibiting too much aggression even against bullies of the Slobodan Milosevic variety. One even hears criticism of America’s passive-aggressive character, meaning that in its very passivity, America exhibits a sort of arrogance that is de facto aggressive.

So has it ended, or just created new group-emotional opportunities and contrivances?

Notable in the case of anti-Americanism is, for example, the externalization of problems existing within European societies by projecting them onto the United States. Using America as a scapegoat for global troubles, Europeans obscure their own responsibilities regarding social, economic and political problems besetting the world thus being to make America the sole culprit while at the same time establishing Europe’s moral superiority vis-à-vis its American rival. Dan Diner identifies anti-Americanism as a general way of rationalizing complex and misconceived social processes defining all aspects of modern societies. “Resistive reactions to emblems of an incriminated time—modernity—convert into emblems of a denounced place—America. ”Accordingly, anti-Americanism—like all prejudices—facilitates the substitution of a clear-cut explanation for a more nuanced understanding of the intricate structure of modern societies. By so doing, it offers a mindset leaving anti-American attitudes ever more resistant to rational arguments, differentiated interpretations, and empirical facts that point into an opposite direction.

Returning to the cheap, opportunistic notion that they would tacitly compare European high-culture that few Europeans understand and partake in, to what they perceive as American low-culture that they do, Obama's presence in Europeans' view has done little that is it was assumed it would.

Turning to the data depicting Germans’ views of America’s cultural influence, the negative not only exceed the positive but also remain steady and unchanged from the pre-Obama days. Thus, 36 percent view America’s cultural influence as negative, only 16 percent as positive. As can be expected, Germans rate America’s culinary influence as particularly horrid: 52 percent regard America’s export in this realm as the absolute worst U.S. contribution to world culture. Showing yet again the abysmally low regard Germans (and other Europeans for that matter) accord American high-brow culture such as art/architecture and literature, only 3-7 percent believe that this aspect of American culture has any global influence, indicating yet again that there exists little, if any, knowledge of, let alone respect for, American culture beyond its mass aspects which, though disdained and hated by Germans, remains avidly consumed by them. This patent contradiction, even hypocrisy, has never stopped a large percentage of Germans to express negative attitudes about America and things
American without shame and any social sanctions. It has not done so prior to the election of Obama, and will not do so during his incumbency.

At best, the resentment looks like "something to think" and fill time with that will convince those "critics" that their opinion is meaningful and relevant to the world in a way that no-one else on earth can. The delusion that they may judge drives much of this.

It's actually an expression of helplessness, and a sign that precious shared-views were received as irrelevant. Like someone who only knows one song on the guitar, playing it over and over, and playing it louder isn't proof of a broad and serious repertoire.

The question now is if the public will reconsider its distaste for torture if it set us on the path, however long, to find the most wanted terrorist

If Torture Led to Bin Laden, Does America Approve?

asks Stars and Stripes' Megan McCloskey.

Republican Rep. Steve King from Iowa tweeted Monday: “Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now?”

Politically, Obama could have a difficult time claiming victory for bin Laden’s death while still separating himself from the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that got the ball rolling. Especially with Bush-era officials highlighting the importance of the intel extracted from prisoners who underwent waterboarding.

The larger question now is whether the American public will reconsider its distaste for torture if indeed it set us on the path, however long, to find America’s most wanted terrorist.

“Forward Thinking” Euro-Mega-Government, at your Service

World’s lamest idea has been found.

"Existential Star Wars" de Georges Lucas et Jean-Paul Sartre

Guerre des Étoiles Existentielles, un film de Georges Lucas
et Jean-Paul Sartre (merci au Wookie Duncan)

"Solidarity" = Politically Useful Hatred

If the word means anything anymore to Europeans, it is only as a code word for hating your neighbor.

Unemployment, precariousness, an uncertain future: Spanish youth has been hit hard by the economic crisis. And that’s why they won’t revolt, writes El País.

Heads long softened in the narrative of social class warfare of attrition there are people out there who want youth to be paid just enough to hate you for it.

And now, after more than two years of economic crisis, youth unemployment (over 40 percent) is double the European average, and half of the jobless are under 34 years of age. In addition, the welfare state they had barely begun to enjoy is now in jeopardy, and the cushion once provided by the family is growing threadbare. “The environment is not explosive,” says UNED sociologist José Felix Tezanos, “but it is flammable; a spark will be enough... The Web is where it is brewing up,” he adds.

In general, there’s a growing feeling that the cost of the economic crisis is being paid by those who had nothing to do with it, while the economic elites who did bring it on have slipped out from under the wreckage without a scratch. The prologue to the Spanish edition of Hessel’s pamphlet was written by José Luis Sampedro. Hessel, in turn, has contributed the foreword to a collection of articles entitled Reacciona (React!).

Some of them light even connect the dots, because knowing that you’re being bred, educated, and having your head fed, and ultimately taxed and punished to cover the errors of others has the stench of a mugging by reality.

And the same old retrograde types are the still the ones who don’t get it.

For Antonio Alaminos, a sociologist at the University of Alicante, some alternatives and some clear objectives are needed for this sort of protest to succeed. Or else an “irrational trigger.” The Arab protests, for example, he says, do have these clear goals (both economic and democratic improvements), and in the EU countries where these have emerged that irrational trigger was also produced. “The difficulty in mobilising Spanish youth proceeds from the expectation that nothing will come of it. Spanish youth (and many Europeans), at heart, want to go on living just like their parents — in a capitalist world of consumption. They don’t want to break up the relationship,” he says. “It is capitalism that has broken up with them.”

No, what they want is a chance to earn a living, and to keep what they earn, not give it to you to fondle, you Socialist pretexter. All the collectivism in the world isn’t enough to feed the freeloading of “community organizers” like that.

They sum up their own unaware selfishness this way:

It may be true that the youth who have taken to the streets so far have been very few in number. It may be that, somehow or other, the family, untaxed work in the shadow economy and the social safety net continue to keep discontent indoors, since basic needs are still being satisfied. And that passivity of the majority of the youth may eventually prevail over the momentum of those who do get out and demonstrate.

DAMN that social safety net! DAMN the love of family!

Really, the actual fate of the people they pretend “to be for” is irrelevant to them. What they seem to want is a unthinking dial-a-mob at their disposal.