Thoughts on the Rhine
In other words, government, economics, and social policy are critical, but themselves are driven by the minute-to-minute culture of everyday people. Germans pick up trash; in Athens, Greeks toss it. Germans do not honk; Italians do not not honk. In Libya or Egypt the pedestrian is a target; in Switzerland he is considered perhaps your father or grandmother. A bathroom in Germany is where someone else uses it after you; in Greece or Mexico, it is where you pass on the distaste of using the facility to the sucker who follows you.
I watch fender benders a lot. In northern Europe, addresses and information are exchanged; south of Milan, shouts and empty threats of mayhem follow. When I check out of a German hotel, I know the bill reflects what I bought or used; when I check out of a Greek hotel, I dread all the nonexistent charges to appear, and a “50/50 split the difference” settlement to be offered. Germans like to talk in the abstract and theoretical; with Greeks it is always “egô” in the therapeutic mode. I rent a car in Athens and expect charges for “dents” to appear; in Germany, there are such charges only if there are actual dents. Add all that up — and millions more of such discrepancies repeated millions of times over each hour — and you have one country that creates vast wealth and another that cons to land vast wealth it did not create.
Ah, you say, silly Hanson, Germanic order leads to the symmetrical barracks at Dachau, while “isôs avrio” Greece leads to live and let live. Perhaps, but if true, that paradox is yet an additional reason to work with rather than caricature and shake down Germany.
A final thought as I take in the inexplicable last seventy years along the Rhine. Where is America in all this? Ours was a noble experiment that would take the European legacy, Western civilization, and British law and implant it all in a frontier without the baggage of aristocratic hierarchy, stratified social classes, racial homogeneity, and pernicious doctrinaire ideologies. Instead, we would let the individual loose within the larger contours of the European heritage of government, law, economics, and human freedom.
It worked, and spectacularly so. Without an America there would today be no French Alsace, no German miracle (only a Hitlerian nightmare or a Soviet ghetto). In fact, over the last forty years America worked so well that our academic utopians glimpsed radical equality for all, and then — human nature being human nature, and individual difference being individual difference — did not quite achieve it, Great Society and all. The result was that in their failure they cursed the sins of man as if they were uniquely American — as racist, colonialist, imperialist, homophobic, sexist — even as they wallowed in the material prosperity that comes with free market economics, the rule of law, and political transparency.
So here we are in the age of Obama, as we talk about looking to Asia, redirecting to South America, wanting our own Arab Spring, praising the New Africa — all the while taking for granted the very European traditions that enrich us in our daily lives, which in the abstract we deprecate.
This week I am walking in German cities along the Rhine that were nearly leveled in 1945. Not long ago I visited Detroit, which was booming in 1945. The latter now looks like its own homegrown B-24s bombed it yesterday, the former as if they had been untouched in the war that Germans started. Ponder those interchanged fates, and why and how these respective American and German cities got to where they were in 1945, and then again to where they are now.
And that answer really is all ye need to know.
VDH, you say: “Where is America in all this? Ours was a noble experiment that … let the individual loose within the larger contours of the European heritage of government, law, economics, and human freedom.
It worked, and spectacularly so. Without an America there would be today no French Alsace, no German miracle …”
Without America, there would be no Israel, no industrialized and prosperous Japan, no South Korea, no China discovering selective capitalism, no tenuous Arab spring.
Without America, the world would be the Third Reich, a bleak and dreary East Germany, a global Russia ruling from sea to tarnished sea.
Without America …
Some seem to forget that the Soviets were the force that turned the 3rd Reich back. The US was a part of the process in the West and we certainly behaved in Europe in a manner that few liberators have (certainly the Russians avenged the treatment of their own people with relish) but it is false to think that WWII turned at Normandy or before that in North Africa. The War turned at Stalingrad.
“P. Ami
Some seem to forget that the Soviets were the force that turned the 3rd Reich back.”
And some forget that the Soviets were the ones who allowed the Third Reich to get started in the first place. The Soviets were quite content to make deals with Nazis, allowing those Nazis to take care of their enemies in the west before turning on the Soviets. You think Hitler wouldn’t have been glad to make a deal with the British, allowing him a free hand to deal with the Soviets? The Soviets would have deserved it.
“And some forget that the Soviets were the ones who allowed the Third Reich to get started in the first place.”
Not true. Hitler’s rise to power had very little to do with the preferences of the Soviet leadership.
“The Soviets were quite content to make deals with Nazis”
Yes, and so was every other country in Europe! See, e.g., the Munich pact or the Polish-German non-agression treaty.
“allowing those Nazis to take care of their enemies in the west before turning on the Soviets. You think Hitler wouldn’t have been glad to make a deal with the British, allowing him a free hand to deal with the Soviets?”
Whatever one might think of Stalin’s system, the suggestion that there is something inherently sinister in Soviet diplomacy attempting to deflect the German threat away from the Soviet Union, and onto third parties that happen to be hostile to the Soviet Union, is not a reasonable argument.
“The Soviets would have deserved it.”
Would the millions of murdered Jews and other victims of Nazi barbarism in the Soviet Union have deserved it? I can’t imagine how someone could seriously think that.
“Whatever one might think of Stalin’s system?” Stalin’s system was a totalitarian, oppressive human slaughterhouse. What might you have thought of it Stanley?
You both are forgetting the role in turning over millions of post war white Russians and others to Stalin. The faced execution and imprisonment. The motive of the British and the Americans was appeasement. Although Stalin provided Germany with secret war materials uncle Joe or Stalin was not a good ally to any of his wartime partners. Maybe the fact that Stalin had developed a very strong spy network thought out Canada, England, and the United States speaks to his motives very well. The fact the detection of this spy network in Canada was almost covered up by the Canadian prime minister for political reasons is most amazing. Like the occupation of Alaska by japan is not taught to most Americans. The Japanese fort is now a national park in Alaska. If you doubt try to look it up in Alaskan history.
Are you not aware that WW2 started as a joint invasion of Poland by Stalin and Hitler, or did you just forget?
This link provides some context beyond mere divisions here or there. In fact, America aid was crucial. The war was just a little more complicated than people think.
http://www.portalus.ru/modules/english_russia/rus_readme.php?subaction=showfull&id=1188913604&archive=&start_from=&ucat=9&category=9
I think David Glantz, who is one of the world’s leading specialists on the subject, wrote in one of his books that the Soviet Union would have defeated Germany without any American military participation but with American lend-lease aid. Without either, the question is whether the Soviet Union would have survived at all or whether Hitler would have attained near-total victory.
Without America sending little but crucial things like copper and trucks, the SU would’ve been unable to concentrate all it’s attention on weaponry. And without the threat of an American invasion of Europe and the bombing campaign, how many more German divisions, armor and aircraft could’ve made the difference at Stalingrad or Kursk – these were near things.
The Germans had to defend Sicily, the Italian boot, and the north and south coasts of France. Put the SU in a situation where the Japanese invaded in the East and the SU is screwed.
We do know that when the SU got word the Japanese had their eyes elsewhere, the SU felt confident enough to throw those forces from the East into the Battle for Moscow. At least that’s what I’ve read. Having to defend or not defend your back door does make a difference. So the SU tore the guts out of the German army – they didn’t have to look in 8 different directions – and who was sending Germany aid?
I should have written without the Normandy landing, not without American involvement at all. If Japan had chosen to invade Russia instead of picking a fight with the United States, then Russia would have been in deep trouble regardless of what the Americans did.
And don’t forget that the USSR’s air force was made up mostly of designs borrowed/stolen from the West.
America gave a lot of lend-lease assistance to the Soviets for which we have never been repaid. Planes, trucks, artillery and ammunition were all provided. We also provided them with engineering expertise on mass-production techniques, Detroit style, without which they would never have been able produce their vaunted T-34s. But the biggest help that the Soviets received was from Hitler himself. The first mistake was starting the invasion too late in the year, and not being able to get to Moscow before the winter started. The German soldier was unprepared to fight during cold weather. And the other mistake Hitler made was to ignore advice from his generals. A number of German armies were lost to his refusal to allow strategic withdrawal – Stalingrad, as an example. And the attack on Stalingrad was also questionable, but Hitler wanted to teach Stalin a “lesson”.
Anther mistake was that the people weren’t so inclined to defend the USSR as much as they were their homes which tended to take the Germans by surprise. I was in the Pacific in 1945. Russia had botn cold and area working in its favor,
“Some seem to forget” that the Soviets were killers, rapists and thieves. They liberated no one. They avenged nothing. They turned all of eastern Europe into a vast, dysfunctional prison camp.
“Whatever one might think of Stalin’s system,” indeed.
And many Americans – as stated by other commenters – spent their lives ready to defend the world from these barbaric Russian sociopaths.
Funny we were just talking about this in the faculty lounge this morning. A rather liberal colleauge, who had just watched “Letters from Iwo Jima” was talking about how the Japanese did not surrender because “we did not take prisoners.” After setting him straight (especially relating my Filipino Father in Law’s lovely tales of Japanese occupation) we began talking about the Eastern Front, and how Stalin turned loose his version of the Mongol hordes on German civilians. Those descendants of Ghengis Khan murdered and raped in numbers that would have done their ancestors proud. Civilized? They had never seen flush toilets before and they thought they were potato washers, they were barely human let alone civilized. My uncle fought from Normandy to the Bulge and he reported that, at the end of the war, German units were deserting the Eastern Front, en masse, marching west, sometimes as large as regimental groups, still in uniform, flags flying, bands playing, rifles sloped, in order to surrender to the Western powers rather than face Stalin’s wrath.
And if you believe that a defeat by the Soviet of the Reich – without America – would have resulted in anything other than a weeping wound of communist hegemony, filled with a humanity suffering what would have made the Russian people’s suffering under the Soviets seem to be a genuine paradise, then you are sorely mistaken. Without regard to which nation contributed the most to the defeat of the Nazi horror, had the USSR defeated the Reich without America being actively engaged in the war – and ready, if necessary, to take on the USSR after the defeat of Germany – the USSR would have instituted a reign of murder, torture and cruelty unmatched in human history. Nazi or Communist, the raw and unmitigated death zones created by those nearly identical ideologies would have blighted human history for a very long time.
Precisely, Ike. And hence my observation: “a global Russia ruling from sea to tarnished sea.”
The “Great Patriotic War” was nothing but a falling-out between two cheap thieves, Hitler and Stalin. Yes, the Russian people suffered enormously and struggled heroically, but it was all in service of a conflict their own leadership brought directly upon their heads, from the Soviet’s covert training of German armor and aviation leaders between the wars to their conspiracy to divide Poland.
Not so. The U.S. fought the Germans and the Japanese simultaneously. If Japan did not have to engage the Americans they would have attacked the Soviet Union through Siberia. The Russians barely survived the German onslaught in l941. With Japan also attacking them from the east they surely would have gone under. There would have been no Stalingrad because the Soviets would already have been defeated in l942.
No French Alsace Lorraine – true, as the German miracle got underway around the time of the US civil-war.(Sherman&Grant taught them modern warfare.)
Then came “the guns of august”, GB financed by J.P.Morgan(US Federal Reserve, equipped by the military industrial complex 1.0. With GB&France in power over Palestine,Deutsche Reichsbank&The Rühr Valley – the future Israelis was stuck in Germany. The new power Japan,was offered the German possesions in the Pacific area by GB provided they conqered them by themselves..
Jumping to 1947, George.C.Marshall forbade Chang Kai Chek To be rough to the commies, making Mao able to meet Truman in “the meat grinder” called Korea.
The US has a bigger footprint than most people know.
Uh oh, here comes the mention of the Illuminati and the Bilderbergers………
“Praise, rather than damnation, for Germany; requests for German advice coupled with thanks for bailouts and promises of reform.”
Even were this initial impossibility to come to pass, we’ve all had those friends and relatives. The promises of reform and recompense are made tearfully and in all sincerity; there is an impressive start on turning over that new leaf. Then it all slowly goes sour.
Honestly, simply reaching an actual, rather than an hysteric, crisis and a crash, with the long, sullen silence following it, will do Europe a great deal of good, and serve as a lesson to the rest of us.
Of course, I’m feeling just a little cynical and jaundiced, these days.
I am a little confused by anyone thinking Greek culture leads to live and let live. Even a mild familiarity with the history of the 20th Century in Greece could not think this. The disaster of the exchange of populations was precipitated by the Greek invasion of Turkey after WWI. Millions were uprooted. Thousands died. After WWII the war with the Communists was horrible. On might reflect on the fact that most Greeks sent their children elsewhere during the 20th Century. And to this day you can see the hammer and sickle presented seriously. Anyway, anyone who thinks that Greece is about live and let live does not know anything about Greece.
Dr. Hanson wrote:
“Ah, you say, silly Hanson, Germanic order leads to the symmetrical barracks at Dachau, while “isôs avrio” Greece leads to live and let live. Perhaps, but if true, that paradox is yet an additional reason to work with rather than caricature and shake down Germany.”
I’m confused too Rick. Who are you implying knows nothing about Greece? If Hanson is your target, you are on shaky ground.
But the Greeks were pressed by the Brits to join the Allies and to attack Bulgaria and Turkey, who were Germany’s allies, they were offered dreams that the Brits didn’t fulfilled later, while changing their mind for their priorities
http://perrya.hubpages.com/hub/How-England-and-France-Forced-Greece-to-enter-WW1
Germans do not honk; Italians do not not honk.
Meine deutsche Frau hat gesagt, dass du musst Deutschland mehr bereisen.
Your point may have relative merit, but just doesn’t hold absolutely true. Honking, she notes anecdotally, increases the further south you go.
Schöne Grüße an Ihre Frau. Ich habe zwo Jahre in die Nähe vom Kehl gewohnt; meine Freunde hat alles g’sacht, war die Franzosen ….
That explains my experience of quick-to-lay-on-the-horn Germans; but I didn’t realize Cologne was in the far south of Germany.
“Culture is everything. That is a politically incorrect thought that can get you in trouble as much as we suspect it is true.”
Basically, “politically incorrect thought” is just a modern euphemism for what we used to call “truth.”
The notion that culture is everything is either a careless remark from VDH, or a bow to Max Weber’s huge influence on postwar American sociology and social relations. I wonder if he meant to align himself with this antidemocratic faction that ruled the Democratic Party (!). But the culturalist turn is dominant in the teaching of both history and political science today. I explained it here: http://clarespark.com/2010/01/02/jottings-on-the-culture-wars-both-sides-are-wrong/. It will surprise some PJM readers.
Yes, the patterns of history do tend to repeat themselves. But once in a while a group, a nation, a society comes along which through an act of will, breaks the pattern. In so doing they prove to mankind that we are not automatons, or animals, or slaves to genetic directives… that we are not always driven by Thucydide’s imperatives of fear, greed, pride or envy; or the baser needs of the flesh. Instead they prove that through force of will and the belief in transcendent truths, man can create a better tomorrow. Not through social engineering and bureaucracy but by placing responsibility for it directly on their own shoulders and confronting an uncertain future with both humility and confidence. Thus, in the end, do these few prove that mankind truly is free.
Germany will eventually save Europe. But it will be ugly.
The alternative, of course, is worse. Much worse.
Americans have the rare priviledge of seeing our own future play out 5 to 10 years in advance.
But it won’t matter. Our obamunists are just as greedy and stupid as the Greeks, and our dedicated little pickpockets are three times as arrogant. And of course, the obamusist’s con game, racism, is the equivalent of the Greeks scam, the never-ending Nazi menace. No matter what the Germans do, they can’t escape the damnation. Because the damners don’t want them to escape; just like obama and his fellow stinking scammers will never relinquish their racism club. It’s their meal ticket after all, and a good one it has been.
Indeed.
“(O)ver the last forty years America worked so well that our academic utopians glimpsed radical equality for all, and then — human nature being human nature, and individual difference being individual difference — did not quite achieve it, Great Society and all.”
Those Utopians glimpsed Paradise, by seeing America as a place to apply all the measures that had already repeatedly failed in Europe. The Great Society being just one example.
Of course, their definition of Paradise looks a lot like the old Soviet Union, with a few overtones of Athens before they started- and then lost- the Peloponnesian War. A “democracy” in name only, run by would-be philosopher-kings.
The problem really isn’t the “nature” of most people. Rather, it’s the “nurture” of those who believe they are on a higher moral plane than the hoi polloi- and thus should dictate the way the Great Unwashed live.
Societies need leaders, true; the alternative is anarchy, which in spite of the protestations of modern libertarians is not a good place to live. But when leadership is decided on any basis but actual proven ability, there is a high probability that the leader will be a maniac, a fanatic, an incompetent, a gibbering idiot, or two or more of the above in combination.
All of the above tend to have exaggerated opinions of their own brilliance, and the ambition to go with it. Ego is not a good benchmark to judge a person’s leadership potential, overall. (All too often, it’s actually the unchained id doing the talking.)
The main problem with any society is how it chooses leaders. We have been fortunate up to now in that our system is more or less self-correcting, as long as the rules are obeyed. Idiots and the fanatical either do not reach the upper echelons because their aberrance is recognized and they are not supported (several Congresscritters come to mind- on all sides), or if they do manage to seize the brass ring, it is taken away from them in the next election.
But that only works as long as they obey the rules. The trouble is, would-be philosopher-kings believe that they are too big and important for rules. Most of the misery suffered by humanity in history has resulted from this conceit on the part of a self-anointed Messiah.
There are a lot of them running around loose today.
cheers
eon
“But when leadership is decided on any basis but actual proven ability, there is a high probability that the leader will be a maniac, a fanatic, an incompetent, a gibbering idiot, or two or more of the above in combination.”
I think you could argue that Obama is all four wrapped up into one! Of course, in this case a perfect score equals a perfect disaster….
Never forget that following WW2 the Marshall Plan enabled former German soldiers to retire at age 50, paid for by the very people they were fighting earlier. My Dad stayed angry at that for decades. He worked his ass off to pay for the German soldiers that tried to kill them as he freed them from Hitler. See how EVIL America is? The Germans are just as guilty as are the Greeks of laziness. The Germans still take many, many weeks more vacation a year than do Americans. We just have a higher percentage of domestic scumbag welfare addicts than the Germans to suck up our money.
The Marshall Plan was set up primarily to help Britain establish its welfare state under Truman’s friends in the Labour Party, e.g. Attlee. As such, it really didn’t work, but then again: did it? As a result, the British Empire went down the drain. The paltry amount of dollars allotted to Germany was more than cancelled out by the American demand that Germans compensate the newly Jewish Palestine (Israel) for war expenses. Germans have paid out 100-fold to the Israelis for the small sums that Adenauer’s government received. The remarkable thing about the Marshall Plan as a slush-fund is that it was quite successful in buying the complicity of dubious regimes around the globe, enlisted in the cause of American imperialism.
really?
some say tha Germany had a priviledged Market, the US, where to sell their new reborn Industry products
You seem to have forgotten the little detail about how America has paid for the defense of Germany and all of Western Europe for 70 years. How much richer would America be and how much poorer would Germany and all of Europe be if they had to bear the cost. There is also the thousands of young American men who essentially spent unproductive years stationed in Europe when they could have been engaging in commerce here in the U.S. This amounts to trillions of dollars, and dwarfs the Marshall plan and all other aid. The Germans, Japanese and others benefitted enormously from the U.S. shouldering the defense bill for the free world.
Throw in South America. They don’t have to have any military that would fend off outsiders. Japan proved a few aircraft carriers and divisions can take over the gov’t of a country thousands of miles removed.
The financial savings that the U.S. military umbrella provides pays for Germany’s state-funded health care system.
You’re perfectly right. The Marshall Plan was an incredible act of eminently Christian generosity. I am not enough of a history scholar to presume to say that no other victorious nation in history has ever done such a thing for its former enemies, but I think that may be the case. I don’t know what it did for other countries but for my country, Italy, it made it possible for us to not only get back on our feet, but to expand the economy to the point where we became one of the world’s most modern and well-to-do nations. In the eighties we even surpassed Britain to become No.4 according to GDP.
This has a lesson in it for today, when we have entered a recession because of the credit crunch: the lack of liquidity ordained by the Brussels Bureaucrats.
Wealth is not the colorful paper bills we call money. Prosperity is the fruit of work. But if you can not trade the fruits of your labor for the needed fruits of other people’s labor out of lack of a means of exchange to fraction the respective values, then the economy grinds to a halt.
The Marshall Plan made it possible for Italians to prosper and it is one of the many deplorable effect of aggressive Marxist propaganda that people everywhere have been persuaded that America did it solely for its own selfish purposes.
In this as in many other cases we should be careful not to bundle everybody up under universal categories. “America” is a lot of things, and it should be understood to stand for its founding principles, not for everything that goes wrong in the world.
Italy prospers and maybe “America did it solely for its own selfish purposes.”
So what? I think that’s called “win-win”.
So too, one needs to also look at the treatment of Japan, post-war. I am not, by any means much of a fan of NacArthur, but his enlightened administration and transition of a defeated Japan into the early post-war era and its re-industrialization period is, likewise, unprecedented.
Weo, oh please, the Germans earned a lot within selling their merchandises to Greece
The Germans haven’t earned anything until they are paid for it.
of course we can se that on their balance sheets
As a frequent traveler to Greece for many years I quickly learned that anything in or of Greece was fifth rate at best. Its people are beyond a doubt the most consistently dishonest denizens of the entire continet of Europe. Cheating travelers, , and their own countrymen is a way of life in Greece that premeates all levels of society.
In fact everything in Greece other than the ancient monuments ruins reflect nothing much beside things shoody, shabby, & slovenly.
The influx of EU(read that Germanic) development money for infrastructure in the last thirty years merely exacerbated the rot & inferiority that is & has been Greece since Alexander conquered the peninsula 23 centuies ago.
In Greece, like in any ME country, or Maghreb countries, you have to discuss the prices first, and when you’ve agreed, it’s OK
Greece is just another one of Fukuyama’s “low trust” societies that lie along Carroll Quigley’s Pakistani-Peruvian axis. Fukuyama, who is only occasionally right, nailed this perfectly.
Dr Hanson’s thoughts here are an opportunity to call attention to a very great absurdity of our American immediate months….this horrifically and ignorantly mis-named “Occupy” movement springing up here and there upon the vaguest of adolescent impulses.
Think of what that word “Occupy” has meant to Europe in the 20th Century…..then question if these current melon-headed agitators can take time away from their agitprop cell phones to seek perspective…….maybe explain just who the living souls were who “occupied” the gas chambers of Europe.
It’s safe to say that those slack-jawed litterers won’t have the slightest clue in such a word-association exercise.
It’s worth noting that until the mountain of debt which caused this crisis has been removed from the economic system ( it was calculated at something like 3 times the worlds GDP ), the world simply will not recover.
People have tried writing it off and letting the banks collapse (Iceland – result = they are doing well again) , transferring the private banking debt to the government ( US, UK, Eurozone – result = they are doing quite badly , and may possibly collapse ).
In the end they will have to either write off the debt ( China won’t be happy ), inflate the debt away by printing money ( China won’t be happy and inflation will go through the roof ). In the end I think it will be a case of printing money, but there’s no easy way out. You can’t cut your way out, because in an economy my expenditure is your income, so if I cut back, I cut you back – which is why Europe’s economies are shrinking. You could argue that the government crowds out private sector – but that only applies at full employment, not in a recession.
So basically, I would expect things to get a heck of a lot worse befor they get better – if they ever do.
“In fact everything in Greece other than the ancient monuments ruins reflect nothing much beside things shoody, shabby, & slovenly.”
I take it you haven’t been to Mykonos. It may be that German tourists spent the money but I suspect that Greeks have lavished their income on it. German tourists are hated in Venice because they spend no money. They come in huge buses that include beds and meals.
The one place in Europe and environs that I have been cheated on a rental car is Britain. They are expensive in France and Italy but not dishonest, in my experience. Always inspect the car before taking it in Britain.
I spent ten days in Greece on business in 1984, escorted about by a local.
Wasn’t impressed, except to sip coffee under Mars Hill while looking up at the Acropolis, and realize that the Apostle Paul argued there 2,000 years earlier.
Paul’s words are all but forgotten in Greece, but sank deep into the United States. We are the richer for it, Greece the poorer.
History repeats itself.
In this great unwinding of the current world order, everything will change, while somewhat paradoxically many things revert to their historical norms.
I suspect war will once again envelope Europe in the next 1-2 decades. The Russians will play their cards in their usual xenophobic, neurotic, poorly planned aggressions; Germany will go nuclear and seek out new alliances and arrangements to protect itself on all sides; France will experience chaos and violent unrest; Spain and Italy may actually fracture into smaller states; and the British will lower their heads into their hands in exasperation and despair.
We will also see China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Phillipines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Australia trying to shape security alliances with and against each other, with Russia, India and the USA on the periphery trying to figure out what to do, what will ensure their safety, and/or what will give them advantage. To call the APAC theatre a source of tension in the next 2 decades will be a painfully profound understatement.
And perhaps the most suddenly explosive situation will arise from the Dar Al Islam, as the oil finally runs out and vast, youthful populations confront the threat of an end of their states and societies. Either they’ll massacre each other in Sunni vs Shiite conflicts, or they will turn their desperate fury on everyone else in the world.
We’re entering a truly dark era, something like Greece after the end of the Persian Wars – a condition of chaos, constant strife, increasing impoverishment, and no end in sight.
Toynbee said that a new, invigorated society always arises from the ashes of the old. But who knows when that will be?
Erik Maria Remarque said that the first world war shattered the old German society and left it frail and tattered, and the second world war completely annihilated the remaining traces so thoroughly that he felt like an alien in his home country. It distressed him so much that he had to leave, never to return.
I suspect we will all experience something similar over the next 20 years. Believe me, I don’t wish it; but it’s almost a certainty that the coming maelstrom will touch everyone.
A Romney victory will unleash the private sector once again, with a vengance! Jobs will return, the economy will begin to grow again, the dollar will stabilize and we will start to drill again… But the world will look starkly different.
Europe is on the edge of the Abyss, the Middle-East is in turmoil, with radical Islam ascending, Russia and China are maneuvering… Our space program is non-existent, our military is being subverted and de-funded and we are tying ourselves into knots with treaties and commitments which serve only to weaken us while strengthening our enemies. The Globalist left has done its job well.
Three things need to happen right out of the gate:
1) A domestic, “De-Demification” program in which the ringleaders are rounded up, exposed and where appropriate, prosecuted. Yes the union thugs, the race baiters, the useful idiots of OWS will rise up, call us Nazi’s blah blah blah. Just ignore. Things could get ugly so be prepared to give as good as you get and don’t let up until they crawl back into their rat holes.
2) Abandon and defund the UN immediately. To hell with the “international community”. Abandon NATO as well. Form a new, lean and mean military alliance under US leadership, of committed capitalist democracies who are prepared to pay a stipulated percentage of their GDP toward maintaining a well trained and equipped military. Beef up our nuclear arsenal, deploy our missile defenses and space-based systems, expand our conventional forces as well as our special forces. Honor our military heroes.
3) Declare ourselves the moral enemies of militant Islam, as actively opposed to the spread of Shariah law as we were to the spread of Communism in the Cold War.
We are not going to let the world implode. The result would be the most horrific war in the history of man. It would make WWII seem like a cakewalk. We are far, far stronger than even we realize. And soon we will prove it.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Albert Einstein
The history of man is the history of war.
As long as we have larger sticks and stones, and the will to use them, we will prevail.
“Germany will go nuclear and seek out new alliances and arrangements to protect itself on all sides; France will experience chaos and violent unrest; Spain and Italy may actually fracture into smaller states; and the British will lower their heads into their hands in exasperation and despair.”
Germany will go to Moscow, Angela’s home
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tuKovsHu5Q&feature=share
ummm sorry, but since France existed, we crossed many chaoitic times, and we still are here to empech the merry go round to work their way, of the Brits, of the Americans, of the Germans…
Spain will remain the Spain we know for centuries, Italy with lira will remain identic, the northern Italians will need the south to sell their goods
But I’d rather see the Brits fracturing, Scotland wants its independance, and as the US are as Broke as the Brits, so it will not get any better for them
If Greece falls, France will be bankrupted due to the massive exposure of its banking sector to Greece. It has high levels of debt and has had low growth for years. It is in a far worse situation compared to either the US or Britain, both of whom have been wisely unwinding any exposure to all euro-debt for years. That is why France was downgraded from its AAA status. If Greece collapses, the Euro will fall apart, and there will be nobody coming to bail out the French, because everyone will have their own problems – if not as bad. Even worse, France is a net importer, and doesn’t even make it’s own staple goods. The UK is a net exporter, and both the US and UK have their own stocks of fossil fuels. France and Germany depend on Mr Putin for their energy. France can’t even reprocess it’s own nuclear fuel – but lets face it, if Greece collapses, France won’t have enough money to service her Nuclear power stations.
If you want to have some idea of what life will be like in France following the euro collapse, I suggest you watch Mad Max for an accurate illustration.
So good luck with that.
One of our problems today is that we deny the value of our European/British Legacy. No other tradition has shown the same vigour and attractiveness in alien settings as the European/British tradition. As a world shaper it has no competitors.
Unfortunately the wide diffusion of that tradition around the world has become incomplete and selective. Now the very success of modernization that was born from the European/British tradition has given rise to misguided Utopian goals that are materially and psychologically unobtainable.
On top of these misguided ideas, two truths of history confuse things. One is that things change much more and much more quickly than we think. The other is that the past hangs around much longer and is more difficult to keep peacefully buried than we think. For these reasons we will probably always find what actually happens to be surprising.
And thus I have striven to live in Germany for 14 of the last 24 years. Culture counts. I love to visit Greece and Italy and will spend a couple weeks in Spain this summer but wouldn’t want to live in any of these countries.
VDH gives an eloquent definition of our American EXCEPTIONALISM. Its spirit is still alive, and is the force behind the Tea Party movement so despised by the Socialist Democrats. It is the essence of our culture of , our “everyday people”. What we must do in this election is defeat the regressive deconstructionist organization that has conned itself into the White House, attempting to hold us to the course that Greece pursued.
Romney and the conservative writers and punditry, including many on PJM, hold that the strategy should be a
reasoned, positive “sticking to the issues”, a lofty refusal to be critical, to avoid following the Alinsky rules. I believe that is repeating the misbegotten course ofJohn McCain. This will be a cultural, “gut-feeling” election and the key appeal should be to pride in the Exceptionalism that is our heritage, with direct reproach of those who would destroy it under the Red Star banner of “social justice.”
Nobody has expressed better than VDH the dangers of the mindset of those who despise their benefactors, accusing them of greed and selfishness in gaining the means to become benevolent. The OWSies are the voice of Euro-socialist achievement.
I don’t get a McCain vibe from Romney at all.
Unlike McCain, his staff is competent, quick-thinking and fast-moving.
Ask the wrecked Hilary Rosen about her brush with the Romney response team.
And as Romney has stated, Obama now has a record to defend and a failed economy to explain.
^^This^^. I’m not a big Romney fan, but when I put on my impartial observer hat, I have to admire his campaign team. Like good chess players, they have been 2-3 moves ahead of Obama. Every time he attacks with misinformation, they already have a video cued up to rebut.
How real is the risk of disintegration? The lessons of the Soviet collapse
“The Soviet collapse is the most powerful demonstration that the disintegration of the EU need not be the result of a victory of anti-EU forces over pro-EU forces. More likely, it will be the unintended consequence of the growing dysfunction of the system and the elites’ misreading of the political dynamics in their own societies.”
http://www.diplomaatia.ee/index.php?id=242&L=1&tx_ttnewstt_news=1426&tx_ttnewsbackPid=606&cHash=540e9b202a
VDH is right: the European pygmies are playing with a particularly dangerous fire in turning their anger and astonishment at discovering their social, political and cultural models lead to bankruptcy, onto the Germans.
German Kriegsschuld, so strong when the vanquished and their children who lived through the war, the Wirtschaftswunder and the cold war were still leading Germany politically and culturally, is fast fading.
My strong sense is that a Europe which accepted and appreciated the Germans for their success and work ethic and moved towards it could keep the Germans within the fold pulling just a bit harder than the others. The Europe that expects the Germans to pay and pay, to work and save so that others don’t have to give up the good life will not.
Once the Germans conclude they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, I expect they will no longer be willing to play. Perhaps we will see something of a new currency area consisting of much of the territory of the old Holy Roman Empire — Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Northern Italy, perhaps with the Netherlands and Bohemia and the (who’d a thunk!) the Poles, with trade ties to the Scandinavians like a modern Hansa.
Deutschland Erwache!
don’t make me laugh, Germans have no better ethics than anyone, they are those that bribed the southern club elites to get the markets, and are bad losers if France or Italy could get some, they then will likely blackmail and launch rumors cabals
Having lived and taught in Germany many years ago I was always impressed by the German civility and order, especially in their big cities. I expected trash and litter lying in the streets but found them spotless. I was amazed at the utility and cleanliness of the public restrooms. I was very impressed by the public transportation, for the price of thirty or forty marks which was a lot less in those days I could travel from one large city to another. The Germans seemed harsh and rigid at first but as I got to live there and since I speak the language and was able to hone my German I began to appreciate the German character. In my experience the Germans do not have a plethora of friends but the friends that they do have experience a long lasting loyalty. I sill am in contact with many of my German friends, Americans by contrast like to have hundreds of friends by none of them are dependable or loyal. I regret that I did not stay in German which I could have done; I was working for the German kultusministerium (department of education in Nordrhein Westphalia). Presently I live in Pennsylvania in the middle of a Amish farm community where German still survives as the language of prayer and devotion. The Amish possess all the German qualities of hard work, loyalty, thrift and dedication to their families. Amish communities are well run and they do not possess many welfare takers, they reside in nearby cities. The federal government of the new American state constantly harasses hard working Amish farmers with endless regulations; recently a fed swat team struck at dawn at an Amish farm and arrested the farmer for the high crime of selling non pasteurized milk to people who wanted to buy non pasteurized milk. The German character is not the way it has been portrayed in the Hollecywood myth land; I learned that by experience. Of course, nothing in Hollywood land resembles any form of reality at all. After WWII the Germans had to find a political leader untouched by nazism, they found Konrad Adenauer, an old member of the Catholic Center party which had been outlawed by Hitler. Adenauer took the job of rebuilding Germany to an amazing height; a destroyed economy was rebuilt, destroyed cities were also restored. No one in Obama’s America is capable of such a feat; neo Americans are excellent consumers and very poor producers. If the Eu collapses Germany will take its place as one of the leading economies of the world while America damaged by Obamism will continue its slide into the dustbin of history.
” After WWII the Germans had to find a political leader untouched by nazism, they found Konrad Adenauer”
you’re naive, he is among the thousand Germans that were released from the denazification program by the Americans to create the CDU party, when they feared that the elections would have been won by the lefty parties
Thank God. If your statement is accurate, it probably saved The Germans the humiliation that the rest of the freeloading leftists in Europe are experiencing. Come to think of it, the PIGS probably aren’t humiliated at all. They appear to have no shame.
Marie Claire, have you firmly ensconced yourself as “the loyal opposition” here? A lot of people have chimed in with interesting, thoughtful posts, and for some reason you only see gloom when there is hope. The tactic of ad hominem when used against both individuals as well as states is one of the oldest and most transparent rhetorical tricks in the book.
Do you believe that only by pulling down the Germans can Europe “save itself?”
David,
have you firmly ensconced yourself as “the loyal opposition” here? A lot of people have chimed in with interesting, thoughtful posts, and for some reason you only see gloom when there is hope. The tactic of ad hominem when used against both individuals as well as states is one of the oldest and most transparent rhetorical tricks in the book.
which book?
thoughtful posts, yeah, from afar, and gloom was /is ever for us !
I know that between the two world wars the Brits and the Americans were the Germans best friends too, and today again, is it because of the Anglo-Saxons tribal empathy, and the remnent dislike of the French, ah these papists !
“Do you believe that only by pulling down the Germans can Europe “save itself?”
don’t worry, they do their lot for pulling down the latin club !
The majority of European immigrants in early Texas were German and Czech, the influence is still apparent today. I hope the Germans stick to their guns, figuratively speaking of course.
The Obama disaster has been a wake up call for the majority of Americanc. It has exposed the massive bipartisan corruption of DC and the false narrative of our Marxist hustlers. Etc… As we move into the hard times of defaults and debased money we won’t be looking to the socialists for a rescue. So, thanks, Obana, goodbye and good riddance.
To help understand why Texians do not particulaly like BHO, a concise and accurate read, The Blood of Heroes by James Donovan.
The “southern Mediterranean con” is only one side of a tarnished coin. A couple of snippets from the other side may put teutonic befuddlement in context:
– Germany agreed to creation of the euro with great reluctance, as a quid pro quo: Mitterrand made it a condition of France’s support for German reunification. Germany well knew the risks at time; as events evolved, officials at the Bundesbank (and many others) were proved correct.
– The initial conversion rate for the D-mark:euro undervalued the D-mark, to the immense, immediate and lasting benefit of all German exporters. Of the original signatories to the euro deal, it is said that the Germans knew exactly what they were doing; the Italians figured it out and also figured it was none of their business (arguable, but probably wrong); and the French, majestically engaged in the Grand Game as usual, completely missed it. AFAIK, the johnny-come-lately countries — Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and the rest — weren’t involved in any way.
– The vaunted German export model is more a sign of vulnerability than of strength: the numbers vary some, but 70% to 75% of ‘exports’ are within the EU free-trade zone. This is rather like claiming that a coffee pot made in Milwaukee and sold by a Texas Costco is an ‘export’.
– Much of German manufacturing is vulnerable to emerging market pressures in ways that ours is not. Our manufacturing industries are the most productive in the world; the trend is accelerating. The newest and most exciting technologies — from fracking to 3-D printing — are all American. And our economy, despite the corrosion of the public sector, is far better balanced and less vulnerable to crippling shocks (yes, surprise).
Culture is everything? Well, reality matters a whole lot, too. The smartest Germans are very worried.
The MSM, as usual, looks away writes a different script.
“and the French, majestically engaged in the Grand Game as usual, completely missed it. AFAIK, the johnny-come-lately countries — Greece, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and the rest — weren’t involved in any way.”
oh those remnent naughty French, when will you forget your anglo-saxons clichés?
Germany was full in the euro project, while the German population and also the French’s weren’t aware of its development. Delors was working under the Bundesbank scrutiny to elaborate the euro, and this, before that the Berlin wall was fallen down.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_and_Monetary_Union_of_the_European_Union
Der Spiegel has a new documents about how Kohl made it
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/euro-struggles-can-be-traced-to-origins-of-common-currency-a-831842.html
How ironic this all is, given that the whole point of the EU, as well as a major function of NATO, was to LIMIT German hegemony in Europe.
It’s true – irony on the political Left is fairly rich hunting ground. Generally speaking, what they say with their mouths is not the thing they do with their feet.
The black Left praises Africa and denigrates America but the last thing on Earth the black Left will do is leave the culture they so despise.
The Left defends Islam from American “islamophobia” but the last thing a liberal woman would do is place themselves at the mercy of an Islamic social system.
The Third World is fully equal, so equal some liberals are offended by the very name, and yet the Third World cannot duplicate what Americans can even with a template Americans had no access to. No liberal in their right mind would go to the Third World to start a family in a “real” country.
Liberals believe white privilege is a thing that actually exists but cannot use it to explain Cortes, the East India Company, the moon, Einstein or the invention of time keeping at sea.
Liberals believe American exceptionalism is a crock but cannot explain away why American culture from forensics, to airline protocols to medicine to literature to music are the global benchmark against which so much is measured.
Liberals decry racism on the Right but cannot point to a single mainstream and institutionalized manifestation of it while one could easily list 500 such entities on the Left, from Miss Black America to the Assoc. of Black Journalists to La Raza to the Congressional Black Caucus. So, in order to compensate, liberals maintain the Right talks in dog-whistles and code.
Liberals defend black culture as being picked on but in reality would never live in a black neighborhood. Even black folks who can afford it will not live in a black neighborhood.
In short, liberals have an academic view of reality that in no way matches up to reality itself or how they conduct themselves within that reality other than lip service. Being given a choice between being delusonal, a hypocrite or straight out liar isn’t much of a philosophy to hang one’s hat on, but it’s plenty with which to wreck a country, and that is far advanced.
Well said. It is quite puzzling that liberals hate white america but think black-everything is beautiful. I think we have to be more honest if this is every going to be fixed. For one thing slavery is an african institution that was most unfortunately imported to the new world. It took hundreds of thousands of white american’s life’s (and many blacks of course) to rightfully end it in the US but still goes on in africa.
I have no idea how to fix this but denying the reality will not help.
Crime and poverty are not universal in the US is it very localized. And the new definition of American poverty is quite astonishing compared to the norm in the third world.
No, slavery is not an african institution; just about every society on earth engaged in slavery; the Greeks, Romans, Indians (of the Americas and of Asia), the Chinese, the Europeans, the Arabs, the Africans, etc. etc. Not surprisingly, slavery was widespread in the Arab lands well into the 20th century and still exists in some forms there today.
In fact, slavery is probably the oldest and most wide spread human institution, going back thousands of years and having been generally abolished only within the last 100 – 150 years or so. Or to put it another way, a slave-free world is a very very recent condition in human history.
Note that the english word for slavery is derived from Slav, as in the Slavic nations. Slavs were amongst the first slaves of Europe.
Slavery in the USA was sort of unique in that it had a racial component. Historically, conquerors made slaves of those they conquered, irrespective of ethnicity, skin color or anything else. In the USA, africans were used as slaves because they could tolerate the very hot climate of the south, whereas others (e.g., american indians) were found unsuitable for this work.
The importation of africans (mostly all from W. Africa) into the western hemisphere was aided and abetted by african tribes who supplied other africans (i.e., their enemies) to the Europeans in exchange for goods.
It was the British Navy (late 1800s) and later on the US Navy that worked to intercept slave ships bound for S.America, and free their human cargo. I believe (I may be wrong here) that Brazil was the last nation in the W.Hemisphere that outlawed slavery in the late 1800s.
Very nicely detailed.
But, try reminding the Congressional Black Caucus of those inconvenient truths. The White ethnic survivors of their own long historic slavery (cf: Egypt) somehow managed to avoid that permanent “entitlement mentality” as they emmigrated, mostly voluntarily from famines and disease and often-conquered lands to the New World….and once here established their financial independence without government intervention….that work ethic seeking independence somehow is still absent among those endlessly enmeshed into the Black “welfare entitlement industry” which is so avidly fostered by the Sharptons, Jacksons, and others of their ilk, which still forms the basis of their “racial industry” lasting well into the 21st Century.
I’d say Jewish folks did a helluva more than just avoid an entitlement mentality. Jews came out of Europe after hundreds of years of on-again, off-again pogroms and built a state in only 3 years with the help of exactly nobody and against mountains of opposition. That is the direct opposite of entitlement and a story that should be pounded home in every black studies class in America.
“Liberals decry racism on the Right but cannot point to a single mainstream and institutionalized manifestation of it while one could easily list 500 such entities on the Left, from Miss Black America to the Assoc. of Black Journalists to La Raza to the Congressional Black Caucus. So, in order to compensate, liberals maintain the Right talks in dog-whistles and code.”
Many of those black organizations which you complain about, date from an era when blacks simply were not allowed in majority cultural institutions. IOW, STFU about Miss black America unless you’re also willing to point out that when the contest was founded there were no black woman in the Miss America contest. What you should be saying is that many of these organizations have outlived their usefulness, and only still exist due to the fact that no large bureaucratic organization wants to end it’s existence. Remember when the March of Dimes existed to fight polio?
I believe those points were implicit in my remarks. What moron is going to say the NAACP was racist in 1940?
However, the CBC was founded in ’71 and the Miss B. A. in ’68. There was no reason to do that then and there sure as hell isn’t one to do it now. They’re practically begging some white person to do the same thing and if it happens there’ll be whining and crying from the Left. There is also no reason for an organization in America that calls itself “The Race” to get federal funding in the millions of dollars or for it to found itself in ’68. For these groups to do so after the civil rights era told that they had no interest in moving into a colorblind future but one of racial advocacy. Screw ‘em.
I believe it was Thomas Sowell,writing on culture,who observed that a Russian Czar imported–with what coercion or incentives–a number of German farmers in the eighteenth century. Their farming practices were superior to those of the Russian peasantry.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Sowell says, two percent of European Russians were German in descent, as was forty percent of his officer corps.
Be interesting, and ominous, if true.
um. we won world war 2, led by Eisenhower, and Nimitz, and others. You know, Germans. WW2 in the west was a german officer strategy game- germans had germans, americans had germans…
Funny thing – As I was reading this, a coworker was telling a story from his recent trip to Germany. Eating dinner at a restaurant, he ordered an appetizer, salad, and entree. The first two courses were so filling he was unable to finish his entree. The hostess, even through a language barrier, scolded him for being so wasteful.
Culture is everything.
For what it’s worth–I find that in contemporary painting and photography, I come back again and again to the work of German artists: the wall-size prints of land- and city-scapes by Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky; the neo-expressionist painting that arose in the 1980′s and that seems to be in large part an effort to revive a defeated culture and resolve the past (Jorg Immendorf’s “Cafe Deutschland” series, and of course the monumental works of Anselm Kiefer).
@stevesmith above: I agree, we Americans are the heirs of Europe, and it irritates me to no end to hear facile and ignorant dismissal of Europe and its culture. Yes, we have saved them from themselves three times in the 20th century, and we will do so again if we remain true to ourselves, if only to guarantee that Western civilization survives.
I’m Canadian but my point applies to all the Western countries who seem to be ashamed of our shared and great cultural, social and scientific heritage. It’s a foolish, self defeating attitude in my opinion.
“…we have saved them from themselves three times in the 20th century, and we will do so again if we remain true to ourselves,…”
So, what are you saying? We already subsidize their military defense. Should American taxpayers bail out EU banks after Germany wises up and refuses? Or, more precisely, should we borrow more money from China, or print more ourselves, to bail out the PIGS nations, and now possibly France?
The Occupy movement in America is the criminal element of the Coffee Party.
Anarchists never wish to build something, they are always in “tear down the system” mode.
And, they are generally lazy, angry, often unclean and quite often prone to mob violence.
Greece is simply a criminal anarchist state at the moment. Reflecting upon their history is interesting, but not particularly instructive. Why does an entire nation collapse into a cesspool of fraud, deceit and self-delusion?
Because its people don’t care enough to stop it and eventually the half that care at all get surpassed by the half that don’t and want to game the system.
Once you pass the ethical Rubicon, it is nearly impossible to turn the rolling avalanche uphill.
We should not be so quick to look down our noses at Athens. We just passed the 50% mark of people on government entitlements. Our information stream is so filled with leftist traitors, liars, …that every piece of mass media news we obtain is the ethical equivalent of a Greek hotel bill or rental car invoice.
Filled with corruption, lies, and false attributions.
Greece is in a national “ethical hospice” mode. There is no cure, Germany is just keeping them comfortable enough before the inevitable occurs.
America has the same disease. The plague of leftism and we are now a carrier as well as a victim. The Obama administration is perhaps among the most virulent spreaders of this disease. And Typhoid Barry has kissed every continent and every state in our union.
We should look upon Greece with sad eyes and weep. Not at her past, but at our future.
“Anarchists never wish to build something, they are always in “tear down the system” mode.”
Sorry to disagree with your otherwise nice post, but this statement is not quite accurate. You can read Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, and even John Zerzan to get a glimpse of the harsh, conformist, collectivist, and primitivist future they intend to create. Although it is wrapped in the cloak of individual freedom, the details of their vision are not very appealing.
The main problem with the anarchism of the Occupy thugs is not so much its “urge to destroy,” but its “creative urge,” to paraphrase Mikhail Bakunin. It is a good thing to know one’s enemies.
DJA, thanks for your thoughtful reply to my post.
Perhaps I should clarify.
No matter what they build, they must always be in “tear down the system mode”.
Totalitarians by their very nature live in constant paranoia and treachery. They come to power by fraud and deceit. Nobody would buy the boot on the throat which is the necessary component of radical extreme leftism.
Therefore, it is sold as something it is not. In order to maintain one’s iron-fisted grasp, one must fight off the next totalitarian in line. The oddity of extreme leftism is that it despises open competition and trades it for competition in the shadows. Caesars and czars will always have to sleep with one eye open.
It doesn’t allow its traitors out in the open as does America and Israel and pre-fluff Europe. However, it doesn’t eliminate the treachery, it simply drives it underground.
By its very nature, the Power of Fraud and Deceit that is radical leftism, subverts itself even when it wins. Perhaps especially when it wins. Consolidated totalitarian power is based upon a lie. The insiders know this best. The only way to stay at the top is to be so ruthless, nobody dares to knock you from your perch. In the free market, the leftists need to knock a million out with slander. But only the most ruthless authoritarian stays long on the throne of deceit and brutality.
It’s a system that is always and forever in tear down the system mode. During the times of the most brutal leaders, it’s difficult to remember this axiom, however.
“Where force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.” – Ayn Rand
Yes, this envy and unthinking criticism of our traditions are what made me stop being a liberal. I say to my liberal friends, you take this for granted, this miracle of dignity and civility and prosperity. As someone wrote, you think this is real life; real life is Darfur.
Given that the German cultural markers of industry and love of order are undeniable, how does one explain the fact that Germans willingly vote for socialist overlords, whose ethos can be summed up as guilt for achievers and never ending disorderly waste of achievers wealth in the name of compassion and/or fairness?
You forget what the abbreviation “nazi” stood for: Nazional-sozialistischen Deutsch Partei, i.e. German National-Socialist Party. Socialism is statism every bit as much as right-wing political doctrine is.
Please explain what you believe is right-wing political doctrine.
“how does one explain the fact that Germans willingly vote for socialist overlords”
much of Western Europe willingly votes for certain entitlements, BUT – and this but mandates all caps – there is a buy-in that all hands must participate towards the provision of those services. In other words, there is not (or has not been, till recently in some countries)the equivalent of the perpetual American underclass; there is no invasion of illegals leeching off the citizenry; there is no engrained moocher class of baby mamas, white trash, and assorted grifters.
There is also no bowing at the altar of multiculturalism, no insistence on moral equivalency among belief systems, and no expecting that citizens assimilate to newcomers. In short, there is a single culture and while the culture believes in things like generous vacations and socialized medicine, it also believes in requiring all participants to ante up.
PS My model for old age is Spencer Tracy as Judge Dan Haywood in Judgment at Nuremberg, playing an American judge who comes to a defeated Germany to preside over a war crimes trial, with a mixture of idealism, bewilderment, and compassion.
“They retire too late and caused others to retire too early;”
No, their average age for retirement is 61/62, like generally everywhere in Europe, though the medias like to tell that they retire at 67, though it’s the agenda to be fully implemented for 2029
The anglo saxon press like to deride the french that are supposedly returning to the age of 60 with the Hollande government, againit’s mere laziness from them, the only that will be allowed to retire at 60 will be those that started to work earlier, mostly at 18, and that have accomplished 41/42 of work, and it’s for the painful jobs
idem for the southern club, the medias are taking some priviledged personnalilites exemple as generality, but fail to pick up the official statistics !
“they saved too much money so others had to borrow too much;”
Save? or is it rather surpluses bonuses ? while stalmating within keeping the eurocrisis alive so that all the good investments and money focus on Germany. It’s not a new policy, Germany’s done that in the late twenties, the result? protectionism !
God bless you, at last someone who knows what is going on. You must live in the Europe of today, right?
Yes, Marie-Claude, you are right, as are most of your comments about the EU realities, cause and effect of Euro event and policies, including the German drive to it, ‘bulldozing’ all of the founding members of the CEE into the scheme. Mr Cabbage wanted to be remembered for two things: German unification [which cost the EU as well as W-Germans a pretty penny] and the race to a unified currency. Glorious he was not; glorious they were not.
Many comments in the threads are interesting and cover some of these points competently, with some perspective or other. I reckon everyone speaks from experience and/or from his/her ivory tower, enriching the picture.
Living and working in Europe, precisely in Germany, a ‘European’ would read Germans differently than most Americans of Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic origins. One should learn how Austrian and German-speaking Swiss see and know the Germans and their work policies and ethics, at home ad abroad. Then one might begin to understand how ‘myths’ can go so far as to convince the most serious minds. I would not presume one looks at how other countries – ahem, less civilized, like Italy or … – see them because they [countries] do not count in the collective consciousness. Actually, I believe this learned and cultivated audience would have a big surprise.
History can be read, interpreted and ‘dressed’ by the historian and his/her perceptions; impossible to ignore or forget this fact. Reality can be elusive to the eye and its individual perceptions: the German one, though seemingly so large and ‘visible’, is possibly the most elusive and demystifying of all.
“Right now the continent’s psychological problem is not that southern Europeans cannot pay the northerners back, but that they are often arguing that they should not have to pay them, as if those who lent are more to blame than those who borrowed”
Which is a common issue throughout European history. See, e.g., the treatment of Jewish bankers and Jews in general, as well as the Knights Templars.
What a pleasure to read VDH and the commenters working through the paradoxes of the Big World.
The mean and miopic partyline politically correct worldview of the Liberal Plantation will leave us all poorer. They will throttle the whole world’s potential abundance.
Still I see the future as bright.
There need not be major violence. The United States is still too strong militarily. For now.
Peace is widespread. Violence is declining with the end of major civil wars in Congo and Sri Lanka.
A major part of the world in Asia is rising economically through hard work. Billions are being lifted out of abject poverty. There is even hope in Africa particularly East Africa.
The political stupidity in Europe and the Beltway cannot last and will eventually be replaced.
Hopefully by some of the thoughtful adults that VDH so represents.
“As we float downstream and discuss the Roman border forts on the Rhine, the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, World II, and the postwar era, you can see why there arose a NATO, an EU, and a nuclear Britain and France, but not a nuclear Germany”
Germany abhorres all nuclear things, they even clos down their civil nuclear sites for betting on alternative energies, engneeered by Siemens, though it seems that that is a failure, there isn’t a beginning of it, so it will be Vlad the gazprom emperor that will fill the void !
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-s-energy-revolution-stalls-without-decisiveness-and-incentives-a-834565.html
Marie Claude,
where have you been so long? I was beginning to be worried that something might be wrong, given that your voice, normally one of the earliest to be heard in such contexts, was still missing in commenting on an article dealing with Germany.
But where has your customary passion for invective gone? Maybe something in fact is wrong (are you secretly worried about Monsieur Hollande perhaps?). Why are you not this time bashing the accursed “boches” of outre-Rhin in your normal manner, pointing out their eternal perfidy in your usual constructive, benevolent and informed way?
Doch, wait for a post, when it will be edited, there are a few links that don’t praise Germany’s role in the making of the euro crisis, it’s rather, Do as I tell you, but not as we do
“But where has your customary passion for invective gone?”
plenty of work on this side of the pond, on TE, where it’s likely la foire d’empoignes”, the Germans, the greeks, the Italians… can bash each others
but the French being bashed by the Brits (a old habit !) and berated by the virtuous Germans, hey, they have such a success story ! so, imagine d’Artagnan in the middle !
hmm Hollande is surprising us, he isn’t the “flanby” that some wanted to see, he can manage a discussion without deriving from his argument
Question for WRM: When is your next military-history tour down the Rhine, and how do we sign up?
I concur.
TACITUS
Benefits are acceptable, while the receiver thinks he may return them; but once exceeding that, hatred is given rather than thanks.
Well, I wish young Germans would take up emigrating to Texas again. We’ve got Germans all over Central Texas. We’ve got manufacturing and car- building factories. The towns even have the same names.
We don’t have taxes on young people. They could build great lives.
Ari, last weekend, I was in Fredericksburg for a party to celebrate the 200th birthday of John Meusebach – one of the guiding spirits of the 19th century German settlements in Texas! We even had some guests at the party, come all the way from Germany. It would be great to have more Germans come to the Hill Country, but they’d have to be able to stand the heat!
http://celiahayes.wordpress.com/2012/05/28/happy-birthday-mr-meusebach/
More dispatches from Europe, please. Interesting thoughts. When I was stationed in southern Italy, we Yanks used to joke about what the Germans could do with it — how orderly and clean that heartbreakingly beautiful place would be. Now and then I was lucky enough to have to travel to Germany for a briefing or conference. What a cool, peaceful break it was from the noisy perpetual-motion machine that was southern Italy. (I have to say I liked the southern Italian food better.)
One of the biggest differences was the driving. Once you have acclimated to Naples, it takes a real mental switch to stop being a Naples driver. In Germany, I made a right on red once, before the pedestrian Walk signal had turned red — there was no hint of a pedestrian anywhere — and about 15 people started yelling at me. At a similar intersection in Naples, there would have been a surging crowd of pedestrians in a scrum with Vespas and Fiats, pedestrians being punted and slapping hoods and shouting in return. Oh, and no one would have had the slightest idea what the traffic lights were doing.
Germans also eat dinner when God intended; i.e., before 11 PM. But then, so do the northern French, the Dutch, etc.
Sir…..don’t forget those impatiently flashing headlights after dark signalling “I! Will! Pass!” to pull around you even as you’re going over the speed limit.
[...anybody have any experience with....gasp!....auto-insurance rates in Italy?]
“Right now the continent’s psychological problem is not that southern Europeans cannot pay the northerners back, but that they are often arguing that they should not have to pay them, as if those who lent are more to blame than those who borrowed. The Germans rightly know that if they were just to write off the debt, such magnanimity would only lead to the same disaster in another five years, as the southern Mediterraneans cited such largess as proof that the Germans were guilty all along of mercantilism and therefore finally evened up with their moral betters. For Germans, this serial blackmail is of course an impossible situation. Would you wish to be lectured by your poorer brother-in-law on why he should not have to pay your $1,000 loan back, as he critiqued your oh-so-conventional workaholic habits?”
yet the Germans were writing off their debt in 1953, and aren’t a good exemple for not defaulting on debts too
“The Germans don’t trust the Greeks to keep any bargain, which is not unreasonable given that the Greeks haven’t been willing to enforce past agreements. Given this lack of trust, Germany proposed suspending Greek sovereignty by transferring it to a European receiver. This would be a fairly normal process if Greece were a corporation or an individual. In such cases, someone is appointed after bankruptcy or debt restructuring to ensure that a corporation or individual will behave prudently in the future.
A nation state is different. It rests on two assumptions. The first is that the nation represents a uniquely legitimate community whose members share a range of interests and values. The second is that the state arises in some way from the popular will and that only that popular will has the right to determine the state’s actions. There is no question that for Europe, the principle of national self-determination is a fundamental moral value. There is no question that Greece is a nation and that its government, according to this principle, is representative of and responsible to the Greek people.
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/germanys-role-europe-and-european-debt-crisis
BTW german banks got their bailout too !
-http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-23/merkel-should-know-her-country-has-been-bailed-out-too.html
HOW CORRUPT IS GERMANY?
The scandals that have tarnished Germany’s image
-http://www.cnbcmagazine.com/story/how-corrupt-is-germany/85/1/#.T70cLllR-Gw.twitter
VDH, your always encyclopedic litany of all-things-Obama was generically nailed by a Dane—
Obama, the Man Of Change and Hope—let’s apply Soren Kierkegaard to him. From “Purity of heart is to will one thing”:
“Neither can he be said to will one thing when that one thing which he wills is not in itself one: is in itself a multitude of things, a dispersion, the toy of changeableness, and the prey of corruption!
In the time of pleasure see how he longed for one gratification after another. Variety was his watchword. Is variety, then, to will one thing that shall ever remain the same?
On the contrary, it is to will one thing that must never be the same. It is to will a multitude of things. And a person who wills in such a fashion is not only double-minded but is at odds with himself.
For such a man wills first one thing and then immediately wills the opposite, because the oneness of pleasure is a snare and a delusion. It is the diversity of pleasures that he wills.
So when the man of whom we are speaking had gratified himself up to the point of disgust, he became weary and sated. Even if he still desired one thing—what was it that he desired?
He desired new pleasures; his enfeebled soul raged so that no ingenuity was sufficient to discover something new—something new!
It was change he cried out for as pleasure served him, change, change!!!
And it was change that he cried out for as he came to pleasure’s limit, as his servants were worn out—
CHANGE, CHANGE!” pages 56-57
VDH is precisely on-target. Read his new book, Who Killed Homer?, for the rest of the story. A brilliant book.
That book is neither brilliant nor new — I got bored and stopped reading about halfway through. I think the problem with much of Hanson’s writings praising Greek culture and the study of classic lit. is that he overstates his case. He seems to believe that anyone who studies ancient literature will be a sage with Achillean courage, unerring political judgement, and automatic wisdom about practical affairs; and that you could not become a happy well-rounded person without studying Greek. He sounds like a salesman marketing a product.
“Culture is evrerything.” Is that why we owe the Chinese all than money?
Germany also happens to have the highest IQ in Europe, much higher than their English Cousins. Israelis have a higher IQ, but their best and brightest share teutonic DNA. In order to design luxury cars you need to be smarter than the average Euro.
On the other hand the Germans may not be so smart.
Along with all the bratwurst reicipes, the German immigrants brought all that Socialism to Wisconsin back in the 1920. Almost 100 years later and we are still feeling the effects of this toxic European political philisophy.
complete and mere BS
You know who the smartest people are?
The smartest people.
don’t tell me you’re one
We should people Detroit entirely with German immigrants and send all the current residents to Frankfurt. Then, 10 years later, vive la différence.
United States exceptionalism flows from the beginning of the settlements along the eastern seaboard. Differences abounded. In some colonies the opportunity to practice religions scarcely tolerated in the class stratified countries of Europe from whence they came. In others, economic opportunity was was paramount and the new arrivals were fully aware that the quest for interclass mobility here included no right to succeed. This first mobility was accompanied by geographic mobility, the ability to go westering from the coast and over the hills and eastern mountain ranges. The third contributor was the role of the family — the most efficient form of governance, and the only level with the moral authority to impose behaviors necessary in a civilized society.
America became the land of opportunity through the willingness of families to risk everything they had for a ticket to this new land, and the willingness of our founding fathers to risk life, fortune and their sacred honor to become an independent nation.
And what are we doing — changing the nation from a land of opportunity to a country of entitlements. The corruption started with the sixteenth amendment. It allowed an income tax to be collected and spent without regard to where it came from. It continued with the application of the Frankfurter Court that extended the commerce clause’s Federal jurisdiction wildly (but did not cure the Depression. It compounded the problem through using deficits during times of prosperity to fund pork projects at the expense of future generations and expending such debt proceeds on ‘police actions’ without asking current taxpayers to bear part of the burden.
States and municipalities gave up parts of their rights by coming hat ion hand to the Central government instead of taxing their own voters. We purposely kept our citizens sleeping after addicting them to the false drug of OPM — Other Peoples Money. There is no such thing, of course
God help our children and grandchildren as the level of the National Debt would test even the shoulders of Atlas. We have spent their birthright of Opportunity and the Republic of fifty States and a Federal government is being changed one of a Central government and weak provinces, not unlike that of the nations which these intelligent immigrants sought to escape.
A good part of Professor Hanson’s argument can be summarized by two German idioms.
The southern Europeans live this life:
Morgen, morgen, nur nicht heute,
sagen alle faulen Leute.
“Tomorrow, tomorrow, just not today,
that’s what all lazy people say.”
The Germans live this life:
Arbeit macht das Leben süß.
“Work makes life sweet.”
Or something more apt for these tough economic times:
Arbeit ist schwer, aber keine Arbeit ist die vollkommende Hölle. /
Work is hard, but no work is complete hell.
Surprised I haven’t seen any references to the contrast of the Ideal EU, with all the lovers being Italians, the engineers Germans, the cooks French, and the policemen English, with the actual EU, where the lovers are all French, the engineers Italians, the cooks English, and the policemen Germans.
Mr. Hansen, I’m waiting for the rest of the article. In your introductory statement, you implied that you would be making a comparison between postwar Germany and post-civilization Detroit.
For what it’s worth, I was one of those hundreds of thousands of young people to whom someone referred as having spent unproductive years stationed in Germany during the Cold War (1978-85). Ah, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
I know someone who spent a year in the infantry over in Kosovo. When they went to Germany they had a blast and everyone was friendly to them. When they went to greece, they went to a restaurant and the owner yelled at them that he wouldn’t serve any puppets of the fascist President Bush and kicked them all out.
you should have entered into the restaurant with civil clothes
You should’ve dressed like a fascist – free dolma. American backpackers used to sometimes put a maple leaf logo on their packs to show they were Canadiens. Try a hammer and sickle nowadays.
uh?
The current economic situation in Germany is more impressive when one remembers that the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 put a tremendous strain on the nation. Most of East Germany’s factories were outdated, heavy polluters, or both and had to be shutdown or rebuilt. The people of communist East Germany were more dependent upon government than those of semi-socialist West Germany. Unemployment was rampant and millions were on the dole. I visited Germany two years ago and was impressed by how well it was doing despite its high taxes (a value added tax of 19% plus an income tax) and socialist tendencies. Government owns and controls too much of the German economy for my taste, but it did not piss away half of the taxpayers’ euros on worthless pork-barrel projects and personnel-inflated government bureaucracies. Much of its infrastructure spending was sensible. The most foolish government financial decision since the reunification was loaning money to Greece.
Regarding the earlier comments about Germany and the Soviet Union during the 1933-1945 period: I highly recommend Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands (http://tinyurl.com/8y4tq99)for an exhaustive account of the atrocities committed by the Soviets and the Nazis during this period.
If you think you already know pretty much about the horrors committed by these regimes, there’s a good chance you’ll read this book and realize how little you really knew.
If you remember when the russians took over Berlin they were on the balls of their ass, They barely beat the germans. if you remember what Gen. Patton said, let me finish off those russians bastards now, but for the lack of balls from our president at the time he was held back. Well people what did that get us, 70 years of grief from those bastards.
Winston Churchill knew exactly what the Russians were too. He wanted to move as far east as possible to prevent the ‘Iron Curtain’ from taking too much of Europe. But Eisenhower and the US president sold him and the West out. Roosevelt sold Churchill out and made a ‘SECRET’ agreement with the Russians at YALTA giving Russia total control over Eastern Europe.
Thank you Pragmatist. Because this secret deal destroyed lifes behind the iron curtain.
Thank you again to write it down.
You ask “Why is Detroit a War Zone and the War Zone that was Germany now a model place to live”
Well Detroit is a Black governed City populated by Blacks
As of the 2010 Census, there were 713,777 people, 269,445 households, and 162,924 families residing in the city. The population density was 5,144.3 people per square mile (1,986.2/km²). There were 349,170 housing units at an average density of 2,516.5 units per square mile (971.6/km²). The census reported that the city had 82.7% BLACK (82.1% non- Hispanic black), 10.6% White (7.8% non-Hispanic white), 1.1% Asian, 0.4% Native American, 0.02% Pacific Islander, 3.0% other races, 2.2% two or more races. In addition, 6.8% of the population self-identified as Hispanic or Latino, of any race, mainly made up of Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.[136] Additionally, Detroit has one of the U.S.’s largest concentrations of Hmong people.
A widely cited report from the Detroit Regional Workforce Fund released in 2011 stated that the National Institute for Literacy (NIL) estimated 47 percent of city residents to be FUNCTIONALLY ILLITERATE (approx. Level 1 Literacy), meaning they had difficulty reading well enough to manage daily living and employment tasks that require reading skills beyond a basic level
Zimbabwe (Rhodesia) was, when run by WHITES, Africa’s BREAD BASKET. 50 years of BLACK rule have turned it in t Africa’s BASKET CASE.
West Germany is a mainly Caucasian Anglo Saxon run country.
Adolph Hitler and the NAZIs had a ‘cunning plan’ for a post war Europe. It was to be a grouping of European Nation States run by an unelected bureaucracy which would be Politically and Financially controlled by GERMANY. And that Ladies and Gentlemen is the European Union in a nutshell.
So tell me again just WHO won the WAR or rather who has WON the Peace.
How tragic that when the Germans finally learned to channel their talents and energies into pure production and enriched themselves and those around them, it still earned them in the end suspicion and envy
You don’t happen to live in Europe,do You? Otherwise You would have noticed that:
1. Germany gained tremendously through the Euro and increased exports.During its increase, exports of Greece,Spain simultaneously decreased.Aka, this countries grew poorer,Germany enriched itself.
2.The incredible, nearly rascist arrogance some German politicians (and vast parts of the population) have with regard to f.e Greece instead of a cool assessment of the situation and what could be done about it (like Eurobonds)
Exploiters and racists, oh my. Poor argument. If you were around circa 1999, you know that Greece wanted to join the EU, fiddled the books to make it in and then enjoined the easy credit. Pooring more of other peoples money down a hole isn’t going to solve anything.
Felek, the, ‘It’s Germany’s fault as well..’ tripe has been proven fictional time and time again.
Germany’s economy HAS been successful for decades before their introducing the Euro.
Germany’s post WWII Minister of Economics, Ludwig Erhard is credited by MANY economist’s for Germany’s then and continuing economic success. Germany’s 60+ year SKILLED labour workforce who continues to put in many man hours has much to do with their CONTINUED successes.
Erhard had greatly loosened economic regulations (something the current administration is alien to) which resulted in Germany and other European nations experiencing the needed economic upswing.
That German economic SOP has only improved since that time.
Germany’s present Minister of Economics was quoted recently, ‘I sometimes get the impression the elite in Greece don’t want to forego their privileges’.
Indeed!
ANY money lent to Greece is likely lost forever. Which is why Greece CAN’T borrow from markets at reasonable rates anymore.
German creditors were recently asked to take a HUGE loss on their Greek bonds. Dr. Hanson only TOUCHED on the millions of losses Greece inflicts on their visitor’s and fellow citizenry alike on a daily basis.
As you know the largest lenders to the Greek government is the Greek banks themselves! So where’s the blame game li there?
You and I know Greece’s decades of fraud and corruption by both Greek government and citizenry alike is the reason behind their demise.
Why would ANY nation, bank AGAIN sacrifice its own economy by throwing good money to a country, people’s who have PROVEN unable to self-govern? All the while the Greek government, majority citizenry blame everyone else. Going as far as demagoguing the very same who have tried to save them from their own demise.
I ask you. Why should foreign banks waste their money on a high-risk, irresponsible borrower in Greece any longer?
The Germans rightly know that if they were just to write off the debt, such magnanimity would only lead to the same disaster in another five years, as the southern Mediterraneans cited such largess as proof that the Germans were guilty all along of mercantilism and therefore finally evened up with their moral betters.
Actually, no. I’m rather surprised that you got this one wrong, Dr. Hanson.
What would happen is this: The Germans would write off the debt, and of course they and other lenders would shut off the spigot. To borrow again, Greece would have to bend over backwards and pay usurious rates to boot.
Hmm. Lenders charging huge interest rates? That’s about the most popular anti-capitalist stereotype there is. After five years, Germany and the other lenders would all be under attack for their “tightfistedness”, and pressured to lend to poor, needy, hurting Greece once more to help get it back on its feet. All this would happen in the media as if the previous default never happened. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need, after all.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
I don’t see where you showed Dr. Hanson wrong, Seerak. You gave details of how a German write-off of Greek debt would “only lead to the same disaster in another five years” as Dr. Hanson predicts.
I think you both are correct.
You continue to be ‘da man, Doctor Hanson!
Greece, Munich, & The 2 Reasons
There are only 2 reasons for having a country: Defense against foreign enemies and defense against domestic enemies. All other reasons are gravy.
Post-WWI, Western politicians lost this, as they had had the war to end all wars; besides as war was over, there was more to spend on projects for re-election. Before Munich, Chamberlain and Daladier conferred with their armed forces chiefs. The head of the RAF told Chamberlain, we can last maybe two weeks, then we are done. The French general in charge of the French Air Force told Daladier, “You have no Air Force – NO AIR FORCE!” Keep this in mind when commenting on Munich.
As an aside, consider that the the US Congress allowed the Army an amount of money for research and development of armored vehicles. It was an annual amount which was about enough to purchase one middle-priced Packard automobile. When things went to hell in Europe, we were behind and empty-handed. Eventually we came up with the Sherman tank, which everyone called a “Ronson.”
The Greek mess can be fixed.
1. Bring back the Draft.
2. Stop hiring public employees at all levels.
3. If it is impossible to reorganize workplace and work force to get work done and a public employee must be hired, draft a retiree.
The next part would be to talk to Greece as follows: We are considering taking a slug of that TARP money and bailing out some of your Greek bonds and by the way at the same time would you be interested in sending representatives to the US House of Representatives to petition for the usual immediate vote on becoming a Category IV or Category III US Territory?
One rarely reads of another remarkable thing that Germany has recently done. After the reunification in 1991, former West Germany had to pull former East Germany from the gutter of the “German Democratic Republic”. They are doing or pretty much have done this and now they are calling the shots in Europe. The ONLY “currency” with any value in Europe is the German worker, highly educated and with a work ethic unsurpassed on the continent.
Outstanding go through, I simply handed this specific onto a coworker who was simply doing just a little research in that. And the lady actually bought me supper simply because I noticed it with regard to him chuckle Therefore allow me to rephrase that will: Many thanks for lunch!
Free Juegos de mario bros -play free Juegos de mario bros in the home! Online now hosts several a huge number of online arcades where free Juegos de mario bros are on industry, Twenty four hours each and every day! You are not today’s computer or laptop can begin to play free Juegos de mario bros via their web browser. Now you are prepared to experiment with some free Juegos de mario bros online! Dependant upon your age and style, you’ll find endless fun and addicting free Juegos de mario bros to play.
We? michael honored to get who you might be a phone from your friend whilst he recognized very suggestions shared yourself internet site. Browsing your blog submit generally is a genuine outstanding expertise. Many thank you for considering audience at all comparable to be able to us, and i wish you the best of triumphs being a skilled place.
Appreciation with the great article. I’m glad We have taken plenty of time to understand this.
Great go through. I also think it may be a touch longer
You may think they are able to only sing, but you’d get surprised at the amount of artists can sing, dance, and play a number of instruments.
Order LA concert ticket