Pandering to colour prejudice

Graham Greene is writing about the French occupation of the Rhineland after WW 1, in 1923. Greene writes disapprovingly of the arrogance of the French, and their ill-treatment of the native Germans.

One of the most startling indictments of the whole futility of French policy, of her cries of “security” and “revenge”, was the sight of a small Spahi, with his ragged beard and dirty khaki cloak, lounging beneath the Porta Nigra, the great Roman gateway that has stood there for sixteen hundred years.

It must be remembered, however, that the French claim that there are no blacks on the Rhine. Blacks, they say, are negroes, and their troops Senegalese or Moroccans. It is an interesting distinction, and in Bonn especially I “imagined” many negroes. The fact, however, that a Frenchman is free from colour prejudice is no excuse for quartering them on a population that is known to possess it. It is a deliberate insult against a defenceless people.

Source: Greene 1991:10.

I’ve long been an admirer of Graham Greene as a writer,m and it took me a while to get my head around that.

It’s not that the attitude is unknown to me. I’ve encountered it before — the idea that failing to pander to people’s racism is somehow unjust. But in the past I’ve usually seen it from those who feel themselves to have been unjustly treated in this way, not from a relatively neutral observer, a journalist reporting on the occupation, and a writer I have rather admired.

In his articles on the occupation Greene reported that the way the Germans were bring oppressed by the occupiers would lead to a fresh outbreak of war within 20 years. In that he was right, though it came sooner than that, it took only 16 years. And yes, it was that repression and French revanchism in particular that facilitated the rise of Hitler and the Second World War.

But with hindsight we can also see clearly what German racism would lead to — mass murder and genocide, and Greene did not foresee that.

Enough is enough: it’s time for Greece to leave the Eurozone

Enough is enough. It’s time for Greece to leave the Eurozone and start issuing its own currency.

Greek crisis: surrender fiscal sovereignty in return for bailout, Merkel tells Tsipras | Business | The Guardian:

European leaders have confronted the Greek government with a draconian package of austerity measures entailing a surrender of fiscal sovereignty as the price of avoiding financial collapse and being ejected from the single currency bloc.

A weekend of high tension that threatened to break Europe in two climaxed on Sunday night at a summit of eurozone leaders in Brussels where the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and President François Hollande of France presented Greece’s radical prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, with an ultimatum.

Someone pointed out that the problem is that Germany has too many lawyers and not enough economists, and this leads to a different mindset. Several people have pointed this out, and it is summed up in this article: A Lawyer’s Mindset Where An Economist’s Is Needed? – Forbes:

A Twitter correspondent pointed out a simple fact that makes Schäuble’s inflexibility in negotiations with Varoufakis explicable: though he is a Minister of Finance, his PhD is in law.

So is he implicitly approaching these negotiations as a lawyer would? Because from that point of view, what the Greeks are trying to do is to renege on a contract. And for a lawyer, changing the terms of a contract after you have signed it is a no deal. It’s either carry out the contract, or I’ll sue.

Varoufakis, of course, is approaching the negotiations as an economist. From his point of view, the terms of the Troika’s package are a set of economic policies that have failed. And if policies have failed, the sensible economist tries different ones.

And some have pointed out that this difference in approach is rooted in theology: The moral theology of the Greek crisis – Spiritual Politics:

… behind the moral standoff is a difference in approaches to human error that has divided Eastern and Western Christianity for centuries. It’s the difference between the Orthodox idea of economia and the Augustinian conviction that either it’s right or God brings the hammer down.

Economia recognizes that while all warfare is bad, sometime people have to fight and then get to repent for it. Augustinianism sees wars as either just or unjust. Economia recognizes that while divorce is bad, sometimes a husband and wife have to split up and they then get to remarry (somberly, no more than twice) and remain Christians in good standing. Augustinianism says no to divorce, and no to communion for those who remarry.

The current impasse seems to show that the differences between these two approaches are irreconcilable, and perhaps it is time for a divorce.

The most sensible suggestion that I have seen comes from someone known to me only as “Whiskers”, who said:

Greece could (should, almost certainly will) leave the Euro and revert
to its own currency, without leaving the European Union. Britain never
joined the Euro but is otherwise a full member of the EU – so when world
financial systems began to go haywire at least Britain retained control
over its own currency, including exchange rates and money supply.
Greece, starting from a much weaker base, surrendered such control and
is now unable to manage its own affairs.

Greece is not a poor country, what they lack at present is not wealth
but currency – they have literally run out of banknotes (not helped by
people hoarding as many as they can at home) and the Euro rules mean
they can’t print any more; they have to get them from the Euro Central
Bank which can’t do it without the agreement of all the other countries
which belong to the Euro. Which is fair enough, as the supply of Euros
affects all their economies too not just the Greek one.

The obvious and sensible thing for Greece to do is therefore to leave
the Euro and start controlling its own currency again. This will solve
the ‘money supply’ problem almost overnight – but deciding the exchange
rate to the Euro will be one of the first things the Greek politicians
will have to do, and is something for which they cannot escape
responsibility by blaming anyone else (but they’ll try to do that too).
Greeks will then be able to borrow money again – but not at Euro
interest rates!

Leaving the European Union would be a much bigger decision, and probably
not a good idea for Greece as they would instantly lose nearly all of
what is at present their ‘home’ market (and the freedom to seek work
anywhere in the EU).

Celebrations after the anti-austerity referendum in Athens (Photo by Julia Bridget Hayes)

What follows, however, is anyone’s guess. Perhaps it could form the scenario for a science fiction novel.

In September 2015 Greece left the Eurozone, and the new drachma, based originally on IOUs issued to pay civil servants, though it started on par with the Euro, depreciated rapidly in value. The Greek government, driven by internally rather than externally imposed austerity, was forced to cut military expenditure, as imported military hardware became too expensive, and thus failed to meet its Nato commitments.

In April 2016, at the instigation of Germany and France, Greece was expelled from Nato, which encouraged Turkey to invade and occupy the Greek islands of Lesvos, Chios, Samos and Rhodes in May 2016.

Encouraged by the lack of resistance, in June 2016 Turkish forces invaded eastern Thrace, and defeated Greek forces at the battle of Xanthi. This opened the way for ISIS agents to stir up the Muslim population to turn against their neighbours, and ISIS thus established control of most of the towns and villages in the region outside Xanthi itself.

France and Germany assisted Turkey, their Nato ally, with arms and other material to defeat ISIS, but most of these were used to make further conquests in Northern Greece…

 

New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage

New NATO: Germany Returns To World Military Stage:

‘If somebody had announced in 1989 that, well, the Berlin Wall has come down, now Germany can unite and send military forces back into Yugoslavia — and what is more in order to enforce a partition of the country along similar lines to those it imposed when it occupied the country in 1941 — well, quite a number of people might have raised objections. However, that is what has happened, and many of the very people might who have been expected to object most strongly to what amounts to the most significant act of historical revisionism since World War II have provided the ideological cover and excuse.’ [6]

The campaign was not without effect in Germany as subsequent events have proved and has been accompanied by the rehabilitation, honoring and even granting of veteran benefits to Nazi collaborators, including former Waffen SS members, in Croatia, Estonia, Latvia and Ukraine in recent years.

Yesterday Yugoslavia, tomorrow the world!

By successfully demonifying the Serbs, and transferring the guilt of its Nazi past to them, Germany has succeeded in perpetuating the past rather than burying it.

Western re-think on Caucasian war?

Are Western countries beginning to doubt the wisdom of their rush to support Georgia in last months Caucasian conflict?

Did Saakashvili Lie?: The West Begins to Doubt Georgian Leader – SPIEGEL ONLINE – News – International:

But now the volume is being turned down on the anti-Moscow rhetoric. Last week German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier publicly called for clarification on the question of who is to blame for the Caucasus war. ‘We do need to know more about who bears what portion of the responsibility for the military escalation and to what extent,’ Steinmeier told a meeting of Germany’s more than 200 ambassadors in Berlin. The European Union, he said, must now ‘define our relations with the parties to the conflict for the medium and long term,’ and that the time has come to have concrete information.

If there is a re-think going on, however, the signs are very faint — “nuanced” as they like to say in academia.

Der Spiegel reports

But now, five weeks after the end of the war in the Caucasus, the winds have shifted in America. Even Washington is beginning to suspect that Saakashvili, a friend and ally, could in fact be a gambler — someone who triggered the bloody five-day war and then told the West bold-faced lies. “The concerns about Russia have remained,” says Paul Sanders, an expert on Russia and the director of the conservative Nixon Center in Washington. His words reflect the continuing Western assessment that Russia’s military act of revenge against the tiny Caucasus nation Georgia was disproportionate, that Moscow violated international law by recognizing the separatist republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and, finally, that it used Georgia as a vehicle to showcase its imperial renaissance.

But there’s no sign of any acknowledgement that Russia’s response was no more “disproportionate” that Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006, the US attacks on Iraq in 2003 and Yugoslavia in 1999, or the British attack on Argentina in 1982.

If Western hypocrisy is cracking, the cracks are still painted over.

The demonification of Serbia

There has been very little publicity in the Western media about the International Court of Juctice’s ruling that Serbia was not responsible for many of the war crimes that the Western media had accused, tried and convicted it of. Here is one of the exceptions.

Slobodan Milosevic was posthumously exonerated on Monday when the international court of justice ruled that Serbia was not responsible for the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica. The former president of Serbia had always argued that neither Yugoslavia nor Serbia had command of the Bosnian Serb army, and this has now been upheld by the world court in The Hague. By implication, Serbia cannot be held responsible for any other war crimes attributed to the Bosnian Serbs.

The Western Confucian asks whether Mr Clinton will soon be shipped off to the Hague to face trial. Or Messrs Blair and Bush, for that matter. There are also interesting comments here and here.

Nobody came out of the wars of the Yugoslav succession smelling of roses. Horrible atrocities were commited on all sides. But the attempts of Western politicans and the Western media to demonify the Serbs and lay all the blame on them must rank as one of the more disreputable spin attempts of the 20th century.

The situation was summed up rather well by Samuel Huntington, in his The clash of civilizations and the remaking of the world order:

The breakup of Yugoslavia began in 1991 when Slovenia and Croatia moved toward independence and pleaded with Western European powers for support. The response of the West was defined by Germany, and the response of Germany was in large part defined by the Catholic connection. The Bonn government came under pressure to act from the German Catholic hierarchy, its coalition partner the Christian Social Union Party in Bavaria, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and other media. The Bavarian media, in particular, played a crucial role in developing German public sentiment for recognition. ‘Bavarian TV’, Flora Lewis noted, ‘much weighed upon by the very conservative Bavarian government and the strong, assertive Bavarian Catholic Church which had close connections with the church in Croatia, provided the television reports for all of Germany when the war [with the Serbs] began in earnest. The coverage was very one-sided’… Germany pressured the European Union to recognise the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, and then, having secured that, pushed forward on its own to recognize them before the Union did in December 1991.

Austria and Italy promptly moved to recognize the two new states (1991) Slovenia and Croatia, after German recognition and pressure, and very quickly other Western countries, including the United States, followed. The Vatican also played a central role. The Pope declared Croatia to be the “rampart of Christianity,” and rushed to extend diplomatic recognition to the two states before the European Union did. The Vatican thus became a partisan in the conflict, which had its consequences in 1994 when the Pope planned visits to the three republics. Opposition by the Serbian Orthodox Church prevented his going to Belgrade, and Serb unwillingness to guarantee his security led to the cancellation of his visit to Sarajevo. He did go to Zagreb, however, where he honoured Cardinal Alojzieje Stepinac, who was asociated with the fascist Croatian regime in World War II that persecuted and slaughtered Serbs, Gypsies and Jews (Huntington 1998:282).