Author Topic: Au Revoir, Marianne; Auf Wiedersehen, Lili Marleen  (Read 752 times)

Offline Ripsnort

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Au Revoir, Marianne; Auf Wiedersehen, Lili Marleen
« on: July 02, 2003, 11:18:29 AM »
AU REVOIR, MARIANNE; AUF WIEDERSEHEN, LILI MARLEEN
 
The End of America's European Romance
 
By Ralph Peters
 
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, May 15, 2003
 
The societies of "Old Europe" remind Americans of the Arab Street.
 
Preferring comforting delusions to challenging realities, Europeans talk a great deal, do very little, and blame the United States for home-grown ills.
 
The recent chants in the boulevards of Berlin were almost indistinguishable from those heard until recently--in downtown Baghdad. Europe's culture of complaint, its enthusiasm for accusing America of every wickedness while assigning every virtue to itself, and its stunning lack of self-examination leave Americans bewildered.
 
We thought you were adults, but, from across the Atlantic, you look like spoiled children.  And your recent tantrums have convinced Big Daddy America to deposit you on the steps of the strategic orphanage.
 
The damage done by the recent confrontation between The United States and those nations whose vocabularies collapsed to the single words "Nein!" or "Non!" will be repaired on the surface.  We shall continue to cooperateon matters of mutual interest.  But, on a deeper level, the exuberantly dishonest attacks on America heard from France and Germany (Belgium simply doesn't count), along with the shameless grandstanding of Mr. Schroeder and Mr. Chirac, appear to even the most pragmatic Americans as grounds for divorce from our long marriage of convenience.
 
The divorce is long overdue.  Ignoring "Old Europe" on questions of grand strategy will liberate the United States, freeing us at last from the failed European model of diplomacy that has given the world so many wars, dysfunctional borders and undisturbed dictators.  The recent mischief wrought in Paris and Berlin has enabled Washington to escape a long thrall of enchantment, a slumber of sorts during which America allowed Europe's ghost to haunt its decisions.
 
Now you have awakened us, and we see that Europe's influence was nothing but a legacy of nightmares.  We shall no longer subscribe to your bloodsoaked, corrupt rules for the international system, but will forge our own.
 
You will not like many of our new rules.  But to paraphrase Frederick the Great's remark about Maria Theresia, you will cry, but take your share of any available spoils.
 
As a result of a series of remarkable strategic miscalculations,  
France and Germany have lost their international footing?not only with the USA, but with the world.  You had your moment in the anti-American sun. High noon revealed you as powerless and inept.
 
For Germany, this divorce will offer some advantages.  American combat forces soon will begin to leave German soil permanently, followed in good time by our logistics facilities, which are simply more difficult to shift. This will be to Germany's benefit practically and psychologically--and verymuch to the benefit of America's armed forces, which have become nothing but a cash cow for greedy organizations ranging from your railways to your labor unions.
 
NATO will survive, of course.  Along with the European Union, it's an indispensable employment agency for Europe's excess bureaucrats.  But other bilateral and multilateral military arrangements will take precedence Washington's strategic calculations.
 
On the negative side, Germany will lose almost all of its diplomatic
influence beyond continental Europe and Berlin never had much, at least since 1945.  The world will take your Euros, but will not take you seriously.
 
You have asserted your independence from America.  Now you have it. Good luck.
 
We won our war, easily, despite your protests and without your help. And do not flatter yourself with rhetoric about refusing to be America's vassals.  No one in the United States questioned Germany's right to decide for itself whether or not to support our efforts to depose Saddam Hussein.
 
Germany had every right to decline to participate.
 
But it was the way you did it that infuriated us.
 
Bundeskanzler Schroeder astonished us.  We long had recognized him as a political charlatan, but the extent of his demagogy and his inability to foresee the consequences of his ranting still came as a surprise to us.  We see Mr. Schroeder as a man utterly without convictions?a man without qualities--a political animal so debased that he resembles no one so much as he does European caricatures of small-time American politicians.  His opportunistic anti-Americanism seemed all for effect, without substance or genuine belief.
 
Yet, in other respects, Schroeder proved quintessentially European: He criticized, but failed to offer meaningful solutions of his own.  He chose slogans over ideas, convenience over ethics, and portrayed small-minded selfishness as political heroism.  What qualities might better describe 21st century Europe?
 
Germany has come a long way downhill from Adenauer and Schmidt to Gerhard Schroeder.
 
Most difficult of all for us to stomach were remarks from members of the German government comparing President Bush to Hitler.  Now, does anyone  reading this newspaper believe that's an honest comparison?  And was it fitting coming from a German official?
 
One thinks not.  Americans heard the echo of Joseph Goebbels. Then there were all the demonstrators waving signs equating the United States to the Nazi regime, as tasteless a display as Germany has managed since the last crematorium went cold.
 
Once our tempers cooled, we realized that all these Nazi comparisons weren't really about us.  It was all about you, your guilt and your evasions.
 
Perhaps the most revealing incident of the war came during a  television interview with a young protester in Berlin after Baghdad had fallen.  The reporter asked him what he thought of the images of Iraqis cheering U.S. Marines and toppling Saddam's statue.  The young German said the scenes "annoyed" him. Doubtless.  Reality is annoying, indeed. [/size]
 
Oh, we know how you see us.  You never cease telling us.  We are uncultured, because we cannot recall the date of the first performance of Das Rheingold.  We are heartless, since our society favors opportunity over security.  We are naïve, since we do not share your prejudices.  We warmongers, because we still believe some things are worth defending. And now we are Nazis, because we moved to depose a dictator who had slaughtered
his own people as well as his neighbors, while harboring terrorists and pursuing weapons of mass destruction.
 
Of course, you continue to buy our cultural products.  Your brightest young people come to our shores to work.  We Americans have moved the racism that blights Germany and France (we look forward to meeting a German Colin Powell of Turkish ancestry in Berlin or an ethnic-Senegalese Condoleeza Rice in Paris), so we certainly do not share your prejudices.
 
And after the events of September 11th, 2001, we will not wait to be attacked, but will strike pre-emptively wherever we believe it to be necessary?and we shall do so without ever again asking Europe's permission.
 
So we are, indeed, warmongers by European standards.
 
But what about the charge that Americans are the new Nazis?
 
I think I understand the sickness that afflicts you.  I received my  
first insight as a young Army sergeant in a not-yet-reunified Germany a quarter-century ago.  Although the event was ten years past, young Germans unfailingly brought up the My Lai massacre in Vietnam during our conversations.  My Lai was one of two documented American atrocities in that war.  Almost two hundred villagers were murdered.  It was inexcusable,and we did not try to excuse it.  But those young Germans grasped at the My
Lai massacre with an alacrity that astonished me.  To them, the two-hundred dead at My Lai canceled Auschwitz and Treblinka, six million murdered Jews,Gypsies, homosexuals and dissenters.  The message was, "See!  You Americans are just as bad as we Germans were?maybe worse."
 
I did not find the comparison convincing.
 
Now, with Germany's Jews long since slaughtered or driven out (to America's great benefit, thank you), you attack Israel at every
opportunity, hanging on every Palestinian claim, no matter how absurd, and inventing Israeli atrocities.  Americans see Israelis as fighting for their existence against those who want to exterminate them.  You view Israelis as a reproach to your past deeds, and you lash out at them.  Clausewitz is no longer a guide to your national behavior.  Today, we need to consult  
Sigmund Freud.  A Jew, of course.
 
The Israelis, too, have been called Nazis by your elected politicians?indeed, "Nazi" seems to be your favorite insult.  At times it sounds to us as though everyone who isn't a German is now a Nazi. Unless, of course, we are talking of Arabs who murder Jews, in which case a good German speaks of freedom fighters.
 
Here in America, Holocaust survivors live among us, as do those aging G.I.s who opened the gates to Dachau.  They have been our fathers, our teachers and our neighbors.  Is it any wonder that we find your rhetoric repulsive?  Hitler, at least, was honest about his bigotry.
 
And now we must endure the ludicrous schizophrenia of your present society, in which you alternate between insisting that German guilt must have an end and indulging in revisionist history that equates the allied bombing campaign against your cities or the sinking of ships ferrying submarine crews with Nazi evils.
 
CONT>

Offline Ripsnort

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« Reply #1 on: July 02, 2003, 11:19:05 AM »
Your attempts to excuse the inexcusable merely remind us that Germany deserved every bomb dropped upon its soil.  Bush the equivalent of Hitler?
 
Show us the American death camps, please. As a lifelong admirer of German culture, you leave me in despair. Your chancellor has transformed the worthy old maxim "Be more than you  
appear to be" into "Appear to be more than you are."  Goethe's timeless query, "Germany, but where is it?" has been answered with "Between France and Russia, duped by Chirac and cooly manipulated by Putin."  And Faust has been outed as Professor Unrat. Auf wiedersehen, Lili Marleen.  It was great while it lasted.
 
And Marianne?  Since no one took Germany seriously to begin with, Berlin had less to lose in l'affaire Iraq than Paris.  France gambled with Dostoevskian abandon in the strategic casino and ended up bankrupt in the morning light.
 
President Chirac and his sorcerer's apprentice, Foreign Minister
Dominique de Villepin, emerged as one of the most incompetent combinations in diplomatic history, two drunkards behind the steering wheel of policy. It astonishes us that the French actually believed that Paris could terms to Washington. Sorry.  Gaul does not give orders to Rome.
 
We understood that Chirac was playing to the Arab world as well as to his domestic electorate.  But the succession of French refusals negotiate seriously or even to consider compromises at the United Nations, climaxed by France's announcement, in advance, that it would veto any further resolutions introduced by the United States or Britain, seemed suicidal to us.
 
And it was suicidal.  The legacy of Charles de Gaulle perished in the Security Council.  The tradition of permitting France a greater voice in trans-Atlantic decision-making than its place, power or contributions merited is over, as dead as Jean-Paul Sartre or his idol, Josef Stalin. The Gallic cock crowed so loudly it fell off the fence and broke its neck.  Washington will no longer entertain the views of Paris on vital international issues.  Nor will we risk another French veto on a matter we view as critical to our national security.  And we will feed the United Nations the crumbs of strategy. Far from expanding its influence, France has forced its collapse. A quick round of applause in Algeria is hardly worth the loss of America's ear.  Briefly the champion of all the anti-American forces in the worldfrom Libya to North Korea, France is left unable to resolve the civil strife in Ivory Coast.  And Paris will not be given a significant role in rebuilding Iraq.
 
France long has seemed to Americans to be the apotheosis of European hypocrisy.  While defending Saddam Hussein from "American aggression," Mr.Chirac hosted Robert Mugabe in Paris in a pathetic attempt to expand French influence into Anglophone Africa.  But I was in Zimbabwe when the visit  
occurred and the degree of fury the people of that country felt toward France for hosting Mugabe, whom they have nicknamed "Robodan Mugabevich", guaranteed that the French will never be welcome between the Zambezi and the Limpopo.
 
France seems to us an aging potato desperate to attract even the most diseased customers. But, above all, it is French naivete that leaves us shaking our heads. How could they so misjudge the situation?  Aren't the French supposed to be terribly clever and devious?  How could they be so clumsy, and on such a grand scale?
 
The short answer is that, like Arabs, they believed their own fantasies.  In addition to the forlorn illusion that France is still a great power, Mr. Chirac and Mr. de Villepin utterly misjudged George Bush. They had called him a cowboy for so long that they came to believe there was nothing to the man.  And they were wrong.
 
I did not vote for President Bush.  But, after 9/11/01, I was glad he was our president.  Had Al Gore been in the White House, we would have done the European thing and formed a committee to ask how we had brought disaster upon ourselves.  President Bush led a galvanized nation into a series of deliberate, carefully-considered actions that have broken back of one terrorist organization after another while removing a brutal, backward theocracy from one country and a blood-encrusted dictatorship from another.
 
And America is not finished.  We will no longer subscribe to the European system in which dictators may do as they wish with impunity within their own borders?your insistence on respect for national sovereignty simply means that Hitler would have been perfectly acceptable had he only killed German Jews.  And we will not follow the traditions of kings and kaisers in which heads of state are exempt from personal punishment, no matter their crimes.  We will go after the truly guilty, not the masses.
 
And no amount of insults hurled from beneath the Brandenburg Gate or from the Place de la Concorde will deter us. We are finished with your delight in weeping over past holocausts while you remain unwilling to act to prevent or interrupt new holocausts.
 
Srebrenica is the European model.  Baghdad is ours. President Bush is a Texan, as Europeans never fail to remind us. But the intelligence services of France and Germany seem to have failed to understand the character of Texans.  They don't speak artfully, but they act resolutely.  They aren't relativists.  Texans believe there is a difference between right and wrong.  And when you insult a Texan to his face while betraying his trust, he is not going to take it kindly.
 
Confronting a Texan in public is always ill-advised, unless you intend to fight it out to the end and have the means to do so.  Texans don't even care where Europe is on the map.
 
We Americans are all Texans now.  You have left us no choice.

Offline funkedup

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Offline Curval

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« Reply #3 on: July 02, 2003, 11:29:26 AM »
"And America is not finished. We will no longer subscribe to the European system in which dictators may do as they wish with impunity within their own borders?your insistence on respect for national sovereignty simply means that Hitler would have been perfectly acceptable had he only killed German Jews. And we will not follow the traditions of kings and kaisers in which heads of state are exempt from personal punishment, no matter their crimes. We will go after the truly guilty, not the masses."


Is Taylor's Liberia included...or is this just an anti-European rant?

This guy talks like a few notables we have here...and yet suggest to them that help is being requested of the US by Liberia thay suddenly turn into "We are not here to help everyone mode".

Which is it for heavan's sake?
Some will fall in love with life and drink it from a fountain that is pouring like an avalanche coming down the mountain

Offline -dead-

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« Reply #4 on: July 02, 2003, 11:36:42 AM »
I think you got a spot of froth around yer mouths there, boys.;)
“The FBI has no hard evidence connecting Usama Bin Laden to 9/11.†--  Rex Tomb, Chief of Investigative Publicity for the FBI, June 5, 2006.

Offline AWMac

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« Reply #5 on: July 02, 2003, 11:54:46 AM »
I just heard that Bermuda is commiting its entire Armed Forces to a Peacekeeping mission in Liberia... now if they can just find those two guys they'll shortly be on their way.  :D

I think the two are looking for the canoe...errr Naval Fleet.




:D

Offline Curval

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« Reply #6 on: July 02, 2003, 12:01:52 PM »
Sail-boards not canoes.  ;)

...and those two guys are damn hard to track down.:D
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Offline AWMac

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« Reply #7 on: July 02, 2003, 12:08:42 PM »
Dammmm.... couldn't get a rise out of the Jizz Kidd.... :D

Offline Krusher

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« Reply #8 on: July 02, 2003, 12:45:57 PM »
Quote
Originally posted by Curval

Is Taylor's Liberia included...or is this just an anti-European rant?

This guy talks like a few notables we have here...and yet suggest to them that help is being requested of the US by Liberia thay suddenly turn into "We are not here to help everyone mode".

Which is it for heavan's sake?


Secretary Powel was asked about Liberia Sunday. He said that the US is studying the situation and will make a decision when they are done. They are our representatives not the posters you refer too.

In my opinion we should act only when there is a clear strategy and not react in a knee jerk manner.

BTW excellent post RIP... it sums up what many of us are feeling.
« Last Edit: July 02, 2003, 01:18:20 PM by Krusher »

Offline Krusher

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« Reply #9 on: July 02, 2003, 12:58:45 PM »
Quote
Originally posted by Krusher
Secretary Powel was asked about Liberia Sunday. He said that the US is studying the situation and will make a decision when they are done. They are our representatives not the poisters you refer too.

In my opinion we should act only when there is a clear strategy and not react in a knee jerk manner.

BTW excellent post RIP... it sums up what many of us are feeling.


well heck I posted too slowly.. It was just announce that the US is going to send some kind of peace keeping force to Liberia
« Last Edit: July 02, 2003, 01:18:50 PM by Krusher »

Offline Wlfgng

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« Reply #10 on: July 02, 2003, 02:23:52 PM »
sail boards.. awesome...
sure beats using a bicycle!

Offline straffo

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« Reply #11 on: July 02, 2003, 03:25:43 PM »
hu ?
pfffffffffffffffffffffffff ...

what is the translation of : crétin congénital incapable de logique ?

Offline Toad

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« Reply #12 on: July 02, 2003, 04:16:51 PM »
I believe that translates simply as "Chirac".

:D
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!

Offline funkedup

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« Reply #13 on: July 02, 2003, 04:19:26 PM »
Quote
Originally posted by straffo
hu ?
pfffffffffffffffffffffffff ...

what is the translation of : crétin congénital incapable de logique ?


cretin, congenital, incapable, and logic are all words in English too.
But as Toad says, we just say "Chirac".  :)

Offline LoneStarBuckeye

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« Reply #14 on: July 02, 2003, 04:50:49 PM »
Beautiful :)  I'm sure Napoleon is rolling over in his grave.