SUPREME SACRIFICE: Iraq War Led The The President To Give Up Playing Golf. President Bush NOW says he didn’t trust pre-war intell and repeats oft repeated recent fear: a withdrawal will cause disaster.

GERMANY: HISTORY AND MEMORY
CHINA: DEATH TOLL RISING
BURMA: SINKING FAST

BERLIN: Berlin is a city of history and memory. Few, Jews who lived here in the 1920’s or 30’s believed i that a country with such historic culture could turn into an hotbed of aggressive fascism and external war. Germany was too civilized, or so it was thought.

We now know what happened—maybe not all of it—but enough of it to realize what a determined group of ideologically driven fanatics are capable of doing, especially at a time of economic downturn and depression. Using fear and spreading hatred, a government decided to build national pride around the idea of a master race accompanied by the demonization and genocidal scapegoating of Jews and others.

Somehow, the crimes of the war have faded in the public memory and been replaced by the crimes committed after the war, during the cold war, as discovered when I wandered over to the area called Checkpoint Charlie, once the border post dividing what was the American Sector—Berlin was divided in four sectors after the war by the then allies—and the Soviet Sector. This later became the epicenter of East-West confrontation when The Soviet Zone morphed into East Germany.

Today it is a tourist attraction with a guy wearing a US WW 2 uniform, holding an American flag, and taking pictures with sightseers for a Euro or two. Then you walk around an enclosed area and read the history of the place on a wall that takes you from the war’s end through the Berlin Airlift and the building of the Wall. You read about how people who tried to escape were shot down, about worker’s risings against the brutishness of the East German government, the role of the Stasi, the East German secret police that had spies everywhere (see stasimuseum.de) and then, finally, the change in the political situation under Gorbachev, and the dismantling of the wall. Some of it, the remanants of the Wall is still be sold on EBAY, only small sections of it remain on display.

The Berlin Wall was imposed in a time of paranoia–fear of skilled workers being recruited to leave as a form of Economic warfare aimed at weakening the State, and a fear of infiltrators. The Berlin Wall was just one TENTH of the whole divided border. 2.5 million people left before it was erected; 200,000 actually moved to the East.

According to one history, “The drain of East Germany’s population into West Germany was hugely damaging for the East German economy and society; one Western economist calculated that by 1957, the westward migration had cost East Germany over 22.5 billion marks in lost educational investment. So it wasn’t totally irrational but it also wasn’t very smart, was it? It was largely Stalin’s idea, no surprise.

There seemed to be few buyers of memorabilia from the days of the DDR (East Germany) although I was interested to learn that the country’s last official act was a public concert right near my hotel of Beethoven’s 9th. That’s how they went out. Before the Wall went down, I believe, Pink Floyd blasted the Wall with, what else, The Wall.

Of course you don’t learn anything about what former citizens of that country told me was its positive achievements including fighting Nazism after the war, advancing the rights of women, providing nursery schools for all kids, a vibrant if controlled culture including the plays of Bertold Brecht, and even the funding of liberation movements in Southern Africa.

All of that memory has been wiped out with layers of thick anti-socialist cold war propaganda, some of it true, some of it very selective. The East Germans did not have the economic advantages that came with the the Marshall Plan or the help of the far more effective propaganda purveyed by the Axel Springer media machine and its allies. Just as communism was a religion for some of its adherents, anti-communism was a religion for many of us in the West. US troops defended West Germany against “them;” the then Soviet bloc defended them against us. And in the middle, there emerged a big anti-war anti-missile movement in West Germany when a new generation there and here called for peace.

The irony today is that it is easier to get access to the archive of the Stasi than the files of the CIA. And I was more revolted by the latter–which kept files on me–than the former. That does not mean I feel any nostalgia for the authoritarianism of that suffocating system. I wouldn’t have wanted to live under it just as I do not like living under the fear ministry of the Busheviks who seem to have adapted some of its more disgraceful aspects.

As for the greater crimes commited by Germany, there is also a large abstract Holocaust memorial near the Brandenburg Gate. It was designed by by architect Peter Eisenman …, according to the Wilkipedia entry, to “produce an uneasy, confusing atmosphere, and the whole sculpture aims to represent a supposedly ordered system that has lost touch with human reason. A 2005 copy of the Foundation for the Memorial’s official English tourist pamphlet, however, states that the design represents a radical approach to the traditional concept of a memorial, partly because Eisenman did not use any symbolism. An attached underground “Place of Information” (German: Ort der Information) holds the names of all known Jewish Holocaust victims, obtained from the Israeli museum Yad Vashem.”

There were also many criticisms of this somewhat abstract artistic structure. Again, in the Wikipedia:

“In 1998, German novelist Martin Walser cited the Holocaust Memorial in his public condemnation of Germany’s “Holocaust industry.” Walser decried the “exploitation of our disgrace for present purposes.” He criticized the “monumentalization”, and “ceaseless presentation of our shame.” “Take all the towns in the world”, said Walser. “Check whether in any of these towns there is a memorial of national ignominy. I have never seen such. The Holocaust is not an appropriate subject of a memorial and such memorials should not be constructed…” The “place of information” has been criticized as breaking with the tradition of having informational museums attached directly to various German Holocaust sites.

For me these memorials were not as important as my first meeting members of my own extended family who survived the holocaust and moved in later years from Belarus to Germany. I had my first encounter with their history which could have been mine, had my Grandmother not emigrated to the United States. My young cousin Masha told me she has problems relating to these events that happened so long ago but believes that her High School in Berlin handled the subject of the war well.

As we know, history is written by the winners. And there is a big air of cold war-capitalist triumphalism which goes by the name of freedom here. Of course, there are no mention of Allied war crimes like the bombing of Dresden or the western companies that traded with and helped fund the Nazis. One of my cousins told me about a book he just bought—a first edition of industrialist Henry Ford’s “The International Jew,” a smarmy anti-Semitic tract. That was the reason my family never bought a Ford. Nazis come in many shapes and sizes.

A counter parallel today is offered up by a NY Judge who is allowing a law suit against the US companies that profited from their support of apartheid in South Africa. Already, many victims of the holocaust here have received compensation from German companies that fueled the ovens and backed Hitler. So far, no South Africans have, nor have American companies that profited in their dealings with Nazi Germany been put in the dock. Sorry to bring it up, but it happened and was shoveled under the rug of righteousness.

POLL: DEMOCRACY IS GOOD, WE WOULD LIKE MORE OF IT: Governments Widely Seen as Serving Big Interests, Not the People

A WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 19 nations conducted around the world finds that, in every nation polled, publics support the principles of democracy. At the same time, in nearly every nation, majorities are dissatisfied with how responsive their government is to the will of the people.

In all 19 nations polled majorities agree with the democratic principle that “the will of the people should be the basis for the authority of government”–a principle enunciated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, whose 60th anniversary is being celebrated this year. On average 85 percent agree–52 percent strongly. Across the 19 nations, 74 percent say that the “will of the people” should have more influence than it currently does.

“The perception that governments are not responsive to the popular will appears to be contributing to the low levels of confidence in government found around the world,” comments Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org. Kull adds: “Most see their governments as primarily serving big interests rather than the people as a whole.”

The poll of 17,525 respondents was conducted between January 10 and March 20, 2008 by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a collaborative research project involving research centers from around the world and managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) at the University of Maryland. Interviews were conducted in 19 nations, though in three of them not all questions were asked.

ANOTHER POLL FINDS GLOOM IN THE USA

WP: U.S. Outlook Is Worst Since ‘92, Poll Finds–Americans are gloomier about the direction of the country than they have been at any point in 15 years, and Democrats hold their biggest advantage since early 1993 as the party better able to deal with the nation’s main problems, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, reports Jon Cohen and Dan Balz.