h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Melvyn,

Due to the log in issues on this site, some couple of months ago, I was unable up to now to respond to your latest post on the other thread.

I hope you´re well and because tomorrow it´s the last day before I get off into my holiday, I take this opportunity to wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

I hope that we´ll meet on this site after my return on January 7th and I also hope that in the meantime this site won´t have any other issues that might Keep me out of it.

Best wishes,

Thomas

Hello Thomas

Good to hear from you.. I realized that you too suffered from the Log-in issues...I hope you have been keeping well...My current theme is "We Made it!", with my current thinking owing much to a book that I discovered a few weeks ago in my favourite source of books, our local charity shop...Having looked almost all the way back from Z towards A without finding anything, I saw an old French-type book with the title "Modern Democracies" (in French version). Picking it up I found that not only was it printed in 1924 but also that no-one had ever actually read this copy.. I instantly recalled more than 50 years ago when we were given a French book and told to cut the pages, because (to save costs) the pages were printed in large sheets, that were folded up and bound together, so that it is up to the reader to take a paper knife and cut the pages.

The author is Lord James Bryce a British academic, MP, minister and British ambassador to Washington, where he became friendly with Woodrow Wilson: and I realized that it was intended as a contribution to the Wilsonian vision of the Brave New World that could be created by the Treaty of Versailles and the universalization of democracy: lessons that are absolutely necessary in the global challenges right now.

This is only the second volume, but his evaluation of the way that the USA was being governed was revelatory and explains a great deal concerning the weaknesses of the USA and why it cannot lead the world anywhere...I did not think that the second study- Australia- would be so revelatory, but it has proven to be so because of its connection with Britain, Europe, Socialism and "Labour"..

The book was actually written in English in 1921, and it is difficult to read it without thinking that, if no-one else did Hitler and Stalin might well have drawn inspiration from the way that Democracy could lead on to totalitarianism via the party system.

Along with other "input" it has got me writing to the press etc, and writing some articles...Perhaps you will have time to print off some reading for your Christmas break.

I hope you have a great Holiday Season.


Cheers

Melvyn

Here is my annual Christmas "Good News" letter

MERRY XMAS 2015

Well it’s that time of year again!

I had been wondering what my ‘Good News’ theme would be: and then, when we made it back safely to Calais on November 15th, I found myself exclaiming “Yes. We made it!”, and immediately realised that this was not just about that drive, but the whole year.

And then I realized that it was probably a feeling that was going to be shared by many people this year, though perhaps not all so ‘self-inflicted’.

To some extent that was the case with the hernia operation that I had in January for I had been putting it off for several years. It went really well and I was passed fit to drive after a couple of weeks. And Sylvie’s on-going struggle with smoking might count as well, and as well as many of her health scares that have come from her passionate application to gardening. Fortunately her fears about contracting Limes Disease, or having a cracked rib, or damaged an eye etc. have so far led to nothing serious.


To some extent the same applies to the challenges involved in getting on ‘top of things’ in two houses and gardens. My ‘roof project’ is nearing completion: but it is not obvious that any end is in sight for our attempts to ‘downsize’ the piles of things that have just accumulated here so we can “put our own house in order’.


And in this, as in many other ways too, our new roles and responsibilities as grandparents have been a major catalyst for change. Vanessa’s old room was an obvious place to focus upon for it had largely become a place to store things, much of it hers. So it had become something of a dump. So Pascal came over and flexed his muscles to help us to totally clear and a decorator has left us with a lovely new ‘blank-canvas’. I have now added a solid-wood floor; and we just had a trip to IKEA for some new furniture. Perhaps what was displaced and dumped elsewhere will soon ‘get sorted’ and not just get put back where it was.


This all makes the sense of space in Bligny most welcome; and Vanessa, Daryl and Isobelle have come over for short stays with even Pascal managing a lightning visit in the autumn. Sylvie’s parents are always overjoyed to see their grandchildren and their second great-granddaughter: and in March we were able to rediscover the arts of baby-sitting, when Vanessa and Daryl had their first ‘evening out’ alone together since Isobelle was born.


It was during that stay that Vanessa told us that she had booked some accommodation for late July in Villar d’Arene, and hoped that we might be able to spend some time together. It firmed up our thoughts about our ageing caravan and by our trip to Bormes in May we had bought a new awning, which we were generally delighted with, though the enduring memory of that holiday is the incredibly hot weather.
On the day we had arrived in March the TV News featured the fact that people had been on the beaches and some ventured into the waves, whereas 12 months ago they had been building snowmen. And by the time we went back on our third trip in July all of Nature struggling with a severe drought.


In the meantime we knew that the rumblings of Nature had forced the closure of one of the major tunnels we take up into the Alps, which meant a huge diversion, that came on top of a sequence of car troubles over recent months. So we finally set out two days behind schedule, opting for the motorway through Switzerland and Italy to catch up some time: and we were ‘making camp’ in the early evening when we saw Vanessa arriving with Daryl and with Isobelle riding in queenly fashion on her father’s back taking everything in as she invariably does. It was time for a cup of tea: and, as it was Vanessa’s birthday, it was another chance for her to make a celebratory day even more-so by giving us some more good news. Another ‘Special Delivery’ is due in March time!


In the four days we had left ‘en famille’ we managed the drive over the impressive Col du Galibier and down again to walk up the ‘circuit of the three lakes’ on the Wednesday, picnicking by the second and largest lake, where our encounter with a donkey was just one of many things that Isobelle got excited about.


A rainy day ruled out a second walk and we were glad of the awning to as part of our ‘base camp’. And once they had come to take their leave on the Saturday we could stay on for a few days and more walks before gently meandering around the 200 km diversion back to Bligny.
And I suppose that it was at least in part the benefit of the mountains that gave me the impetus to finally tackle my longstanding project to build a shelter for the caravan, that subsequently grew, as projects tend to, but was more or less finished by the time we closed up Bligny up for the winter in November.


Another ‘date for the diary’ that Vanessa told us about in March was that of her baptism in early May, in the village church at Leafield, which was my mother’s native village. I had not been there for 55 years and Vanessa only got to know Leafield, when an old friend moved there a few years ago: and it seemed to be an appropriate Thomas Hardy “Return of the Native” moment.


So , though an old-school reunion the evening before meant that the early start was another challenge, I parked by the familiar churchyard with a couple of minutes to spare, noticing immediately the house just opposite, to which my grandparents retired, and the farm my grandfather had worked. And after the service, both before and after the lunch party, I had some time to wander around and ‘touch base’ with ‘my roots’, though ‘disturbing roots’ is not without its own consequences.


Still ‘all things daily grow’: and by the time we were back in England in mid-August we were very much aware of ‘life moving on’. Isobelle reached the grand age of one on August 27, which was a good excuse for a modern version of an ‘English-summer barbecue’, English Augusts these days not being much like those I used to know. And a few weeks before this Vanessa had come to the end of her maternity leave. Fortunately Vanessa and Daryl have been able to restructure their work in order to maximise the time they can be with her: : and we have tried to visit regularly and helping out any way we can, which increasingly means spending time with Isobelle, who “does not stop” as the French put it.


It is something that Uncle Pascal and Auntie Jasna have not been able to do as much as they would like. Sunday is still the only non-working day they have in common, outside of the school holidays. But we have all managed to all get to High Wycombe to celebrate both Pascal’s and (eventually) Vanessa’s birthdays. And we even managed to assemble, minus Jasna, in Bligny in early November for Maurice and Yvette’s 93rd birthdays. That was a trip that involved new adventures all designed to make it possible to keep in touch in the future via Skype: and Skype is now cheering up our ‘darkest hours’ of the year: while once again the weather amazed us being more like Spring than late autumn.


So, as the nurse said to be on my annual check-up last week “You are keeping active then?” And that too applies to us all most of the time, though we are not all as active as Isobelle, while just at the moment Jasna is recuperating from knee surgery that should have rectified a niggling problem.


But three months leave from work is not really unalloyed hardship for an artist: and Pascal too is looking to new creative ventures for a major feature of his year has been his increasing work as a sound engineer, and he has been asked to work as a studio engineer on a new CD that could prove a ‘breakthrough’ moment.

As for Vanessa, she does not seem to be daunted by anything, and is hosting our family Christmas this year. And the Christmas story after all is very much to do with family that had to make challenging journey and ‘made it’ “In the Bleak Mid-Winter” and opened up a whole new era of hope for Peace on Earth and Goodwill to all Humankind.
So, I have been reflecting upon Sylvie’s comment on our first return to Calais this year, when we saw some young migrants from the Sangat encampment and she said that they looked “just like us”.

And indeed they were much like we were at their age, about fifty years ago in the ‘Rolling Stone’ Sixties, when the world was “Blowing in the Wind” , the “Wind of Change”. And it is just possible that the recent Paris Climate Agreement may mean that we will leave a more hopeful and harmonious world to our grandchildren.

“WE MADE IT!”
1
2015- ANOTHER YEAR OF “THE BURSTING OF THE DYKES”

There was a moment on 15 November 2015, when, after we had successfully checked in for the Car Ferry at Calais I punched the air and exclaimed with some relief “We made it”.

And I immediately realized that I was not talking of just completing another 500+ kilometre drive so far that day, with only another 100 to go. And not even what has been a whole year of tests and challenges for us two, because that had quite probably been much the same story for all the people I would soon be writing to for Christmas: and even beyond them, in fact to all of those people, who will eventually “make it” through into 2016.


THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
It was early in 2014 that I decided that the phrase “The Bursting of the Dykes” was applicable to the challenges that were confronting the world, borrowing it from a chapter of G.G. Coulton’s 1938, “Medieval Panorama” in which Coulton used it to sum up the events that swept away the ‘Middle Ages’ and created the ‘Modern World’.

But it is difficult to read Coulton’s description of the forces that were to shape to the Renaissance and Reformation without feeling that his analysis was overshadowed by the contemporary growth of Fascism and Nazism in these years: the new dynamics that were leading the world towards a new Dark Age in the 1930s. And in much the same way many people have seen similarities between the sheer horror of some of the events of this year and those dark days of barbarous regimes with policies of genocide and extermination.

Certainly that came naturally to someone of my generation, born in 1944, to grow up in a world that was learning more and more about what had happened when, as Winston Churchill put it, Hitler and his Nazis were told that they could to “do their worst”, while “we” would “do our best”.

As it turned out our “best” had involved the carpet bombing German cities, including the city of Dresden, which, much like the bombing of Hiroshima, seems to have been chosen at least in part because it had remained largely intact and thus offered the opportunity to show just what evil and destructive power the “United Nations” were now prepared to use, the kind of power that was continually refined and developed throughout the military stalemate of the Third World War. Perhaps especially through the eyes of childhood it all seemed so deeply tragic. In this New Millennium the image of bombed out cities has become all too familiar once again

So in January, it was in the light of much personal and collective History that I watched the Parisian authorities deploy their militarised police units during the Charlie Hebdo crisis, the kind of militarised units that have a long history in France arguably going back to Napoleon Bonaparte’s use of a ‘whiff of grapeshot”: and I wondered in the immediate aftermath, when plenty of Parisians, and friends of Paris, rallied to show their support of the city’s values and historical importance, whether Paris and France were going to avoid the trap of giving the terrorists exactly the kind of response that they wanted, the kind of response that would strengthen their own case before the judgement of their target audience, as probably happened after 9/11.

Most people think first of the Iraq War as the main response to 9/11, forgetting that the most immediate response was for the authorities to encourage the Western consumer to save the global economy after a 20% slump in Stock Exchange values around the world threatened the whole edifice that was heavily based on the economics of mass-production and conspicuous consumption. In response to being urged to defy the terrorists by going out to ‘spend, spend, spend’, the Western consumer went out to defend the Western values and way of life that were under-attack armed with easy credit card terms, which all encouraged the massive borrowing and accumulation of unsustainable personal debt that became the ‘way of life’ for the New Millennium, until the Financial Crisis of 2008 threatened to bring the whole edifice crashing down in a World Chaos like that of 1932-3.

So, in our first visit of the year to Burgundy in March, I raised some of my concerns about the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ attacks with the young man, who works in the local community centre, questioning this idea that consciously trying to offend people by deliberately violating things that they hold sacred can be counted as a sign of being civilized. To which he responded with “Well! That is how things work in France”. To which I responded: “But things in France are not working”.

Looking back, I suppose there was a tinge of tetchiness in the exchange. Mine perhaps partly to do with the fact that I had had an operation January from which I was still in recuperation: and his may have reflected the same kind of irritation with Great Britain that I have only discovered before in the aftermath of the War in Iraq.

THE WAY THINGS WORK, AND DO NOT WORK, IN FRANCE

And in 2015 the issue causing some tetchiness towards Great Britain on the French Media was the problem of migrants, with particular reference to the Sangat encampment at Calais. For at a time when France had more than enough ‘home grown’ problems, it was often stressed that the challenges that the Sangat migrants pose for France were really ‘made in Britain’: and France could do little or nothing to solve them.

Both the migrants, who have already ‘made it’ to Sangat and ‘infest’ the local area, and those who are making their way right across from Marseilles to Calais, were adamant when interviewed that there was nothing that France could offer them that would make them stay in France. And, when asked just why, they stayed quiet or said that France was ‘no good’, especially for black people, for they were not treated with respect.

In fairness the fact that very few of those interviewed in this way spoke French suggests that they were not migrants from the large ‘Francophone’ regions of Africa, or from “France Overseas”. But in France as in England, “colonialism in reverse” has resulted in immigrants often being channelled into lives of entrapment in ghettos of poverty and disadvantage, with similar and different results. So people probably only choose to migrate to such places if they are likely to find a ‘first port of call’ with already established friends and family to give them a start in their new life.
And given a ‘free market’ choice between Britain and France, either the myth or the reality, was that Great Britain was being seen as some kind of modern ‘El Dorado’ acting like a magnet. It was essentially the same argument that Hungary was to put forward later in the year regarding the role of Germany in the dramatic surge of migrants and refugees into and up the Balkans.

Certainly the struggle to cope with the “Sangat problem” has been very visible in around the Calais Car Ferry complex this year. Disembarking for our first trip of the year, we saw the new and formidable steel fencing topped with razor wire: and on our return journey the defences had been augmented by a Police presence, which might have had something to do with the time of day.

There are activities that are best suited to the hours of darkness, and we were rolling up to catch the early evening ferry, only to find the carriageway ahead blocked by Police vans with armed ‘gendarmes’ standing guard. Before moving over to the left hand carriageway I glanced over to check on the current state of the Sangat encampment that was mushrooming amidst the dunes: and a kilometre of so further on, when we turned into the slip-road leading down to the port, suddenly there was a group of pedestrians walking up by the side of the road, who then abruptly milled across between the traffic just ahead of us, with much of the same ‘insouciance’ as young people might cross any inner city road in the UK.

WARS OF DESTRUCTION AND THE GREAT ‘WAR OF CONSTRUCTION’

My wife looked up from Gardeners’ Question Time, said- “Oh! They look just like us”, and got back to GQT.

It was a sentiment that was to become something of an oft repeated theme about migrants for the rest of the year, sometimes expressed in a tone of some surprise that is understandable in people of our generation. As children of the 1940s we grew up in a world awash with a desperate mass of humanity just trying to get by from day today, anywhere, anyhow, in the world of continental desolation created by a war of destruction that had killed 55 million people.

The refugees of 2015 were a rather different species: and the fact that these times are different to ours, was brought home to me later in the year, when I heard a victim of modern-day slavery pick-out as the very worst moment of her life the day, when she found she did not have £5 to put some credit on her mobile phone. Different generations have different challenges and expectations, but I suppose my wife put her finger on the truth with the kind of incisive French thinking that Mrs. Thatcher admired.

Indeed these migrants were very much “just like us” as we were ‘at their age’, about fifty years ago. That was when, very much in the ‘Sixties’ mood of ‘one-world fusion’, we embarked upon this project to carve out a life for ourselves stuck between England and France like an experimental missing piece in a puzzle.

‘At their age’ we were the generation, who were supposed to eventually “inherit” the One World Earth, after the most destructive war in History. And we were brought up with that dark legacy amidst privation and rationing that gradually improved, only to have to come to terms with the fact that we were living through a ‘Third World War’. But it was not like the world wars that our parents and grandparents had been caught up in. The threat of an unleashing of the ‘war of destruction’ was ever-present, for the destructive capabilities of the two sides was being constantly refined and improved in an Arms Race that kept us constantly a mere few days from “the Eve of Destruction”. But, this time unlike the years before 1914, it was accepted that a “great war” had become unthinkable and totally counter-productive as a conscious instrument of policy: though the man at the head of the US Strategic Command, Curtis le May could say that should the Nuclear Holocaust destroy almost all Humanity, only leaving a new Adam and Eve to start again in a world free from Communism he could count that as a victory.

But the USSR had lived through something almost like that during the Second World War, when the combination of the German invasion, a repetition of the traditional Russian ‘scorched Earth policy, and the terrible struggle to defeat the Nazis, which cost 20 million lives and left much of the USSR in ruins, wiping away the heroic achievements of Stalin’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ through ‘Socialism in One Country’.

In 1945, however, the USSR was in the position to promote socialism in more than one country, as the two countries that had now emerged as ‘Superpowers’ sought to spread their own power, influence and way of life, as they contemplated when and how to move from the waging of war to the waging of peace.

In fact it was only in the mid-fifties after the death of Stalin that the new Soviet leadership declared the Second World War to be over, and, in that world in which the needs of reconstruction were so massive challenged “the West” to a “war of construction”, a kind of scientific experiment to test whether the existing Capitalist order or the new Communist order could deliver the higher material standard of life to the masses, the most fundamental premise of Marxism being that only material reality really matters and that the ideas of immaterial, imponderable, moral, spiritual, judicial or humane values had always been disseminated by ‘ruling establishments’ throughout History as cynical ploys that made it possible for those in power to rob the masses of material wealth, which was really all that they themselves really cared about.

WAR AND THE AFTERMATH OF WAR

This ‘war of construction’ lasted for forty years and these young migrants had been thrust into the world to inherit a different destiny.

Writing shortly after the collapse of the ‘Soviet Empire’ and the fall of Communism, the British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm observed for the first time for almost two hundred years the world had no real structure or coherence, while the US Historian Francis Fukuyama had said that the world was living ‘after the end of History’. Either way the world had no clear forward thrust or purpose.

So while our generation was faced with the challenge of living with the aftermath of the two great wars of destruction, totalling 9 years, while two Superpowers fought their ‘war of construction’ over the right to claim the future, young people today face the challenge of living with the legacy of 40 years of that far from ‘phoney’ war: a legacy that includes:

[A] THE LOSS OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

It was the French who brought the American revolutionary ideal of “Government of the people by the people” to Europe in 1789 and tried to spread it by force of arms. And France gave the Statue of Liberty to the USA as a modern “Great Wonder of the World” and an iconic emblem of America’s role as a beacon of Hope for the whole world. So when Martin Luther King shared his “dream” with the world in 1963, “a dream rooted in the American Dream”, it spoke to our global generation.

But by 1968 the cracks were showing, not least when Dr. King was assassinated. It was a dream that was beginning to look like “a bridge too far” in this generation, as Dr. King intimated in his last great speech, a speech that his ‘team’ forced him to make as the only man who might have been able to quell the dangerous upsurge of the “men of violence”. “I may not get there with you but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land”.
By the early 1970s it became very obvious from the failure of the US military effort in Vietnam and the OPEC Oil Crisis that the USA was not actually as powerful as had been thought, or offered a way of life or a global project that even the ‘flower’ of its Youth wanted to really embrace. But this weakening in the credibility of both the constructive American Dream and the destructive American forces persuaded some at least that, whether they really wanted American Dream or not, they knew that they did not want Communism. And among the ‘strange bed-fellows’ perhaps the most important were the Saudi Royal Family.

Nothing really could be much further from the ‘American Dream’ than the traditions of the Wahhabite form of Islam, of which the Head of Saudi Royal family was the unchallenged leader. All of the Wahhabite people owed personal allegiance and submission to the King, whose duties included ‘holding court’ daily, as kings did from time immemorial so that any citizen could come to see him personally over any problem. The King also acted as the Guardian of the Holy places in Mecca.

But, while the traditional ‘crown resources’ available to fund the work of government had been a proportion of the camels bred each year and a tithe on the date harvest, the Saudi Arabian oil fields, which were by far the greatest in the world, were treated as the personal property of the Royal Family, and it was an American Company that got the contracts to develop them President Roosevelt helping to seal the deal at a time when the USA needed to achieve “Oil Security” in order to be able to act as the ‘workshop of the free world’ and defeat Nazism.

So, even if the Wahhabite way of life was very alien to the American Dream, America had a tradition of keeping business and politics apart, at least in its international affairs. America was “the land of the free” and treated other countries as having the same right to work life out in their own way, as long as they respected the right of others to do the same. But Communism had triumphed in Russia by a violent ‘coup’ staged by a small band of extremists who then took over the machinery of government, and spread not only its ideology but also its methodology: and the King of Saudi Arabia had very good reason to feel threatened by Communism and the possibility of military aggression from neighbouring states where “Godless Communism” that was either taking root or at least being flirted with as Colonel Nasser of Egypt had done in the 1950s, when he played the two Cold War Superpowers off one against the other, as would be suitors.

So, even though there was much in US and wider “Western” culture that was anathema to the Wahhabites, from the time of the OPEC Oil Crisis Saudi Arabia played a crucial role in making sure that the USA did not falter or fail in the struggle against Communism. But the opposite was also true. There was much in Saudi Arabia and its authoritarian government, and if fact in many other governments with which the USA retained friendly relations because their shared anti-Communism was more important than their shared Dreams that disquieted or shocked many people in America and abroad. As the “Prohibition Era” of the 1920s, and the era of ‘Savage Capitalism’ that prompted it, had shown, there was much in the USA that was anathema to many devoutly religious people in the USA, many of whom still clung to the Puritan values of the first New England colonies, or to the Gospel values of the Baptist Churches that had been so important in the lives of African-Americans, as the musician and Human Rights activist Barbara Hendrix has explained in her autobiography.

And to some extent the “American Dream” went downhill from the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and then that of Martin Luther King as the enduring conspiracy theories around those are other tragedies all suggested the return of a troubled USA, in which “The Grapes of Wrath” were less evident than they had been during the Great Depression. Things were better managed in these conditions of this unusual “Third World War”, when great care was taken to “Keep up appearances” and distance the USA from its “savage” past.

So, much as, back in 1942 Harold Nicholson, on an official visit to Dublin, wishing to counter Irish resentment over the old Britain of the rampant lion, “raw in tooth and claw”, referred to “the British lion as an elderly, replete, self-satisfied, moth-eaten animal”, something similar might be written about the great American Bald Eagle. And perhaps if it had not been so the outside world might have been even more alarmed by the election of Ronald Reagan, an old B-Movie actor to the White House. But by then the wider world, and perhaps many Americans, had learned not to expect too much from the USA. It was only in Hollywood movies that it could offer any kind of ‘Dreamland’: but, in fact, the old ‘Dream Factory’ was probably making more money from nightmarish scenarios.

[B] AN ARMED AND ARMING WORLD.

It was the US President Woodrow Wilson who highlighted the dangers of what Neville Chamberlain later called “an armed and arming world”, when he presented his blueprint for a world without war, judging that the great Arms Race in the decades before 1914 had led to a great war with a certain inevitability: and his famous Fourteen Points for peace addressed that problem calling for the destruction of Germany’s ‘Heavy’ weapons and Fleet as the first step towards a general disarmament.

In fact it could be argued that had Great Britain not carried on the English tradition of having no ‘standing army’ in time or peace, so that in 1914 the German Kaiser could be dismissive of Britain’s “contemptible little army”, perhaps the German High Command would have thought a little more about invading Belgium. Certainly by the time that the world was faced with the militaristic and totalitarian states of Germany, Italy, Japan and the USSR Winston Churchill’s argument that “military weakness” is the greatest possible encouragement to an enemy was convincing.

But, in so far as world does have a post-Cold War agenda, it has fallen back on that Wilsonian-American Dream with the idea of the ‘government of the people by the people’ being spread around the world in accordance with Wilson’s remedy for the woes of the world, that is the dismantling of great empires and the creation of a post-imperial world in accordance with the will of ‘small self-determined nations’. And indeed the 40+ years of the ‘war of construction’ did see that process, but this time accompanied by armament rather than disarmament.

But, whereas a conventional ‘great war’ like the First World War and the Second World War matches together the “war of construction” on the Home Front with the “war of destruction” waged on Front Lines, because applying the methods of an Industrial Age to the Art and Science of War involves an effort that is never-ending because weapons and munitions are being used and destroyed in equal measure to the millions of men, and more are always needed for the next ‘great push’, a great “war of construction” unaccompanied by a “war of destruction” just keeps creating stock-piles of weapons.
And, in fact, it was not just any-old Arms Race that triggered the First World War, but the way that the vast geopolitical changes that are still at work had raised up the power and importance of New York, Berlin and Moscow, as the railway revolution radically changed the strategic importance and economic potential of the lands that connected Europe with Asia. For all three the railways opened up revolutionary possibilities, though the creation of a huge hinterland for New York in North America did not create the same tensions as the vast hinterlands that were linked Berlin and Moscow, connecting both to the Pan-German and Pan-Slav movements that hoped to spread into former Turkish lands.

For half a millennium the Turkish Empire had dominated this region having wrested control away from the Arab peoples a thousand years ago, only to become the “Sick Man of Europe” in the late Nineteenth Century. It was the massive geopolitical scale of the possibilities for good or evil that produced such vast armies that were sent to war as the Assassination at Sarajevo in 1914 set in motion the drift, what A.J.P. Taylor has called “War By Time Table” because the start of the war, and much of the conduct of the war was determined by the railway systems.

But back in Oxford in the previous century and looking through that special window through which it is possible to see other worlds, including Utopia, T.E. Lawrence had conceived a ‘Jurassic Park’ idea of calling back into being the old Arab world with its “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”: and having become an expert on Arab cultures and languages he was tasked with raising up the Arabs into a war of terror and guerrilla disruption fuelled by bags of gold and consignments of weapons with the promise of winning “national independence” only to be disappointed and dismayed when Great Britain and France were given the task of administering the Turkish imperial possessions in order to handle their transition to ‘self-determined nations’. But then, by implication at least they were charged to do the same with the German Empire, and their own.

But the Wilsonian vision of the new world order was compromised more or less from the start. Of the three powers that were to become the Superpowers of the mid-20th century, the USA refused to sign the peace negotiated by its President and neither Germany nor Russia had any say in the talks. Nevertheless as the whole idea of a massive Peace Congress was not repeated after 1945, the basic thrust of the Versailles vision was still ‘in place’, and in fact it was consistent with British policy in 1815, at the beginning of some attempt to create a world order that would replace the idea of ‘the Balance of Power’.

THE WORLD OF BOUTROS GHALI

But as we can see by just looking through the life of Boutros Boutros Ghali before he became UN Secretary General in 1992 this was most unlikely to be a disarming world.

As a student in Paris and Rome on his way to become a Professor of Political Science at Cairo he had friends from many places, and made many ties, but they included ties linked to his Egyptian identity that attracted him to the idea of a Pan-Arab movement. Like many people he admired the work of Bismarck and the Pan-German movement, and indeed a lose Pan Arab League was created in 1945, which led to the Yom Kippur War in 1967. Much like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1 this war seems to have been intended, by some people at least, to show how what had been a loose confederation of states could suddenly become a decisive military power and claim a new status in the world as a consequence. In this case the Arab states surrounding Israel all agreed to attack Israel on this most holy day of the Jewish calendar, and destroy it as an independent state that had been set up without UN sanction and so had no clear legal status. But the result was a humiliating defeat and a lesson to Israel, and other states no doubt too, in the advisability of having up-to-date, modern weapon systems, and the personnel to handle them.

Many of those friendships were revisited when Ghali, having been called out of academia to serve as a minister in the Sadat government, he attended a Pan-African Conference. Many of the other representatives were known to him from his university days as fellow students, or as students he had taught, while others had been taught by the same lecturers who had taught him. They were all part of a new post-imperial ‘establishment’ and, the career path that he shared with them may well have been just the natural trajectory of a very similar background.

Ghali has written that in Egypt since Ancient time families are either ‘those who govern’ or they are nothing: and his family was one of the 200 of those governing families. It meant that his grandfather had been appointed by the British to govern Egypt, and he got assassinated. He himself had hit upon hard times because his wife was Jewish and in the light of Communist influence in Egypt his wife’s property and much of his own family inheritance had been taken away “for the people”. But no one could take away his privileged education and there was nothing wrong with his position in Cairo University, until President Sadat arranged for him to be ‘called to serve’ once again.

So, when it came to the formal conference, Ghali could congratulate the leaders of the post-colonial African states on having agreed to accept the way that Africa had been divided up during the “Scramble for Land”, for he could understand how, for them as for him, things had just ‘fallen into their lap’. And Boutros could make much the same point in a speech to students in Montevideo University, congratulating Latin America too on having avoided wars that would try to change the borders from those inherited from the Spanish and Portuguese ‘Conquistadors’. The social inequalities in post-imperial Latin America had been a scandal more or less from the start, and students at university were likely to be young people born to privilege elites in the post-colonial republics, or heading there.
What is evident from the history of both continents is that the borders and sub-divisions had more to do with the outreach of a European ‘great power’ than any ‘on the ground’ realities. The Spanish and Portuguese came as “Conquistadors” and at independence descendants of Iberians who lived in the continent owned about 98% of all of the land, the landowning class accounting for about 2% of the population. So as the new order was created from the outside by force of arms it is hardly surprising that, for at least the first century and a half after independence the theme of “Arms and Politics” dominated current affairs in Latin America, with any government wishing to stay in power making sure, not only, that the military were ‘well looked after’ as one of the first calls on the attention, and the money available, to any government. And any Head of State, who ignores this rule, is likely to be unseated by a military ‘coup’: all of which does nothing to decrease the build-up of arms in Africa, even if militarism in Latin America may be on the wane.

The situation in Africa is very different in many respects, not least because it was not a “New World” to ‘Europeans’ in the Fifteenth Century but a very old world, most recently associated with the power of Islam that was threatening once again to over-run Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, though Iberia had managed to win a liberation struggle against ‘Moorish’ occupation after about 700 years.
But it is even more obvious from the political map of Africa than it is for Latin America that the frontiers are based on little or no knowledge of the ‘on the ground’ reality, or perhaps more accurately the ‘on the ground’ reality was not based on anything fixed and settled. The very specific nature of the African continent, with its great ‘table-top’ interior of grassland and desert encourages the migration of all creatures: and many of the frontiers are merely straight lines drawn upon a map based upon the lines of latitude and longitude that were so important in the creation of the Euro-centric world of wandering around in accordance with “the tides in the affairs of man”.

But, of course the Land can be divided up, ‘lorded over’ and exploited more easily than the oceans, and along with other aspects of Western Civilization Africa has embraced the idea of land-ownership and the rights of either individuals or collectives, even whole nations, now living to exercise their right to dispose of the Land at will. But this kind of ownership that finally came to England in the 1770s did impose the obligation to fence and ditch the land that you claim to own and to govern it responsibly in accordance with your responsibilities before the Law that sustains the rights that you claim so that you are not a nuisance to the neighbours. And ultimately, failing good governance, the State must enforce the law, if necessary by force of arms if those who defy the Law leave the authorities with no choice.

But the people too may feel that there has been a lack of ‘good governance’ and may also feel obliged to resort to violence, as so nearly happened to Boutros Boutros Ghali in the end. Just by chance, according to his own account, Ghali was unable to attend the function at which some soldiers marching passed President Sadat suddenly moved their machine guns into the firing position and sprayed the President and his bench with bullets. Ghali should have been sitting right next to him.

THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM AND BACK

It is generally assumed that Sadat was assassinated because he took the unprecedented step of going to Jerusalem in order to try to improve relations between the two countries and indeed did so, negotiating the return of the Egyptian lands and sharing a Nobel Peace Prize with the Israeli leader: and it seems likely that Boutros Boutros Ghali was invited into the Sadat Government because he had a Jewish wife and was an Egyptian Christian rather than a Muslim, and was not only more likely to be prepared to join in any such diplomatic effort, but also more likely to be at least-diplomatically received by Israeli representatives. Student days in Paris and Rome provided safe common ground when talking with people of a similar level of culture and sophistication. But the assassination of Sadat underlined just how difficult it was to deal with the complex problems surrounding Israel and the City of Jerusalem, and goes some way to explaining just why Saudi Arabian policy has contributed so much to flooding the Middle East with weapons.

When the Arab states launched the ‘Yom Kippur’ War they were beaten back by an Israel forces that were equipped with ‘state of the art’ US military technology, and at least the equivalent military training of any US forces, much of this heavily funded by the American Jewish community, because many Israelis had come to Palestine via America. The end result was a dramatic victory for the Israelis and humiliating defeat for the Arab states, most of which lost territory as Israel conquered territories that would give it buffer zones, or otherwise increase its defensive capability.

Many Arab states wanted to strike back and many attending OPEC demanded that they should use the “Oil Weapon” and destroy the USA. But the Saudis could see that if the US Economy was ‘destroyed’ the whole Western Economy, that was so heavily based on the public buying motor cars, often on credit, and building their work and leisure around the family car, might collapse. This would mean that the Capitalist “war of production” would most likely to crash and leave the victory to “Godless Communism”, not least because though popular feeling might briefly celebrate the humiliation of both Israel and the USA, if the global oil economy collapsed too the impact on their National Economy and their own ability to govern could be fatally undermined. In 1973 a British Government lost a General Election on the issue of the “right to rule” and non-democratic governments were not necessarily more immune from grass roots discontent.

And to some extent the Global Economy was not unlike a House of Cards. The weaknesses within US Industry that Galbraith had described in 1958 had not been remedied. US Economy had boomed to full employment when the British were ‘standing alone’ against the Axis Powers and desperately needed “the tools to finish the job” bought on the basis of Lend Lease: and shattered countries around the world once the war was over needed almost everything in order to rebuild, though those under Communist control were allowed to get them from the USA.

But in normal conditions American motor cars, for example, were still not suitable for exporting abroad, apart from anything else they were built to American scale, and as the US became more affluent, customers who wanted real quality bought manufactured goods from abroad, which helped countries in places like Europe and Japan, which had been rebuilding since 1945, for the USA was more or less the only place in the world where the consumers could afford to buy goods that were “Made in Britain” and other relatively high cost economies. J.K.Galbraith had acknowledged in 1958, however, that the US Defence Industry had excellent R&D with some of the best Scientists and Technicians in the world.

These were circumstances in which Saudi Arabia could play a crucial role in ‘playing for time’, for keeping the “Free World” “in” the Third World War until such time as the Communist challenge was defeated. And it did so in three ways:

(a) Its vast surplus Income from Oil was used to invest in the USA and to purchase properties there and in other Western, building up its own asset base, but also driving up ‘real estate’ values and therefore “Big Money” and National Wealth.

(b) Because its own vast, scarcely populated, surface area Saudi Arabia’s internal defence needs were best met by an Air Force, and the Saudis bought the best that the West could produce, at a time when many Western countries, including France were grasping the Economic potential of the Arms Trade.

(c) Because of the delicate and difficult political situation in the Middle East, especially regarding Israel and the Palestinians, the Saudis could not show themselves to be too pro-USA. So it agreed to some serious increases in the Oil Price though not as much as was demanded by ‘the Hawks’, because there were genuine issues related to US policy regarding the value of the Dollar, and also Saudi Arabia became a huge purchaser of Arms and military equipment to ‘hand out’ to neighbouring countries along with grants and aid almost in something like the old Eighteenth Century ‘Balance of Power’ tradition.

THE ARMS AND METHODOLOGIES OF TERRORISM

So, all in all, the ‘Third World War’ created an ‘Armed and Arming World’ much like that which emerged during the decades of intense rivalry both before 1914 and again in the 1930s, and did little in the way of destroying those arsenals.

And this is problematic because the common interpretation of the Wilsonian analysis of that pre-1914 period, i.e. that it was all the fault of old and new empires, usually ignores the fact that it was not simply the existence of such great and powerful empires that actually triggered the world wars, either in 1914 or 1939, but the widespread terrorist activity that undermined confidence in the ability of the existing ‘establishment’ to create conditions of ‘good governance’: and really in 2015 we are heading that way again.
In 1950, as the ‘Third World War’ was just getting underway, Aldous Huxley wrote in the introduction to the second edition of “Brave New World” : “For the last thirty years there have been no conservatives; there have only been nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left. The last conservative statesman was the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne; and when he wrote a letter to The Times, suggesting that the First World War should be concluded with a compromise, as most wars of the eighteenth century had been, the editor of that once conservative journal refused to print it. The nationalistic radicals had their way, with the consequences that we all know- Bolshevism, Fascism, inflation, depression, Hitler, the Second World War, the ruin of Europe, and all but universal famine.” (page 11)

But ‘The Times’ had been bought by Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, who had created the “popular press” in Great Britain: ‘popular’ because it gave the masses of working people what they wanted, i.e. some visceral sense of being alive and part of a wider world that would brighten up mundane lives of people who were employed as ‘hands’ ‘working for the man’ in ‘places of work’ with no other purpose than to monotonously mass produce.

Back in that Eighteenth Century world to which Lord Lansdowne referred, the world of “The Age of Enlightenment” and “The Age of Reason” that followed three centuries of traumatic change’ it had been possible, to create an “Age of Civilized Security” that lasted from 1760-1790. And it was after a whole generation had grown up in such security that William Wilberforce and his team discovered just how to harness the way that ‘public opinion’ could be stimulated into violent outbursts of Moral Indignation, a purely visceral reaction that bypasses reason and enlightenment, if stimulated by the right kind of material that is presented as an appeal to that ‘gut instinct’ with which ‘all men are endowed by their Creator’.
And a hundred years later the young Alfred Harmsworth developed a supreme skill these arts of visceral appeal that brought his cheap publications massive circulation figures that attracted massive commercial advertising. And like the adverts the content of his newspapers was not aimed at educating or informing the public but offering them some distraction and emotional stimulation telling them how they must surely feel, as ‘normal’ people, about things that were outrageous, scandalous, sublime, wonderful, etc. And just in case current affairs were getting a bit ‘boring’ Harmsworth ‘made the news’ by promoting events that “made the news”.

And Alfred Harmsworth credited himself with having brought about the First World War because for years before the summer of 1914 he had made sure that all of his stable of publications reflected his opinion that a great war with Germany was inevitable sooner or later: and indeed once Britain had decided to go to war, which was the step that guaranteed that it would be a ‘world war’, when the global Women’s Movement started planning a great Peace Conference to stop a return of such insane behaviour of “man to man” the newspaper reports of “The Belgian Atrocities” committed by “the Hun” against Belgian womanhood destroyed the female pacifism more or less at a stroke, as young women embraced the “White Feather” movement ‘terrorising’ men of their acquaintance with this public accusation that they were “too chicken” to volunteer.

But to be fair to Northcliffe he had been born in Dublin in the 1860s, where his mother, perhaps with that ‘Irish gift of Second Sight’ that John Steinbeck saw in his own mother, became alarmed at the state of the world, especially when, in the light of the success of Irish regiments in the American Civil War, there was talk of an American Irish Army that could come and liberate Ireland from the English. Ireland had already known terrorist atrocity and counter-terrorist atrocity for more than 200 years and Mrs Harmsworth insisted that the family should migrate to the London area.
The world was indeed changing, with what were to become the two ‘Superpowers’ stirring into life, with the assassination of a US President being mirrored by that of a Russian Tsar, so in 1914 when the Black Hand Gang assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo in 1914 as ‘suicide bombers’ of an earlier kind, throwing their bombs before taking poison and jumping into the river running alongside the road, such tactics had become widespread.
In this case it could be connected with the Pan-Slav movement associated with the slow, evolutionary and progressive modernization embarked upon by the Russian Tsarist regime in the 1860s. Student bodies produced revolutionary cells, which fostered rebellious and revolutionary movements that could harness popular support in times of famine and hardship. Revolutionary terrorism and the war against it went to extremes, including the emergence of the ‘nihilists’ the most extreme of the anarchists who believed that everything must be destroyed so that a new and healthier order could just grow naturally.

But in Ireland too there were those who wanted to get back to the days when terrorist societies made the island virtually ungovernable for the “English”: and before 1914 Indian nationalist resistance to British rule was pre-Gandhian, with the Hindu nationalist Tilak calling for terrorist assassination and sabotage, arguing that no Hindu should have anything to do with anything that comes from ‘Western Civilization’. So hundreds of Raj officials were assassinated and acts of sabotage committed, the blowing up trains achieving spectacular results.

For the most part these actions were intended to show that the supposed conditions of “Civilized Security” were neither truly civilized nor secure, and to make the news not only by the acts themselves but by the subsequent actions of the authorities which may be moved to respond with a self-righteousness and moral indignation, proving Lord Acton’s premise that “All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

But to be fair to “the powers that be”, who are charged with doing their best to preserve conditions of “civilized security”, the received wisdom, even while we were living through the Third World War, was that the first two world wars had been times of “Great Leaps Forward” in terms of Science and Technology: so that even Evolutionary Biology had embraced the idea that Life on Earth itself had been shaped by revolutionary periods that demanded such “Great Leaps Forward”, which favoured those capable of adaptation and condemned others to extinction because “they were not fit”.
But, even though Evolution had undermined the idea of a Creator God, the “Western Intellectual Tradition” still tended to presume that the Universe was like something by a great scientist-mind, something physical made by intelligence for a specific purpose, trajectory and a destiny, and that inventions and discoveries existed potentially before they were made like the lands and seas of the Earth that were just waiting to be explored and their secrets revealed; and wars merely resulted in a greater emphasis on making those investments that would make it possible to “get ahead” ‘down the track’.

But it is self-evident that the concept of conflict, and “the struggle for the survival of the fittest”, placed an emphasis on ‘short-termism’ and ‘winning at all costs’ putting off serious thoughts about the longer-term future for later, when, in fact, the investment made in perfecting the ‘arts of war’ tended to become the developments that could then shape the ‘arts of peace’. Hence for Nazi rocket technology gave birth to the Space Race and the computer chip was developed to meet the needs of rocket technology that needed to become ever-more sophisticated and endowed with artificial intelligence; and the kind of technology that made it possible for a man to make “one small step for me. But one great step forward for humankind” also makes it possible for one man to wreak havoc on Earth.

During the Third World War, in addition to producing massive World-War-capable weaponry, armaments industries produced and weaponry that could turn the humble ‘Tommy’ into something like ‘Robocop’: and this along with laptop computers, mobile phone technology and much else besides gives global terrorism the potential and potency of a modern plague.

And part of what is terrible about plagues is that those that carry it appear to be ‘Just like us”.

Thanks for your reply and good wishes, Melvyn.

I´ve copied and printed your extracts from your posts below and will do the reading during my holiday break.

I guess that there´s nothing new to tell about your efforts to get published, cos you didn´t mention any success on that one in your post.

Looking back on this fast ending year 2015, it´s been a very stressful and challenging year, on political matters. The refugee crisis was the top topic for many months and I´ve been thinking about you on your journies to France when using or better avoiding the Channel Ferry to Calais. Obviously, you weren´t bothered by that too much, I presume.

We can only hope that the next year will be a better year on such and other matters.

So, again, have a good time and I hope we´ll meet on this site in January.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

Yes.. As you will see from what I have written when I had my "We made it" moment I quickly realized that it was much more than merely personal...We had delayed our return from the Thursday to the Monday because my wife needed some medical examination, which meant that I was watching the France Germany football match on TV when the Paris attacks started and we then heard about hostage taking etc at the Bataclan...And our trip on Monday had to be earlier than usual because the boat we normally book for was withdrawn PLUS, listening to the BBC all travellers were advised to arrive at frontiers earlier because of France's new 'closed frontiers'... So it was a fine calculation whether or not to pop into Calais and fill up with diesel before heading for the Ferry...In fact there was nothing much different, apart from some armed police near the passport control who stirred themselves to check us, probably because a van had joined the queue a few cars back and they did not want to appear to be 'picking on' it.

But as you will see I have been thinking over an encounter on our first trip with migrants from the Sangat camp.. My wife has forgotten that she commented that they looked "just like us".. And we do tend to see ourselves in essence still much as we were 50 years ago...which made me think of us as the migrants of a Sixties "one world" generation.

As for Germany and the migrants there were scenes in German speaking lands that made me feel that there was something not unlike what I saw as the Obama-effect when grandmothers dragged out their grandchildren to support the candidacy of an African-American. Perhaps it was just the way I see things through my minds eye, but there seemed to me to be a very visceral impact in 'greater-Germany' of these scenes of desperate humanity cramming itself into buses and trains to head for a better Future in Germany. As someone of a certain age who have lived with the traumas of the Nazi era, the Final Solution and a Europe awash with refugees all our lives it seemed very obvious that there was an emotional groundswell of determination to "put the record straight" and to provide another and much more positive image than that of people being herded into cattle trucks... I sincerely believe that that too was a "Not in my name" moment.

So glad you got back in touch.. re: publication- because of the immediacy of the crisis I have tried to raise interest in my articles.. And in fact wrote letters to the press last week, hoping that BBBC TV, or some newspapers or magazines might be interested, and also wrote to one or two publishers..

Yesterday I wrote to the chairman of a Parliamentary Commission; and I may have mentioned that back in August I was arguing with a BBC Economist at our daughter's, at the moment he is on trial for a month to as the Chief Economist of the BBC; and I have not despaired of eventually persuading him that my very different understanding is worth airing.

Anyway.. You are no doubt busy trying to 'wind up' for the break.. Enjoy.

Best wishes

Melvyn

~ ~ Please excuse me for posting here, but I just wanted you to know how interesting I have found your piece about this history. There is so much more that is going on that what we read in the headlines. I always click into h2g2 before turning in for the night (I am a night owl) and now it is very early in the morning here. . .. ...

Gingersnapper

I think I can speak for Thomas B in asserting that we have no "no intruders" policy...It is just that we have quite a long history going back to when we met on the BBC History website and immediately enjoyed a shared taste for really substantial and thoughtful exchanges, only to have others manifest a clear hostility.. In fact I owe Thomas an enormous debt because publishers, literary agents etc have been telling me for 20 years that there is no market for the books that I write, many of which are put up here on my h2g2 site.. Thomas has been kind enough to read and comment upon much of what I have written... But I live in hopes.. I hope that this at least allowed you to go to bed with 'sweet dreams' in prospect.

Cheers

Casseroleon

Hi Melvyn,

Excuse me for responding that late after my holiday break. I hope that all went well for you in past weeks.

This obvious never ending refugee crisis has kept me busy on another place where I used to post more frequently than on this site.

I´ve read your writing just before Christmas and, as usual, you´re connecting the things from history to today in an interesting way. There´s nothing to which I could object in your vies. Just to add, that as wee can see these days, people tend to either deal with history as some thing of entertainment or they regard it as being "not that important" for this fast running life, seems to be too short for them to consider and think about it in depht.

I trust that some events that took place in Germany on New Years Eve which have made it to the international news, just a couple of days later, got noticed by yourself as well.

You may as well have noticed the rising of the far-right Party "AfD" (Alternative for Germany) who is at the Forefront of the anti-Immigration faction and could be compared with what you have in the UK which is the UKIP. They are not (yet) that radical in their actions like this other British far-right movement "Britain First". But they are taking up what the people are concerned about and more so after the mass raping that took place on New Years Eve not just in Cologne, but as well in Stuttgart, Frankfurt/Main, Hamburg and other towns.

The tide on the "welcome culture" has been already changing and this incident was the last drop that tipped the balance towards the negative and more and more people are turning against the refugees. It is now the time, where all this "political correctness" is losing ground and being preceived as just an imposed attitude for hiding the truth and for preventing people to speak their mind, frankly and openly. The PC has perverted itself during the past decades and has become a thing, just some "Elite" still believes in. It Comes from there that the Police was withholding the reports about the mass rapes for a couple of days until they couldn´t do otherwise but to publish it and Name the nationalities of the reported (at the beginning alleged, but in due course confirmed) perpetrators.

What Mrs Merkel has done in September 2015, was the biggest folly any German Chancellor has done since the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. All those years before that "open door policy" which she decided by herself alone, she was rather keen to keep Germany out of that crisis as Long as the Greek financial crisis wasn´t settled. But with Italy and Greece trying to ease the burden with the refugees in their own countries by issueing and allowing refugees to travel to other countries by train (like it happened in Italy) or by coach (like the Greeks did by carrying them in busses to their border with Macedonia), the "flood gates" were opened.

Merkel, in her unexplainable "humanitarian fit", decided to not just take all those stranded in Hungary to Germany but gave way to "welcome" everybody to get to Germany as the people are able to make it to come here. With the big run kicking in too soon afterwards, Germany received thousands of thousands of people every day, for weeks, for months until all the capacities became full up in short times.

You may see her as one Person doing the good Thing with the humanitarian cause on her side and herself just devoted to that. Well, that´s what she likes to have other People like to believe but it isn´t the truth for me. IMO she has done it just out of her own vested interests and vanity. Taking up the pro-refugee and pro-immigration stance and policy that is rather originating from the German Green Party.

Merkel has "trusted" on the other EU member states that they´ll come and take their "share" in refugee numbers but she soon had to realise that that wasn´t so and that the many - also Western EU countries - have no interest in "taking their share". As latest as with the Paris attacks from November 13th 2015, France is to take no-one from the Muslims because they already have a severe Problem with radical Islamists on one hand the the Front National breathing down their neck on the other.

Since the fall of the wall and the end of the cold war, the re-united Germany had taken in refugees and immigrants for decades. The difference is just, that in the last refugee crisis during the Yugoslavian war in the 1990s, there were still enough former "Gastarbeiter" from Yugoslavia who were able to accommodate their Family members themselves. We also took some "contingent refugees" from the former USSR in the 1990s. That all went down rather well because it was better organised and administered. But the core of the Thing was that we didn´t say that we´d take the whole world in, no matter where the Person Comes from and of what reasons.

So, with her "driving on sight" policy (that´s what she always has done and still does), she created a mess and the People grew more and more angry about her. Seeing that the Establishment parties fail to answer that crisis properly and set an end to the still ongoing influx of refugees (in the first weeks of January this year they were already more then 50,000 "new refugees" that crossed the border), this AfD party benefits from the current situation.

On 13th March 2015, there will be three elections to state parliaments in three federal states. Two of them in the West and on in the East. Polls are predicting the AfD to win more than 10% and in the East probably more than 15% of the votes. The results from this three upcoming elections will put even more pressure on Merkel than it already is for months. But stubborn as she is, I hope that this will be the last straw before her downfall. This woman is worse than Thatcher (if one likes to take this comparison at all, on which Merkel felt rather "proud" be compared to her) and like it or not, she has already split the EU right in the middle and along the former "iron courtain" line, because by her arrogance and "German dominance of the EU", she didn´t find it necessary to talk about that with our neighbouring countries in the first place and make decisions after and in Agreement with them. But no, this was yet again the infamous "German Sonderweg" of which Europe has had enough of it in the 20th century.

I often think about your Approach on history and especially your dream of a just and peaceful world which is - as I see it - your personal answer towards all the Troubles from the past (i.e. History). These days, you´ll rather get the chance to see this dream collapsing like a house of cards because our leading politicians have no sense of history and no real understanding of it either.

In the past weeks, I was reading some other literatur concerning the ME and Turkey. I´ve got some insight into the background of that region and this country. It would lead us too far to go more in detail about it by now. I might write more about it on another day, in case you´re interested.

We are already facing this new world crisis coming more closer to our homes and our politicians are just about to either do nothing, or make the wrong decisions.

So much from me for today and I would be interested to hear about your recent activities.

Cheers,

Thomas

Hi Thomas

Lovely to hear from you and get your insight into the Merkel question.. As you may have grasped I try to be sympathetic to anyone who has put themselves at the head of a government, and especially David Cameron--- Not least because I wrote to him when he became leader of the Tories and explained my thesis about Labour having become the Conservative party for its own caucus nb in 1951 so that GB had no "progressive party" and was interested to see that he raised the flag for "Progressive Conservatism"-- and in fact I exchanged correspondence with his office for some time before he got to 10 Downing Street...And so I had a great deal of sympathy for the David Cameron line when one photo suddenly awoke the interest of the public, who were not concerned about all the things that he was doing back at the source and cause of this trouble they wanted action now.... And in Germany they got it from Merkel.. But I always suspected that this too might prove a "one day wonder" of the kind that is so typical of those whom slavishly follow what is in the news.. But I cannot blame her, because I can only imagine how the scenes of people once again crowding themselves into trains that they might have preferred were cattle trucks of the kind used in the Final Solution...chimed with her... This time they wanted to come to Germany, after years in which such terrible history was being raked up by Greeks Ukrainians and others....As her current manfriend is at Cambridge I am hoping that this whole experience will make her appreciate even more the English Progressive experience and persuade the EU that change along the lines that Cameron is asking for is in the best interests of the EU.. I noted that the French PM has raised the possibility that the Migrant Crisis might make the EU fall apart.. Well that has been the French way often enough...

Continued

But all of that is relevant to what I am just writing, which excites me (you might say once again)

A couple of weeks ago someone on Facebook posted a Newspaper article on "the five worst atrocities" committed by the British Empire and posed the question "Can you be proud of the Empire?".. It led briefly to a few exchanges.. But then I decided to take each of the five and explain the circumstances which shaped these tragedies, none of which was deliberately contrived by the British authorities, even though they often resulted in official enquiries to see whether any one acting in our name was criminally culpable or merely incompetent... But as I worked my way through a new understanding of the Age of Catastrophe developed, and (as I have revived somewhat from January Blues a couple of days ago, I realized that the real question to be answered is "Can we be proud of our future?"... which is obviously of extreme topical relevance in terms of our vote on the EU.. We have already started to get the normal bribery literature on this issue- "What you get and gain from our membership" and No doubt we will get "What you lose from our membership"... Unless we find what our collective future vision is going to be we will never be able to harness all of the drive and energy that this world needs so badly.

I will probably post the first part of this soon,

Hope you had a good break.. WE made it through Xmas and had a small New Years Day gathering, but then I had some kind of collapse of life-purpose and dynamism... But it seems to be coming back.. One of the burdens of last year was the in depth renovation of our daughters old bedroom, with my wife showing all the obsession of a first-time grandmother... But this week-end was lovely. Our daughter and partner came Sat afternoon, left our gd with us as they went out to dinner and an opera, leaving us to look after our gd who is an absolute joy.. It was so lovely to see "two girls" playing together etc.. And everyone had a great time. They all slept the night so we had some time together on Sunday till after lunch, and we bribed our son and his wife not only to join us for Sunday lunch, but to arrive in time to see their niece.. It felt like a really precious family time and made this feel like a family house once more... And we have had mild weather and sunshine... Suddenly it is the good life.. and to cap it all I heard from my friend Thomas.

Cheers

Melvyn

Thanks Melvyn,

I´ll come back to your post tomorrow, cos my working day Ends in a couple of minutes. Just to tell you that much, I´m with Cameron in many things, especially regarding the EU and the way to bring about Reformation to the EU. Well, I understand perfectly well that Cameron has the UK at heart in the first place which is just right. But I wouldn´t exclude the possibility that from what the British might gain from the negotiations, might benefit the whole EU.

Like it or not, but I´ve become more and more an Euro-sceptic during the last years, and as you know me, I´m not a right-winger at all. But the Social Democrats have not guts to reform anything, just to keep yearning on more "solidarity" and an ever closer Europe. The last Thing is what I don´t like to have. It´s already close enough and sometimes it´s better to be not that close and have more space to breath for oneself and adjust measures and decisions that just fits the Region and has no use in other parts of the EU.

As for the Social Democrats. I don´t know whether I told you last year that I´ve re-joined the SPD not quite a half year before this refugee crisis has developed into a open doors policy by Merkel. In due course, as I had to witness once again that the SPD was unable to take the majority of the People with her (the welcomers have always been regarded by myself as being a minority made to a "majority"), like I had to back in 2003 when Schröder was pushing his AGENDA 2010 through the Party, I was once again left to either bear with it or take the consequences. Well, as I couldn´t bear with it any longer to be a member of a Party that is as well responsible for this Farce, I took the consquences and quitted my Membership a couple of weeks ago.

Now, I´m left as I was before, I´m a Social Democrat who doesn´t understands the Social Democratic Party any longer and this time, it´s a decision that will last for the rest of my life. They are just interested in keeping themselves in power and running behind anybody and anything they deem to sustain their power, but they will lose in votes soon enough. But that´s their own fault, if you ask me.

I´ll explain my thoughts to you on this matter in more detail tomorrow. So until that, have a nice evening. It´s good to be in touch again with you on this site and I might not turn back to this other forum for good.

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas

Just a quick one.. Your comment about the SDP put me in mind of the book I found last November that I may have mentioned. James Bryce's "Modern Democracies" published 1921... I came upon it in a French translation published in 1924 -- or rather just the second volume.. But I think (since we share so many interests and values) that you might love it as much as I did (and hate it too, in a way because it is rather depressing to find so much knowledge and understanding was already around almost 100 years ago... and has been ignored... But then that has been my life experience.. Bryce was amongst other things a Professor at Oxford, and as I have said many times probably, it has been the blessing and curse of my life to have had my hopes raised by our family involvement in the Oxford branch of the Labour Party with high hopes of what Labour could do now that it finally had a mandate to govern and make radical changes, only for a revolt on my seventh birthday to split the party, because a significant part just wanted to be free to protect what it already had rather than work for the future...Bryce had the same sadness about what he found in Australia and New Zealand where an "Anglo-Saxon" prosperous working class were the electoral majority and they used a strong Labour political and industrial caucus to give themselves a privileged lifestyle, which they were careful to protect against imports and immigrants... I have lifted a purple passage from the New Zealand section in which now over 80 years old he comments how 50-60 years ago when democratic rights were extended to working people their instinct, having claimed them as "human rights" would be to wish to share them.. But Australia and NZ were run as "closed shops"... a bit like some would like to do with the EU...

You must be gone by now.. Look forward to hearing from you again tomorrow..

Cheers

Melvyn

Hi Thomas

Something funny happened when I tried to post that last one.. I have just come back and found that it did not get posted.. Just as well that I have got into the habit of hi-lighting and copying my posts before I try to post.. The system is designed for shorter ones like this.

Good Morning Melvyn,

I know that from your own experiences, you´re rather a critical observer of the Labour Party. I´ve just come across that split matter from 1951 in the Andrew Marr series about Modern Britain. Anyway, I like to comment on some parts of your posts from yesterday.

“.... And in Germany they got it from Merkel. But I always suspected that this too might prove a "one day wonder" of the kind that is so typical of those whom slavishly follow what is in the news. But I cannot blame her, because I can only imagine how the scenes of people once again crowding themselves into trains that they might have preferred were cattle trucks of the kind used in the Final Solution...chimed with her... This time they wanted to come to Germany, after years in which such terrible history was being raked up by Greeks Ukrainians and others....”

She never really said what was behind her attitude and remained silent, or at best rather vague. The overcrowded trains appeared in the news just after she announced her open door policy to every refugee. So, the comparison with the trains of the holocaust is bit too far fetched in this regard. You have a different angle from which you look at her cos you didn´t experience living under the rule of her and more important, under that of her mentor Chancellor Helmut Kohl from which she learned and copied how to “deal” with problems in simply just doing nothing and let it cook up to the boiling point and then fall into “take quick action”. In fact, she is to blame for this mess because she created it and she thought that, by all this “pushing this woman in public perception as being the most powerful woman” by the media, she is in charge of the whole of the EU and every country has to follow her “orders”. That´s not the case and from the very first moment she came up with her “EU solution” it was clear to me and predictable that this will not work because she “missed” (more deliberately neglected) to consult the other EU countries beforehand. After Merkel was made the “person of the year” (so in my own words) by the American Time magazine, it just took a couple of weeks that the same Americans who “made” her that “great”, were showing their “backing off” on her. She felt for that because of her vanity which is there and which has developed in herself to some sort of “megalomania” that created – once again – some “bunker mentality” in her mind, because she does more fear “losing face” than the consequences her stupid acting and policy will have on the whole political spectre of Germany and in particular on her own party. The rise of the far-right in the recent times cannot be uncoupled from her ruling. It is the answer to it right from the centre of the German people, who won´t bear it any longer to have her making mistake after mistake, making announcements but no change is taking place because this would mean to make a complete turn on 180° which she still rejects.

As for Greece, the way she and her finance minister Schäuble treated the Greeks brought her the “label” of the “iron chancellor”. The conflict in Ukraine isn´t over yet, it has been brought to a stalemate but not a peaceful solution on the basis of a referendum on which the ethnicities in Eastern Ukraine decide for themselves whether they want to remain part of the Ukraine or go to Russia. It´s a very tricky thing, and in the end of the day, it´s up to the conflicting parties to solve it, not merely to give the “success” to the mediator.


“As her current manfriend is at Cambridge I am hoping that this whole experience will make her appreciate even more the English Progressive experience and persuade the EU that change along the lines that Cameron is asking for is in the best interests of the EU. I noted that the French PM has raised the possibility that the Migrant Crisis might make the EU fall apart. Well that has been the French way often enough...”

I don´t know whether I´ve told you that for some times, but from the very start, this woman Merkel appeared in German politics, I´ve got a very deep rooted and in recent times more increased contempt for her. Apart from her personal appearance and the way she represents my country, which gave me very many moments of embarrassment, she´s the worst politician ever. She managed to “get through” her first term to get re-elected, and so it went with the second term until Fukoshima happened. Then she went blind and, like her former mentor, without a clue how to make this change of energy supply happen she just put pressure on all sorts of companies, administration and further sections to “work on a blueprint” and to realise it in a short time. In short, she cocked it up because nothing sustainable really happened to this day. This change in energy supply and resources has been a topic already for decades but as long as there was no “worst case” kicking in, they left the Atomic power works working. Then came the Greek crisis which was a thing that came over night, it has developed into that for years beforehand and worsened by the global financial crisis. But the vanity of the EU and in particular to sustain the Euro which is the top prestige subject of the EU had to be protected at all costs.

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She didn´t show any sort of humanity while Greek people, suffering from this financial crisis and losing all, housing, jobs and even the minimum of a decent human life, were committing suicide. It didn´t matter to her, because the only thing that mattered was to help the Greek banks to avoid their collaps and thus avoiding state bankruptcy of Greece and with the alter-native of a “Grexit” to have the whole Euro threatened in its existence.

Don´t get blinded by her, she´s as cold and cruel as Thatcher was and worse than this, she has some “blueprint” of a “new society” in Germany in her mind that doesn´t has the consent of the German people. She knows that and this is way she remains “vague” when it comes to her to explain it to the people, cos the people would reject that as you can see in what is going on in Germany for months now.

There is a real chance that the EU will meet her breaking point and fall apart. It´s not just something typical French, it´s more a matter of reality and even this staunch EU supporter, EP Chairman Schulz, said that he might face the downfall of the EU if this refugee crisis cannot and won´t be solved on a EU basis. You just have to look at Poland and Hungary, were their national governments are very eager and keen to establish an authoritarian system that allows the right-wing governments to rule as they please and suppress the opposition, the media and thus erecting a modern dictatorship. Some people, on this other internet forum, already see the EU as the dictatorship of our time.

This dream of a “United States of Europe” is gone and frankly, I never wanted it. I was fine with the EEC such as it was and the more power the EU was given from her member states, the more she developed herself into a bureaucratic institution that works not for the people, but in essence for the Lobbyists in her “corridors of power”. This is what lies at the core of the problem with the EU, she never really was in touch with the people, she was from the very outset of her predecessor established by the concept of the common market to make trade among the member states easier and provide the environment for more economic growth and profits. This was all well and so far in order, but this EC, where the real power of the EU is, for it is apparently not in the EU Parliament, has brought the EU onto the brink of collaps by her incapability to reform and I mean – like Cameron means it too – to stop the road towards an ever closer Union and give the member states their sovereignty back, making the EU once again that what it was and is supposed to be, the frame work for a common trade market.

I hope, that I´ll soon see the day of Merkel either stepping down herself or being kicked out of her office for she is as well a blocker to any EU reformation as well as she is imo the worst chancellor we ever had since 1949, worse than her mentor Kohl who always choose to “sit out” problems instead to deal with them and solve them. People in Germany seem to have all too easy forgotten about the legacy of 16 years Kohl rule from 1982 to 1998 and if it wasn´t for German re-unification, he probably had lost the next GE which was to be held in 1991 (the last GE pre re-unification took place in January 1987, four years after the first election in which he won in 1983). At the end of his last term in 1998, people were simply fed up with him. Now, the numbers of people who are fed up with Merkel is constantly increasing and I hope that this will continue until she will disappear at least and with good riddance. If you ask about the alternative to her, well, someone should have the guts to challenge her but as power addict that she is, she managed to get rid of all her critics within her party on her “path to chancellorship” and afterwards. That´s what she sees as her “asset”, that there is “no al-ternative chancellor” but herself.

“… relevance in terms of our vote on the EU.. We have already started to get the normal bribery literature on this issue- "What you get and gain from our membership" and No doubt we will get "What you lose from our membership"... Unless we find what our collective future vision is going to be we will never be able to harness all of the drive and energy that this world needs so badly.”

I think that the UK might be better off outside the EU, as long as she can sustain the ad-vantages of the common market by re-negotiating her relationship to the EU, on a basis like other non-EU countries such as Switzerland and Norway. With the EU drifting towards falling apart, there might be some chances to get the best out of it for the UK and a success of the leave camp will surely trigger the downfall of the EU in a short time.

“Hope you had a good break. WE made it through Xmas and had a small New Years Day gathering, but then I had some kind of collapse of life-purpose and dynamism... But it seems to be coming back. One of the burdens of last year was the in depth renovation of our daughters old bedroom, with my wife showing all the obsession of a first-time grandmother... But this week-end was lovely. Our daughter and partner came Sat afternoon, left our gd with us as they went out to dinner and an opera, leaving us to look after our gd who is an absolute joy. It was so lovely to see "two girls" playing together etc. And everyone had a great time. They all slept the night so we had some time together on Sunday till after lunch, and we bribed our son and his wife not only to join us for Sunday lunch, but to arrive in time to see their niece. It felt like a really precious family time and made this feel like a family house once more... And we have had mild weather and sunshine... Suddenly it is the good life ... and to cap it all I heard from my friend Thomas.”

I like to notice the way that you get along with your granddaughter and that it gives you some joy. I can imagine that you´re a good grandfather as well as your wife being a good grand-mother. Isn´t it family that has it all in live, for good and for bad, but without it, nothing would really make sense at all?

Well, our turn of the year was a bit more quiet because we don´t get out on New Year´s Eve and stay at home. It wasn´t bad anyway.
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“... Your comment about the SDP put me in mind of the book I found last November that I may have mentioned. James Bryce's "Modern Democracies" published 1921... I came upon it in a French translation published in 1924 -- or rather just the second volume.”

I´ll remember that author and book and see whether to get a copy of it some time. The problem of the SPD and many other Social Democratic parties is, that as you´ve already stated in one of your posts yesterday, that they might in some ways become a tad too conservative for their grassroots voters. Another thing is that Socialist and Social Democratic parties were traditionally strong bound to the trade unions, where these parties originated from. During the last decades in the 20th century they were loosen it, for the benefit of gaining votes from what they like to call “the centre of the society”. That “centre” refers to the “changing voters”, people who vote not on ideological grounds, but being either pragmatic or opportunistic, vote for the party they deem to deliver them the best advantages. This “running” behind them has cost the left-wing-parties credibility and thus votes from their grassroots voters. Tony Blair was the one who made the start by “building New Labour” and other followed his example. But people don´t need two similar conservative parties as well as they don´t need two similar social democratic parties. When it comes hard to hard, they tend to rather vote for the original but with the SPD, as well as Labour, throwing their grassroots over board for their opportunistic stance to gain more votes and thus getting into power, when the tide turns, they´re left with the remains of voters that are not sufficient to them to remain in power. The SPD got just into that grand coalition with Merkel because her former coalition partner the FDP (the Liberals) lost the elections and were kicked out of Parliament. Now the SPD is caught in a tricky situation. She cannot oppose Merkels policy on the refugees because this might get contrary to her own POV on that matter, on the other hand, there was such talk for years, Merkel might “swing” to the Green Party in order to change her coalition partner and thus sustain her ability to remain in power, with the Greens as her junior partner. Whatever the SPD does, she is unable to take the credit for her part in this government. But Merkel has turned that far in favour of the Greens that she has them on her side and in fact, there is – except with the CSU which also a coalition partner of hers – no real opposition in the Bundestag, not even Die Linke, to force her to a radical change in her refugee policy. All goes very slow and just because of the pressure from the CSU, her party´s conservative sister party from Bavaria.

Now, as the AfD is gaining more and more ground, despite the recent “scandal” of this party´s chairwoman who called to “shoot at illegal refugees, trespassing the border” (which was taken a bit out of the whole context in which she said that, for the context itself was probably more referring to an emergency situation to defend the border), but doesn´t necessarily lead to a decline in public support, the other parties are getting more and more nervous. The thing is that there is already an attitude established among certain establishment parties who either tend to go on something like a “witch hunt” on the AfD, or simply refusing to debate with them and thus exposing the real core of the AfD in public debates. It´s as if they really believe that with ignoring them they will simply go away, but they won´t because the already have the backing of many Germans who are – in their supposed majority – not all far-right radicals of Neo-Nazis. That some of the latter are clinging on them to ride on that wave is unfortunately unavoidable, but what the AfD is doing is just to take up the worries and concerns as well as also some anger from among the public towards this current government and not just give them a voice but also using it for their own purpose which is simply to get seats in parliaments.

I´m a more sceptical observer on the AfD. I look at them through the media and some com-ments from other users. Trying to make up my own mind and up to this day, I can only say that without doubt, there are some far-right radicals in this party as well as there might be some people who are not too far from Neo-Nazism. What is plainly at the core of that party, and that is taken not just from what they say about themselves but what is apparent, they are partly “national-conservative” and partly “german-national-conservative”. This sounds a bit like hair-splitting on the terms what sound not too far apart from one another. The AfD is without doubt a party on the far-right edge like the UKIP is and she is as well as party that one call a protest party, absorbing the discontent of the people opposing the government and are left with no other alternative political party that takes care about them.

I wouldn´t trust the AfD for various reasons, but I think that they might be good enough to have them breathing down the necks of the establishment to make them listen to the people and not letting them imposing their ideas on the people which are not wanted by the people themselves. The tricky thing is just, that once they get their feet into the parliaments, they might not be that controlled or used as some people would like to see them being handled. It´s probably rather the case that the establishment parties will continue to ignore them, until they have that many seats in parliaments that they can´t be ignored anymore but have to be taken on by the very grounds of their policies and manifestos. But this approach has to be now and not later, but you see the cowardice of the establishment parties when it comes to a new one appearing on the political stage with real chances to take votes from them because the people losing trust in the establishment, perceiving them as too arrogant and ignorant.
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What is the usual dealing by the establishment parties with the AfD? As I said, they choose to either ignore them, refuse to talk to them and discuss with them. Further, they call for protests coming from the “decent people” of the society, as if all that sympathise with the AfD are per se “indecent” people. All that is just a bloody failure and won´t make this AfD go away. On the contrary, they are just about to gain even more support from the public because the people see how unprofessional the establishment is dealing with them and loathing everybody who is to support that party instead of listening to the people and do what the people demand, not the minority of the do gooders who would if they would have it their way, let in the whole of the Third World and this bringing in more problems than we already have. This AfD has to be challenged, and it is the obligation of the politicians with either official or party mandate to do that, but they fail to take up this challenge and shreek from it. There isn´t anything better but to expose the real character of a party than in hard and rational debate. But some other problem to that is that the AfD would certainly expose the failures of the establishment in the refugee crisis and that is what the establishment is not willing to face, although everybody knows that. So, how to defend the wrong to oppose a party who points out the failures and the errors? That´s what the establishment fears more than the confrontation with a political opponent, the chance that the opponents wins the debate and gets the credit because the establishment is not to admit that they were wrong were the wrong is obvious.

Just another aspect to this AfD and refugee issue. On the last SPD annual party conference in December last year in Berlin, there were certain leading party members who had the need to tell publicly about their “migration background”. That was some sort of “exposing” some personal matters in order to “show” solidarity with the refugees. Well, whether one deems such things as important to be made public is up to the individual him-/herself. But to instrumentalise it for the purpose of a party stance leaves a bad taste and makes it appear “opportunistic”. In my view this was just cheap and in some ways as well nonsense because such things doesn´t matter to me. I´m not really interested in whether the Father of the new elected party secretary general is an Englishman and her mother fled from Dresden. This is her private matter but she found it necessary to go with that public because others did likewise so too. Like Martin Schulz, talking about his home area where he grew up and which lies between three countries, and which is – according to himself – the very reason for why he is such a convinced European.

In addition to that, they´ve invited other leading Social Democrats from other EU countries, like from France, Austria, Italy for their discussion on the EU which was rather like some likeminded friends were having a chat about the EU and call for more solidarity among EU member states in a time when the whole thing is drifting apart and ignoring (or rather avoiding to mention) the fact that one reason for this drifting is the long ongoing German domination of the EU by Merkel. Since she took over, this German domination of the EU had increased and is very strong perceived in a very negative sense outside Germany. Such a domination never took place by her predecessors, it´s personally bound to her and that is another reason for why I´m so strong in favour that she must go, she´s overdue to go and not just for the sake of Germany but for the sake of Europe as well. There is little chance to get the EU reformed as long as she remains chancellor of Germany. I´ve been waiting for her dismissal since the first day when she took office in 2005 and I hope that I won´t have to wait much longer.

Cameron has the guts and the proposals to bring about a reformed EU, Merkel and Juncker both don´t have it and both don´t want it. But that is overdue and either the EU reforms herself, best by the way the British could contribute to it, or the EU will fall apart and go down in history as an experiment that started with great expectations and failed on her incapability and the dogmatism of herself to change what has to be changed. That is less bureaucracy and more freedom to the member states for they can handle their own affairs better than it is handled by an institution that it in its core more like a centralised ruling body. Just like France and the UK were for centuries, until they shifted to give their regions more self-government and implying a bit of federalism with it.
The worst thing that I have to admit is, that Nigel Farage, the one I´ve always deemed to be just a political clown, has been proved right by the very failures and wrongs of the EU itself. But I´m not that sort of an ideological person as that I couldn´t say that one of those I always opposed is right when he´s obvious right. But that doesn´t makes me a UKIP or Farage sup-porter neither does it make me one of this far-right anti-EU people either. I just see that this institution is strangling itself because it tries to force an ever closer Union which brings more problems with it than the current state of her as managed to even solve from those which are still unsolved.

Strange or not strange but I´m on the side of David Cameron. Not because or despite he is a Conservative but because he´s one of the very few left who sound and act rational and rea-sonable, with a pragmatic approach on solving problems and that´s more like it to my taste in politics.

Does that make me a Conservative? I don´t think so, but I admit that I´m a Cameron supporter, despite being a Social Democrat myself. The establishment has to return to the basis and listen to the people if they won´t lose the support for democracy because that would be the worst of all. But what is the meaning of Social Democracy These days anyway? One thing it is for certain to me, not being an idiot and ignorant.

Hi Thomas

I have started read through your posts.. And will finish and comment.. First reaction is that (naturally perhaps) I am struck with your sense of engagement with the German political scene, with which obviously I am less familiar.. But then as I see it Germany, a bit like France, has been recreated many times over the last 150 years by conscious political action.. My dentist on Monday really liked my highlighting the fact that as an Englishman I believe that it is best if things evolve..

Get back to you a bit later,

Cheers

Melvyn.

My apologies for eavesdropping on a private conversation but I have tried to start a debate on the EU referendum in the Ask forum and your opinions would be very welcome there. I'm particularly keen to hear how people in other EU countries view the referendum so Thomas's comments on Cameron are very interesting.

If you don't want to express your ideas in a more public arena that absolutely no problem of course.

Chris