Once again Asia/Oceania has been hit by a devastating tsunami, or killer tidal-wave series. This time it was Samoa and American Samoa that were afflicted (as well as other neighboring islands, such as Tonga), and it looks like no one was able to be warned in time about what was coming from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii.

It’s all very bad, but at least the devastation wasn’t as widespread as at the time of the last big tsunami emergency, that one that hit India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia shortly after Christmas back in 2004, right? Actually, there have been a number of other tsunamis since then, and a helpful article from the French newsmagazine Le Point provides a handy list (and reveals the interesting fact – interesting to me, anyway – that the French term for this disastrous phenomenon is raz-de-marée, which they also use for “landslide” in the political sense):

• Indonesia, 17 July 2006: An undersea earthquake creates a tsunami that hits the southern coast of Java and kills 654.
  
• Samoa (again!), 28 September 2006: Only a “light tsunami” this time, no word of any casualties.
  
• Russia, Japan, and USA, 15 November 2006: An underwater earthquake among the Kuril Islands (northeast of Japan, administered by Russia) causes a tsunami that hits the northernmost major Japanese island of Hokkaido. It’s a weak one, though, although apparently at the same time strong enough to go clear across the Pacific to cause some seaside damage at Crescent City, CA (just under the Oregon border).
  
• Solomon Islands, 2 April 2007: Three coastal villages devastated, 52 people killed when a tsunami hits the westernmost of the Solomon Islands.
  
• Japan, 11 August 2009 (just last month!): A tsunami hits “the center of Japan,” so presumably the main island of Honshu, but it’s a light one and only a few people are lightly hurt.

And then there’s yesterday’s serious incident around Samoa. I suppose the lesson is that, if you live anywhere near Southeast Asia (even in Crescent City, CA), you had better stay tuned in on-line to that Pacific Tsunami Warning Center website, but still keep your surfboard handy and/or your running-shoes on your feet for when the waves turn out to move faster than the warning.

The Flemish Gazet van Antwerpen reminds us today that the Anne Frank House Foundation recently set up an Official Anne Frank Channel on YouTube.

Among the film-clips on display is one showing the only time Anne Frank was captured on video, as she watched from her family’s balcony the departure of the neighboring girl to her wedding. Naturally, this is before the Frank family had to go into hiding. In fact it is a little less than a year before they did so, and so the scene is at the apartment house elsewhere in Amsterdam where they lived a normal family life up to and a couple years into the German occupation, before moving to the famous achterhuis on the Prinsengracht to try to disappear and so evade a call-up from the occupation authorities for relocation to a “work camp” (which more often turned out to amount to transportation to a death camp in Eastern Europe; it was only Anne’s elder sister, Margot, who received this notice, but that was enough to drive the whole family into hiding).

The brief Gazet van Antwerpen article (no by-line) notes that another clip gives a video-tour of the achterhuis and was put on-line in celebration of the Anne Frank House Museum’s fiftieth anniversary, but it also seems that the entire YouTube channel was created only recently.

By now you’ve heard about the election results from last Sunday in Germany: Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU/CSU gained seats while her “Grand Coalition” partner the SPD lost them, but the significant new development was that the right-wing, business-friendly party the FDP itself also gained enough seats in the Bundestag to make possible a rupture of that “Grand Coalition” in favor of a right-of-center CDU/CSU-FDP coalition government. Traditionally the head of the junior party in a German governing coalition is given the Foreign Minister’s portfolio; in this case that is FDP head Guido Westerwelle.

We’ve been hearing quite a lot about Westerwelle in the press – and that’s even before he and Merkel have formally entered into negotiations as to how they will form their coalition government, which just goes to show what a foregone and “traditional” conclusion it is that he will become Foreign Minister. He’s a J.D. (Juris Doctor, i.e. “doctor of laws” or lawyer), and he’s openly gay. Remarkably, the German electorate seems not particularly bothered by either fact.

Already a minor flap has arisen in his connection, though. You can see it on video here: at his first post-election press conference he refused to take a question in English which a correspondent from the BBC wished to pose to him. So it’s apparent that he doesn’t feel very comfortable with his English. You might find that a rather unfortunate quality in a foreign minister – and you would likely be right. But Mariam Lau of Die Welt believes it reveals something rather deeper: The smallness-of-spirit of Foreign Minister Westerwelle. (more…)

Here’s another interesting tidbit for those interested in US border control, and the effect that has on perceptions of the country by foreigners. Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung reports today (Astonishing USA entrance-ban) that Karl Dietrich Wolff (66 years old) was supposed to attend a human-rights conference at Vassar College, co-sponsored by the German Historical Institute of Washington, DC, but was detained last Friday as he tried to enter the country at JFK airport in New York, kept there for several hours as officials questioned him, and finally packed on a flight to take him back to Germany. Now, he thought he was in good shape with a 10-year visa to enter the US valid until next year, and had indeed traveled there without incident invoking it on three previous occasions – except that US authorities had revoked that long-term visa back in 2003. Or at least so he discovered during his extended questioning in the bowels of JFK; Wolff claims no one had bothered to inform him about that before. (The question remains open whether during one or more of those previous trips he had managed to enter the country despite relying upon that “revoked” ten-year visa – how much does anyone want to bet that that did not happen at least once?)

Just who is this enemy of the (American) people, Karl Dietrich Wolff? That brief Süddeutsche Zeitung piece – credited to news agencies – makes a game attempt to figure out what the problem could possibly be. Back in his mid-20s, it seems, he was chairman of the Socialist German Student Federation (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentbund, or SDS) and further founded the “Black Panther Solidarity Committee” in Frankfurt in 1969. Since then, though, he has been a publisher. It’s true that his first publishing-house was called “Red Star,” but that one went bankrupt in 1993 and he went on to found others, while winning a few German literary prizes along the way.

Ah yes, a publisher – just the sort of figure you want in any foreign land to become disenchanted with the way he is treated by uniformed officials from another country! Then again, we can strongly assume that Wolff has a better grasp of American border-control policies and procedures than most of the rest of us: he is known particularly in his career for bringing out critical editions of the works of Kafka, among others.

Readers of this weblog – a smallish, hard-core elite, to be sure, but we’re trying to do something about that – will have known the news already, but last Thursday President Obama came out in public to announce that his administration did not intend to proceed with the planned deployment of anti-ICBM missiles to Poland and supporting radar to the Czech Republic. Reaction to the decision was swift and vociferous, both for and against, domestically and internationally. Presseurop has a good survey of that reaction in the Eastern European press, although I feel that it tends a slight bit too much to the alarmist side. It seems many of those newspaper headline-writers have forgotten how fundamentally unpopular the American deployment was among ordinary Czechs and Poles; in this light, Obama’s cancellation of the program per se is not so regretable, but rather the considerable trouble both governments had to take to gain the political approval for their participation, now all achieved for nothing.

Not to worry, though, because French president Nicolas Sarkozy praised Obama’s move as an “excellent decision,” and the editors at Le Monde make it clear that they agree (Hand extended). Yes, the proposed deployment was going to be expensive, for a weapons system about which there remained significant doubts that it ever would actually be able to do what was designed for. But don’t forget the diplomatic dividends, either, Le Monde reminds us. These mainly involve Iran, which is supposed to start multilateral talks with a range of western countries starting on October 1; Obama’s action sends them a message of “good will and realism.” And Russia? Obama’s gesture was directed there to an even greater extent, but Le Monde’s editors unfortunately do not expect to see any corresponding gesture from the Kremlin anytime soon.

By the way, mention should also be made of the announcement by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, noted in Le Monde’s news coverage of the American announcement, that the “SM-3” missiles which are now to be the replacement anti-missile system will be deployed in turn from 2015 in Poland and the Czech Republic. First of all, that is a bit over-determined: mainstream US news reports put it instead that deployment of those missiles to those countries is but a possibility. And that’s a good thing, too: recall that the original ten defensive rockets that were to be intalled in Poland were designed to counter Iranian missiles of intercontinental range. Poland presumably is a good spot to deploy those – just take a string to your globe to check out the great circle route from Iran to the USA – but that is probably not also the case for defense against the short- and medium-range missiles which are now assumed to be the only Iranian threat for many years to come. In light of this, these suggestions that Warsaw and Prague will eventually get their missiles after all have to be regarded as sheer political bull-headedness – “We won’t let anyone tell us we can’t station missiles in Eastern Europe!” – rather than anything based on considerations of military effectiveness.

It goes off once a month (here in the Netherlands at 12:00 noon on each first Monday), sounding from somewhere in the distance. If we even happen to notice it, we pause a moment to remind ourselves that “it’s just that time of month” – no need to go take cover against some air attack or to try to find the nearest gasmask. It’s the air raid (or public emergency) siren, and it still makes up one element of the home-town environment for many of us. And in truth, it should not be retired any time soon, since we all still need it: launchable nuclear arsenals deployed within long-range bombers and on intercontinental ballistic missiles remain in the armories of a number of the world’s military powers, and then in addition few places in this world can count themselves immune from the possibility of devastating floods and/or earthquakes.

In actuality, though, these siren-systems are under threat: they cost too much, supposedly hundreds of millions of euros to maintain nationally. That datum comes from a recent examination of this issue in the Frankfurter Rundschau by Roland Knauer. Public authorities are increasingly shutting them down, in favor of setting up alternate warning systems for fire and civil defense officials employing TV, radio, and SMS. (more…)

These days, more and more, it’s Hitler this! Hitler that! I just wish that Adolf Hitler would go away! The Nazi dictator stuck a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger more than 64 years ago anyway, isn’t that right?

But no, Hitler is a meme that will just not disappear (especially, I suspect, because it is in the public domain, so you don’t have to pay anyone any royalties to bring it up). I’ll just briefly mention here the ridiculous “Obama/Nancy Pelosi-as-Hitler” theme turning up lately, such as at last weekend’s “Tea Party” rally in Washington, DC. Then there is that German AIDS awareness ad you might have heard about recently, depicting a young woman having sex with Hitler and various other historical dictators. (After all, AIDS – like Hitler & Stalin et al. – “is a mass-murderer.”)

Now the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad brings us the latest (by way of the Italian Corriere della Sera). A French tourist browsing in an Italian supermarket (namely Carrefour, headquartered in France) was shocked to find wine being sold in bottles bearing the likenesses of Hitler and Mussolini – and, for that matter, with various fascist slogans inscribed on the labels as well! This particular tourist happened to be of Jewish extraction; she immediately complained to store management, with the result that Carrefour soon removed from its shelves all such bottles. The article adds, however, that other wine bottles remain that are decorated with images of Pope John Paul II, Che Guevara, and Bob Marley. They sell fairly well.

We all know that President Obama would be tickled pink to have his home city of Chicago win the nod to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. He has made his engagement to that cause plain – but, clearly, there are many other important matters on his plate right now. That’s why, at a promotional event yesterday on the White House lawn for “Chicago 2016,” he nonetheless made it clear that he would not be showing up personally at the meeting of the International Olympic Committee in Copenhagen next month that is supposed to decide whether the Windy City or one of its competitors (Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, or Madrid) gets that prize.

In a report from the Danish news agency Ritzau that appears in the leading daily Politiken (Copenhagen will manage without Obama) city spokespersons reacted calmly to the development. Said Morten Mølholm Hansen of the Danish Sporting Union (Idræts-Forbund) which will be the IOC’s host:

Of course we would have preferred to see Obama come to the city. But on the other hand I will say that the congress will attract such attention by itself that that is not decisive. So many big names will come to Copenhagen, and the the decision itself about who will become the host-city is so interesting for the entire world, that this will not disturb our concept.

This assessment is shared by communications consultant Henrik Byager, who points out that, after all, Barack Obama may not be coming but it seems that Michelle and Oprah Winfrey will – “the two most prominent women of all in the USA.” Besides, there is also that big United Nations climate change conference scheduled for Copenhagen for this December. Obviously it would not do to have the US president attend both, and if they had to choose one the Danes would prefer that he be at the latter, which actually has to do directly with Danish interests.

UPDATE: Ah, but it seems they’ll get Obama early anyway! Twice within three months, in fact, since he is certainly going to the December UN climate change conference as well. So much for “Obviously it would not do . . .”

FURTHER UPDATE: OK, who really knows whether Obama will actually show up again in Copenhagen in December?

Germany’s Die Zeit allowed itself yesterday a bit of gloating: Europe takes over from North America as richest region. It’s all due to the Great Recession: North American wealth is to a much greater proportion held in equities, whose values lately have plummeted, so that assets under managment (AuM) there fell by 21.8% in 2008 to $29.3 trillion, while in Europe AuM fell in the same period by merely 5.8%, to $32.7 trillion. Latin America was the only region where AuM increased despite the adverse economic conditions, by 3%.

All of this, and more, is information forthcoming from a new study by the Boston Consulting Group, which the BCG is kind enough to discuss at length here, in English, so you can consider those previous and the study’s other findings at your convenience. (For example, the US still has the most “millionaire households,” at almost 4 million, although they are thicker on the ground in Singapore, where a full 8.5% of all households own more than $1 million.) Indeed, not only is the BCG itself willing to state figures to one decimal place, while Die Zeit for whatever reason tends to round up to the nearest whole number, but the former also makes use of the American/British system of big numbers (thousands, millions, billions, trillions) that you are probably more used to (and whose differences with the continental European system I had occasion to discuss here previously).

Even as America is consumed with its health care reform debate – with the associated “Tea Party” mass-demonstrations in the nation’s capital, rants on Fox TV, etc. – rest assured that it’s not as if over here in Europe we’re living in some sort of public health paradise. Far from it, in fact, although at least the local press is willing to give problems the necessary public airing-out. Like De Volkskrant here in the Netherlands, for example, and its recent piece (credited to the Dutch national news agency ANP): “Half of all cats have behavioral problems.”

Really now – where does it end? You do your best to ensure a healthy and happy life for all your human family members, but then the inconvenient prospect pops up that the housecat may well be bonkers. Although it seems we have at least had canine psychiatric care covered here for a while now, at least according to one Sonja van Leeuwen quoted in the article, who states “. . . it is already quite normal to have your dog with behavioral problems treated, but for cats this is not really accepted yet.” Instead, too many cat-owners here (who among them own 3 million cats) still have to suffer from feline friends which become too aggressive, or which urinate inside the house as an expression of some problem they are trying to communicate. Or which expropriate the seat of the only family scooter and refuse to move from it.

Then again, perhaps Ms. Van Leeuwen has an interest in talking up the potential travails of cat-ownership, since she intends next year to start a new course in cat-behavior therapy, in cooperation with a local dog-training academy. If you’re interested, well, you’ll have to know Dutch, and then be ready to make yourself available over the year-and-a-half course – at Lelystad, in the relatively-new province of Flevoland – to attend a total of 43 lesson-days. You’ll get to know a lot about cats, of course, but you’ll also get some insights into human psychology as well since, as Ms. Van Leeuwen is at pains to note, “Many problems are caused or worsened by the owner.”

Sorry, we have to leave the sexy now for the serious. The big news of the past week on the European auto-manufacturing front was the announcement – finally! – of the fate of Opel, for eighty years the General Motors subsidiary operating in Europe, especially Germany. The winner for Opel’s hand is Magna, a Canadian-Austrian investment consortium working together with the Russian Sberbank as financial partner (and also with the Russian auto company GAZ). The announcement was that GM is willing to sell to Magna a majority stake (55%) in the new company, while it retains 35% (and the Opel workers the remaining 10%).

From there the story proceeded just as it always does when a company gets a new owner, especially in the case of a failing firm where that new owner is being counted on to come in and rescue its fortunes. Clearly, drastic cuts have to be made – but who will bear them?

The answer has always been pretty obvious, but it seems that “De Nile” is not just a river in Egypt, somehow it also flows through Flanders. Opel’s factory located in the harbor area in northern Antwerp was always the leading candidate to draw the short straw and face closure as part of any attempt to reorganize the company. The leading negotiator for General Motors – one John Smith – openly said as much: “In our plans Opel Antwerp is superfluous.” Nonetheless, it’s amusing to read in coverage of the new Magna deal in the Flemish business newspaper De Tijd about the refusal of many parties still to accept that reality. After all, points out Luc van Grinsven, spokesman for the ACV union that represents most of the plant’s workers, that’s only a GM official saying “superfluous,” not anyone representing Magna, i.e. the actual new owners. “The exact consequences of the take-over are not yet clear,” claims Van Grinsven. “But GM after the take-over has no more authority.” And Flemish regional president Kris Peeters is still clinging to a letter he received from Magna at the end of July, assuring him that the company intended to investigate further what possibilities there may be for the future of the plant. (more…)

Ah yes, Holland: Land of prostitutes-in-windows, of “coffee shops” where what’s mainly at issue (meaning what’s issued) is not coffee at all – everyone knows about all that. So perhaps you would also expect that that would be one country where a reigning beauty-queen would also feel free to pose nude – but preferably “tastefully” – in any publication she might desire, without recriminations. Alas, that is not yet true, as an article in the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad today reminds us about the appearance in the new issue of the Dutch Playboy of the current Miss World Netherlands.

She is Carmen Kool, out of Amsterdam, and in addition to her name (if it actually is real, of course), I really like her attitude, especially for a 23-year-old. She was already clearly unrepentant in a slightly earlier piece from the AD (entitled Miss Netherlands with bare bottom) that first brought her exhibitionist transgression to light and speculated that she “was gambling with her crown.” “I think that the [Miss World] organization won’t be happy with my photo-shoot for Playboy. Unfortunately. I myself have nothing against nakedness. What’s more: I like to be a bit of a rebel.” She added, “I am Miss Netherlands. My countrymen have a right to it,” where by “it” she seems to be referring, again, to her naked photo-shoot. Again, a rather refreshing, even somewhat surprising attitude.

The axe did inevitably fall on her title shortly afterwards, and that follow-up piece announcing the sad news recounts a bit of a she said/he said dispute between Kool and a spokesman from the Miss World Netherlands organization about whether the latter sufficiently supported her in getting further opportunities for acting, TV commercials, and the like – in short, in getting further exposure, which she implies is why she felt she finally had to turn to the world-famous masters at providing exposure, as it were. Of course, the Algemeen Dagblad itself had now rendered its own assistance in that regard: you can click either of those two article links above to marvel at a photo which provides a coy sampling of her considerable charms (as well as an object lesson in how what is deemed proper for a European news publication often would not pass muster in the US).

As for Playboy.nl, for now it has only this entry in what it calls its “Playblog” announcing the coup, together with a shrunken rendition of the cover of that current issue on Netherlands newsstands now. (The Naakt! you see there of course means “Naked!”, as in “Hey wow! Look who we got!”) More revealing images tend to migrate to the website after subsequent issues, and subsequent centerfolds, follow, but I’ll have to leave it over to my dear readers to keep checking back on that Playboy.nl site to see when that happens, if desired. Alerting you to that here (if I even ever find out myself) is really not the purpose of this weblog. For that matter, perhaps this very subject is not really its purpose, although it does involve the “European non-English-language press.” In the end, I think I’m supposed to determine what that purpose is, but I nonetheless welcome any more e-mail contributions of opinion you might care to send!

Obama gave his big Health Care speech to a joint session of the US Congress early this morning (Central European Time). Let’s take a look at some material about that from the national press of France, the country which, it is widely admitted, has much to teach the Americans about how to run a national health care system.

We first need to consult the French paper-of-record, and that is still Le Monde, which provides initial coverage in a piece jointly credited to it, the AFP news agency, and Reuters (Obama’s big oral exam on health) and put on-line only a couple of hours after the event itself. Graphically, the article stands out due to the two YouTube videos embedded within it, which feature no dubbing or subtitles or any other concessions to French-only readers but which of course include that electric passage when the president was loudly heckled (Vous mentez!, he shouted – or would have, in French, if he had had any bit of class) by South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson. The main insights of note here come at the very beginning – Barack Obama joue le tout pour le tout, or “Barack Obama is going all-in,” in poker-speak – and at the end: the piece remarks that Obama knows he needs to achieve something this year, as it will be even harder to do so next year, an election year. (more…)

Been to Berlin recently? Noticed how everything seems to flow particularly smoothly when you navigate the subway system (the U-bahn) there? But that’s just because it’s Germany, right? I mean, seemingly in exchange for exhibiting certain, shall we say, strict and humorless character-traits, and sustaining themselves on Sauerkraut and other tasteless food (at least according to popular imagination outside of the country), Germans can at least be sure that their trains run on time.

Actually, not really. I don’t mean that the subway-trains don’t run on time in Berlin, it’s quite likely that they do. Rather, it seems that they have recently addressed the entire issue of U-bahn efficiency – especially the problem of minimizing transfer times between one line and another – with a bit of higher mathematics, as Holger Dambeck recounts for us in Der Spiegel (Waiting faster).

Consider: you pull into a transfer-station in your one subway train and cast an anxious eye across the platform to where you rather hope the other subway-line to which you want to transfer has a train already waiting there for you. Of course, it’s rare that you’re so lucky; usually you’ll need to get out and wait for some period of time before that follow-on train ever arrives. And sometimes – oh, the frustration! – you do see the train there across the platform as your first train pulls into the station, yet the other train-driver can’t even wait a minute and instead pulls out of the station just as you are arriving! (more…)

She’s known mainly for being ultra-polite and proper, God bless her, but even Queen Elizabeth II reached the point at the end of last year when she couldn’t restrain herself anymore from asking, while visiting the London School of Economics, “How could no one have foreseen it?” “It,” of course, was the catastrophic banking/financial breakdown that had come to its terrifying climax the previous September – almost one year ago now – and plunged most of the world into grave economic troubles, her own sovereign realm definitely not excepted.

Putting Her Majesty’s query in another form, How did economists get it so wrong? Or, if you like: What were they thinking? Whichever way it is stated, the issue is no doubt a complicated one, not to mention rather embarrassing for that profession of economists from which one might still assume that the best answers might ultimately come. And by now they are coming: the previous two hyper-links, in fact, take you directly to major pieces on the evident failure of modern economics by Paul Krugman (in the New York Times Magazine) and by Francis Fukuyama (together with Seth Colby).

But all of that is in English and so readily accessible. (Well, you’re going to have to subscribe to The American Interest if you want to read all of the Fukuyama/Colby piece, but the Krugman is all there and is really a “must-read.”) For our EuroSavant purposes, let’s consider instead an analysis piece just out in the French newspaper-of-record Le Monde by editor-in-chief Frédéric Lemaître: The crisis puts back into question economists’ knowledge and status. (more…)

Today we go from yesterday’s discussion of the implications of the melting ice in the Arctic Sea to . . . the Arctic Sea. But hold on: the “Arctic Sea” I’m talking about this time is not the geographical area, but rather the freighter (Maltese-registered; Russian crew) which has recently been at the center of a bizarre tale, having been hijacked just off Sweden on July 24 and which then proceeded seemingly to traverse the English Channel (one of the more-crowded stretches of water in the world) undetected, only to finally be found and captured by Russian warships weeks later in the Atlantic, near the Cape Verde Islands off the West African coast. If needed, you can refresh your memory from this Reuters report, and you might also consider an additional Associated Press report about a “Russian maritime expert,” now having fled Russia for fear of his life, who raised the possibility that the ship’s cargo could very well have included things a bit more interesting than just the Finnish wood listed on the manifest – like maybe weapons, for example. (more…)

I’ve got some good news for you, and some bad news.

It has to do with global warming, and since this is my weblog, I get to decide that I’m going to give you the bad news first. You probably didn’t hear about this – I know that I didn’t – but this past week has seen the World Climate Conference – 3 take place in Geneva, Switzerland. Journalist Richard Heuzé of the French conservative newspaper Le Figaro provides coverage and, as you can well imagine, the outlook is not good. It’s so “not good” that the conference participants had a wide array of things to choose from for panicking about.

On this particular occasion they happened to concentrate their foreboding on the state of the Arctic. Put simply, it’s much too warm there already. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon spoke to the conference just after actually conducting – as Heuzé puts it – his own “inspection tour of the North Pole,” and his tidings were dire. “The Arctic is warming up faster than the rest of the Earth. There could be no more ice there in 2030.” One rather daunting result of that could be the unleashing of a positive-feedback effect that would cause the global warming process to accelerate, whereby the warming Arctic permafrost releases massive amounts of heretofore trapped methane gas into the atmosphere, which traps heat at the Earth’s surface even more effectively. (more…)

I don’t cover the Polish press here that often; nevertheless, the overriding imperative of this weblog remains finding and discussing the most interesting goings-on within the wide ambit of my language-coverage, and these days that certainly has to lead us to the Polish front.

I use “Polish front” here deliberately, because yesterday’s headline event in Europe was without a doubt the convocation of several national heads-of-state at Gdansk, Poland for ceremonies marking the seventieth anniversary of the opening of that Polish front by Nazi Germany with the ground-attack that started the Second World War. This is understandably a sensitive historical matter for the host nation, and controversy was assured from the very beginning just by the list of attendees. That featured a few names who you would think simply did not belong at such a ceremony, for various reasons. Like James Jones, US National Security Advisor: why were the Americans sending such a relatively low-ranking official and not someone at least at the level of, say, Vice President Biden? There was also Russian premier Vladimir Putin, whose presence was sure to be controversial for more profound reasons, both contemporary (Putin has for years been engaged in an effort to glorify Russia’s past, particularly its involvement in the Second World War under Josef Stalin) and historical (that involvement notably involved the Red Army’s “stab-in-the-back” invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, arranged according to the terms of the secret protocol to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact negotiated only the month before).

“We can’t forget for a moment that what we have here is a great battle over memory,” preached Archbishop Henryk Muszyński of Gniezno at a Mass he held yesterday. “Preserving that memory and the entire truth about the Second World War is our obligation.” That is probably the wisest, most-reasoned remark made in connection with those ceremonies at Westerplatte, the specific spot on the coast at Gdansk where hostilities begain early in the morning of 1 September 1939, from among those cited in Rzeczpospolita’s main article covering the event, by Piotr Kubiak (After the war – the battle over memory). (more…)

Returning to my €S post from a well-deserved summer break, and thus resuming my scrutiny of European affairs, my attention was piqued in particular by the entry on Matthew Yglesias’ weblog entitled US to Scrap Eastern European Missile Defense.

“Could this be true?” I wondered. I have certainly covered this whole Czech-and-Polish missile defense system topic here before, most notably in a post from last March entitled Poles Down the River?, and my common theme has been the Obama Administration’s steadily-waning support for going through with this deployment. Yglesias – evidently a non-Polish-speaker – can only provide as reference a link to a report from the DefenseNews site that itself cites “[l]eading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza” as the source for its information. Here we can do somewhat better, of course, and even with five days’ delay it was relatively easy for me to use the Internet-tubes to find the on-line article in question (Poland without shield, by the newspaper’s Washington correspondent Marcin Bosacki – athough feel free to insert “the” or “a” there in the title before “shield,” as the Polish language ordinarily uses neither word explicitly). (more…)