Ol' Pappy & Son (Reuters)

Experteneinschätzung: Nordkorea könnte bald eine Atomrakete haben http://t.co/luFw9VFb

December 28, 2011 11:45 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@weltonline

Welt Online

Atomrakete – yes! “Atom-rocket”! One that will be in North Korean hands, and thus under the “Great Successor’s” personal control, and rather soon!

Hey, that’s not nichts! It’s in fact the estimation of one Larry Niksch, long-time North Korea expert at the (US) Library of Congress, brought to us in an article from Die Welt, who in a recent paper set forth his view that the Pyongyang regime will be ready to mount its Nodong missiles with nuclear warheads within two years at the most, whereas most estimates up to now had foreseen at least five. Now, the Nodong is still but a middle-range ballistic missile – still out of reach of California, probably also Hawaii, but more than capable of hitting, say, Seoul or Tokyo. (Then again, mere North Korean artillery has always been able to devastate Seoul whenever the Great/Dear Leader/Successor felt like giving the order.)

A somewhat less dire prognosis is cited in this same piece from Siegried Hecker, who, despite what you might gather from his name, is former chief of America’s Los Alamos research laboratory. Hecker says that, before North Korea can go ahead confidently with anything very threatening (in the missile realm, you understand), it still has to have a third test-explosion, a successful one (there were doubts whether the first two were really that) to make sure that a nuclear device miniaturized so as to fit as a warhead will actually behave as ordered.

Two points here:

1. He might style himself the “Great Successor,” but “king” or “emperor” might be more pertinent titles for Kim Jong Un, given his absolute control over every aspect of the lives of his subjects. Actually, let’s go with “emperor” – as in “new clothes,” for the silence here is truly deafening. Just look at the guy! Only in his late twenties, having been outside the country only to study among luxurious conditions at some Swiss school, yet now he’s supposed to be in charge of a country still at war with its southern neighbor (at least formally – although northerners have certainly acted like it numerous times in the past, even after 1953), with a moribund economy where people starve to death and everyone wants to escape to China – and with nuclear warheads and, soon, the means to deliver them! Where is the innocent little child to cry out “You’re in way over your head, Jack!” and so to break this spell of fantasy, so that people can once again call things what they are?
   
2. This “Great Successor” was of course the “Dear Leader’s” son – his third it seems – and the mantle came the same way to the “Dear Leader” back in 1994 (although with seemingly much more opportunity to practice the job beforehand). Here we see again the amusing if wearying paradox where all-powerful rulers in what are putatively “republics” (here: “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”) decide that no one is better qualified to succeed them in the people’s service after their demise than . . . their direct progeny. Abrupt terminations to this sort of farce have been realized over this past year in several North African/Middle Eastern countries (with one or two more possibly to come), as Prof. Juan Cole points out in an excellent recent blogpost. But this phenomenon was also addressed at more depth in Francis Fukuyama’s excellent new book The Origins of Political Order: it’s the sort of primitive, tribal-based urge that truly mature, developed systems of government usually leave far behind as they progress to leadership based on true merit and authentic popular choice. Yet as advanced as any ruling regime may be, those sorts of blood-tie yearnings (i.e. to set up one’s children for life in cushy positions) never cease to be a threat to the political order, Fukuyama states, and the extent of their re-intrusion into the body politic mirrors the extent of that regime’s decay.

UPDATE: Well, I guess we need to note and fully appreciate any bit of good news emanating from that part of the world that we can:

BREAKING: Kim Jong-Un Rebrands North Korea as “N. Kiddy”

December 30, 2011 4:39 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@BorowitzReport

Andy Borowitz

                          

Intervention gefordert: Die kriegerischen Planspiele der Türkei gegen Syrien http://t.co/VbhCTKZ7

November 18, 2011 7:55 pm via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@weltonline

Welt Online

This links to an article from the authoritative German national daily Die Welt about how Syria’s neighbor Turkey – whose Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once termed al-Assad his “brother” – is beginning plans to make its own intervention into the Syrian national uprising go beyond mere words. First of all, it’s starting to prepare to impose its own no-fly-zone on the country. Also, according to the authoritative English-language Beirut newspaper The Daily Star, Turkey wants to seize a strip of Syrian land along the common border as a “security zone.”

Don’t get too excited here about the Turks’ zeal to help out their neighbors, though: the main function of such a zone would be as a place for Syrian refugees to be able to stay for a while in safety from their government, rather than have to cross over into Turkey proper. To the south, Jordan is said to be considering this sort of a move too, and both countries are gaining support for it among Western and other Arab countries as al-Assad continues to be intransigent.

By the way, there is an important US airbase in Turkey, at Incirlik, maybe 120km from the Syrian border. The Welt article also mentions US support of Jordanian armed forces, which might get the Americans involved here that way.

Of course, some representatives of the Syrian rebels – in particular the Muslim Brotherhood there – have already called for full-scale military intervention. Turkish, that is; most still will not accept any such explicit help from Western powers. Still, for all the Turkish sabre-rattling, there are also important questions to give its leaders pause. A no-fly-zone – and even just trying to seize enough Syrian territory for the “security zone” – would require disabling Syria’s air force, built around 100 advanced MiG-29 fighters – is the Turkish air force up to the job by itself? Foreign Minister Davutoglu has also made recent statements that Turkey would really rather not go it alone when it comes to any intervention. It would surely require explicit Arab League and UN Security Council approval for any such step, as well as probably co-belligerents (and Jordan alone would likely not be sufficient).

Then again, Syria also currently depends on Turkey for much of its electricity, and for the water coming over the border from Turkish highlands in the form of the Euphrates river. What’s more, the recent attack by a Damascus mob on the Turkish embassy there – complete with burning Turkish flags – was itself not very “brotherly.”

                          

#Referendum in #Griechenland: #Papandreou riskiert eine globale Finanzschmelze http://t.co/Q5z7zEYw #Geld

November 1, 2011 2:39 pm via bitlyReplyRetweetFavorite

@weltonline

Welt Online

Yes, every other newspaper is writing about this as well, but this particular Die Welt article, by D. Eckert and H. Zschäpitz, stands out for its headline: Papandreou risks a global financial meltdown, or rather the alarm such a headline evokes in contrast to the serious, mainstream sort of paper we all know Die Welt to be – i.e one that doesn’t usually resort to such headlines. Yes, there are no doubt similar-sounding titles in tabloid papers, and not just in Germany, but all that is mere dog-bites-man.

This piece also stands out for the handy list it provides – you have to scroll down a little, look for Die größten Wertverluste . . . – of the banks which have lost the most market-capitalization, so far, from the plummeting prices of their shares. FYI, BNP Paribas stands at the top, with nearly €4.7 billion lost, followed by Deutsche Bank. (It also stands out for author “H. Zschäpitz”: isn’t that just a howler of a name? But no doubt the fellow has a Google Alert on it and will be reading this blogpost sooner or later – my apologies!)

Otherwise, though, I stand vulnerable to the charge of European tokenism. Because the piece that has really clarified things for me is in English, and written by our old friend Dana Blankenhorn. Greek Latest is Solar Scam is its title, it does spend a few paragraphs dissecting the faulty economics behind a Greek solar-energy investment plan. But then it addresses what Papandreou and the Greek authorities are really trying to do with this referendum. Given that Blankenhorn assumes that the result will be “No,” it’s simple: they are threatening to take the rest of Europe to down with them, unless they get an even-better debt-relief deal than the 50% they got from the EU last week.

You should check it out, and the article from Seeking Alpha that Blankenhorn links to as well. Strangely, his link to it reads “Sink the euro” even though that other article itself argues that there is still a chance for a “Yes” vote!

                          

If you weren’t alarmed enough yet by the European situation, try this interview on for size (use Google Translate): http://t.co/K6EyrTs

August 16, 2011 4:23 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@B_Eichengreen

Barry Eichengreen

Turns out that the interview in question is of UC Berkeley Prof. Barry Eichengreen himself, conducted by Die Welt writer Tobias Kaiser. (That link in his tweet opens a PDF of the interview. Of course it is in German, but no need for Google Translate when you’ve got the EuroSavant!)

Well, who among us who publishes on the Net can ever be immune from such cross-posting temptation? Besides, he has some interesting things to say on the current transatlantic debt crises, and his piece was even retweeted, and so implicitly endorsed, by Doctor Doom himself.

Prof. Eichengreen emphasizes that, whatever else might be going on currently in the Eurozone, Italy and Spain must now be the focus of policy-makers’ attention. That is not so insightful per se – German Chancellor Angela Merkel is in Paris today to meet with President Sarkozy and presumably the public finances of those two ailing Mediterranean states will be high on their agenda. (Not that top-level officials from either will be present; that’s not always necessary when the EU’s two big powerhouse-states are having discussions.)

Rather, the interesting nugget from Eichengreen’s interview is his “tough love” stance towards Italy. Economic growth there is vital for resolving that country’s fiscal problems, and by extension for averting a general economic crisis and euro-collapse. The problem is that the Italian economy has not exhibited very much growth in the past few years. Something drastic has to change there, meaning that there have to be substantial reforms in the way the economy is run, and Eichengreen is confident that the Italian economic elites realize this and are ready for same.

But of course it is the political types – currently with Silvio Berlusconi at their head – who have to be convinced to carry through any such reforms. What if they refuse? Then, according to Eichengreen, the European Central Bank should be ready to withdraw its support, by ceasing its purchase of Italian government bonds.

Of course, as he recognizes, this will inevitably lead to debt “rescheduling,” another way of expressing the concept of default. But Eichengreen does not flinch from the possibility; rather, he says that other Eurozone countries (especially Germany and France) should get ready for it in the sense of getting their banks prepared to absorb losses from any Italian default, by building up their capital. They probably have at least until the end of 2011 to do this, in the worst case.

On the one hand, it is probably true that Italy won’t be able to dig itself out of its mess without some thoroughgoing reforms. But on the other, Prof. Eichengreen is being rather blasé about what happens if the ECB’s bluff is called so that it might feel its credibility requires it to stand aside and allow an Italian default. Maybe that sort of thing is contemplated a bit more easily from way over on the Pacific coast.

                          

Jacobs has been Potsdam’s mayor for a while now, since March of 1999, and he did come out on top of that initial vote with 41%. But Scharfenberg was not all that far behind at 33%, and the guy does have many useful qualities, such as being a shrewd judge of people’s character, and able both to keep a secret and submit thorough, informative reports. How do I know this? Because Hans-Jürgen Scharfenberg is also unique as the first significant German political candidate known to have been an informer back in the day for the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi.

Some good coverage of the Scharfenberg phenomenon is to be found in the German press, of course (like in Die Welt: Stasi informant wants to become Potsdam’s mayor) but also in the press from not so far away to the East in Poland, namely Gazeta Wyborcza (Will a Stasi agent govern Potsdam?). All accounts agree that the guy was very good in those side-activities he engaged in next to his formal post at the Academy for State and Law in Potsdam (from 1978 to 1986). The file he accumulated on people he spied on totals some 300 pages, and he was apparently quick to root out and denounce to his Stasi masters not only colleagues who let it be known that they were trying to find some way to escape to the West, but also those who were womanizers or homosexuals (and so “mennenizers” maybe?) or had other aspects of their personalities or behavior that could constitute weaknesses for the Stasi to use to blackmail and manipulate them.

But then times changed – rather drastically – and Eastern Germany saw the DDR regime’s collapse and reunification with the West. Scharfenberg eventually found his feet in this new world rather well, actually running for Potsdam Oberbürgermeister in 2002 and losing by a total of only 122 votes in the run-off – yes, to the SPD’s Jacobs. The thing is, back then no one other than himself knew about his Stasi background; indeed, he denied anything of the sort and in the 1990s had refused to allow any sort of screening or investigation into his DDR past.

Since 2002, however, researchers rummaging through the extensive archives saved from Stasi destruction at the end of the regime finally came upon information about Scharfenberg and “outed” him, so to speak. Still, he ran again this year for the same Oberbürgermeister post, and he came in second again in the first round. And depending on turnout, how the voters for the candidates who didn’t make the first cut switch their votes (if at all), etc. he could even win on 3 October and become Mayor. (I’ll try to remember to look to see if that happened and let you know via an update to this post, since I realize that, by this point in the post, you’re all dying to know how the story turns out!)

Stasi Don’t Matter?

In other words, his prior work for the Stasi doesn’t seem to matter politically. That’s surprising in one respect because one would ordinarily think that Die Linke would not do well in Potsdam – indeed, that the Left side of the German political spectrum in general would not do well – because Potsdam is fairly prosperous these days as a film industry, computers, ERP software, etc. give it an unemployment rate of under 10% (very good for the East).

The larger issue, though, is of course how someone with such a shady past working directly as a spy for a repressive regime could at all be attractive as an elected public figure. But he is, and this is called Ostalgie or “Eastern nostalgia,” a nostalgia by many Germans living in the East for the DDR where, back then, even if the authorities spied on you all the time, they at least also ensured that you and everyone had a job, an apartment, a pension, etc. – none of them very fancy, but guaranteed (if you didn’t defy the State). For this writer, and for many others I’m sure, such an attitude is hard to understand – but there it is, undeniable, staring us right in the face in the Potsdam mayoral polling figures.

For those needing a subject for their sociology/history dissertation, the obvious comparison here is with attitudes to the Nazis (especially the hard-core: the SS, high regime functionaries) following Germany’s defeat in WWII. Why were Germans willing to definitively reject these after the War yet at the same time harbor this Ostalgie now? Then again: it’s only the former East Germans by and large who feel Ostalgie – back immediately after the war, in the former Soviet sector of Germany, was this particular cohort ever really allowed to confront and resolve the question of how to regard the Nazis among them? Quite possibly not; recollection from my own reading tells me that any and all issues of Nazi guilt were swept under the carpet as the Soviets and their German Communist lackeys rushed to form a Worker’s State to stand in opposition to the fascist-capitalist regime (in their eyes, of course) taking form to the West. So does this affect their attitudes today, more than sixty years later?

UPDATE: Nope, sorry: Hans-Jürgen Scharfenberg lost once again in the run-off election, and this time by tens of thousands of votes, not the 122-vote margin of last time. Gerd Nowakowski has an interesting commentary in Der Tagesspiegel, which is after all a Berlin daily and so very close-by. He says there is no way the ex-Stasi informant Scharfenberg could have won, and that because of a simple fact that I should have picked up on, but didn’t: 3 October, the very same day of the run-off election, was not only also German Reunification Day holiday, but no less that event’s twentieth anniversary!

Just imagine if the Potsdam electors had chosen the Stasi-man, on that of all days! Frankly, whichever official was in charge of setting the run-off election date, once the results of the initial poll showed that it would be necessary, was the one who in effect chose who Potsdam’s next Oberbürgermeister was going to be, by picking a date that in effect ensured Jann Jakobs’ second re-election to the post. I wonder if that person explicitly knew what he was doing – he must have! Shades, perhaps, of DDR-style “democracy”?

                          

It was apparently a rather long speech, with a panoply of various points within it that one can choose among to emphasize – also, if desired, the sheer fact that it was delivered from the Oval Office, something that is generally supposed to denote an especially serious occasion, as Viktoria Unterreiner points out writing for the German paper Die Welt. Still, the title of her piece is “Obama declares the end of ‘cheap oil’,” and that is one aspect of the President’s address that certainly has attracted particular attention over here. Namely: Can America – the land of the Chevy Corvette and Route 66 – really wean itself from cheap oil, even while spurred on by tarred beaches and dying pelicans? Unterreiner is herself doubtful; she notes that, after Obama made that declaration, “he however became no more concrete” about how to go about it. Perhaps a start would be his CO2/climate bill – but that’s currently in “suspended animation” (im Schwebe-zustand) in the Congress.

Our old friend, the Danish journalist-in-US-residence Paul Høi – perhaps partly because he did not have to disrupt his sleep-patterns to watch – also has a piece out on Obama’s address: Obama aims high and hits low. He divides the speech into two very different parts and has very little to say about the first, which he characterizes as simply a populist tirade designed to up his sagging poll numbers by demonstrating that he is in charge and is perfectly able to get tough with BP. No, like Die Welt’s Unterreiner, he’d prefer to focus on the second “idealistic” part where the President announced the end of cheap oil and puts developing new sources of “green” energy on par with the campaign in the 1960s to put an American astronaut on the Moon. “Does he seriously mean that?” he asks. After all, Høi knows the math: to get something like that CO2 bill through the American Senate you need 60 votes, and since there are now 41 Republicans, Obama probably does not have them.

Then again – Obama also did not have 60 votes in the Senate for his Health Care Reform bill, which of course did ultimately pass earlier this year. Yes, I realize that that was true only at the end . . . but give the man a break, Høi is just trying to find some sort of silver lining here, some sign that Obama’s talk about “the end of cheap oil” was more than mere words. Actually, he borrows this silver lining from an analysis by Ezra Kline of the Washington Post, who professes to see signs from the language in Obama’s speech that indicate that the President is in fact serious, more precisely indications of an attitude of “Come with what you’ve got, give me what we can agree on, and will pass a law that will lead us in the right direction” – supposedly also the President’s attitude to Health Care Reform, once he got serious about passing it, and supposedly his attitude now about the CO2 stuck in Congress.

Update: OK, that was a couple of foreign commentators. But you’ve got to think they are on to something with their “Was he serious?” doubts when the same stance is taken by the Rude Pundit. (Warning: As usual, profane language.) “So tell us what to do,” His Rudeness implores. “Lead us. That’s what we want . . . not an especially skilled anchor[man] informing us that oil spills are bad.”

                          

You might recall that this political organization, like all the off-shoots of the original Pirate Party in Sweden, takes for its purpose advocacy mainly for Internet-related issues such as copyright reform, digital civil rights, and the prevention of Internet censorship. Philip Kuhn of Die Welt recently sat down with party leader Jens Seipenbusch for a brief interview in the wake of those poor electoral results.

The obvious question to pose was, “Why did those results regress from those you achieved just over half a year ago at the federal level?” After all, Internet-related issues during that period remained fresh within the German political landscape, what with such things as court-mandated curtailed retention of citizens’ personal data to governmental hostility towards the wanderings of the Google Street View camera-car. Seipenbusch saw as a sign of his party’s success the increased attention to such digital issues being shown by the establishment parties, including a new commission on Internet und Digitale Gesellschaft (Internet and Digital Society) formed in the lower house of the German legislature (Bundestag) to take up such matters. Nonetheless, the electoral results for NRW remain there for all to see, and he attributed them to the supposed lesser relevance of such issues to voters at the state and local levels of government.

Seipenbusch himself did gain re-election as Pirate Party leader, with 52.6% of the vote, at a party convention called in the wake of those NRW results, and he interprets that as an endorsement by the party rank-and-file of his particular political approach, namely that of having quite a lot to say on digital/Internet issues but very little about anything else. Of course, most other political parties, given that they presumably exist in order eventually to get the chance to govern in some way, generally make sure they take up a position on all or at least most outstanding policy-issues. In the interview, the Pirate Party leader does show that he recognizes the pressure to widen the scope of the party platform that way – “I want to achieve a moderate broadening of the [party] program” – but then makes it clear that the “broadening” he has in mind goes little further than covering “all the themes of the Age of Information.”

Granted, Germany is set to take some high-tech initiatives in the near future – such as an electronic passport and ELENA, a chip-card for the registration and payment of government benefits – that makes it vital that informed public discussion take place. Still, there are many public issues that the Pirate Party will miss with this platform policy. Interviewer Kuhn asks him about marijuana legalization, for example; you’d think that would be something in which the Pirate Party’s constituency would also be highly interested. Seipenbusch’s reply: “Whether we will want to get involved in a dispute about that, only the future will show.” Likewise, he has nothing to say about the current Eurocrisis and the massive financial aid to Greece – even as it dominated German newspaper headlines at the time, the topic somehow never came up even once at that recent party convention!

These, one must sadly conclude, are truly more the hallmarks of a “gimmick” political party rather than one that is trying to build up its credibility in voters’ eyes to someday govern. And it is that which probably lies behind its faltering performance at the polls.

                          

It’s often pretty funny stuff. Then again, another thought may come to anyone inclined to think about such things a bit more deeply. (And/or to those quick to take offense – or are these two cohorts actually one-and-the-same?) Could it be that the “paper of record” of one great civilization is, in effect, mocking the citizens of yet another for their well-intentioned struggles in navigating the former’s language? When, in fact, relations between these two great civilizations are of possibly the most crucial importance to world peace as well as progress on most other global-scale problems (e.g. environment, trade, financial regulation)?

Maybe, but maybe not. As esteemed as the NYT is, it still needs to attract paying readers and satisfy them with informative, entertaining articles and (on its website, of course) slide-shows, so it could hardly have turned these articles down. Anyway, “Chinglish” is not some new discovery – there are websites devoted to the subject, after all. And finally, here’s some fresh proof that this sort of sly mutual rib-digging among insiders (that is, native-speakers) at others’ mistakes is just a natural human inclination: the Germans do it too! Bitte sehr, I give you a new on-line article-with-embedded slide-show from Die Welt featuring comic attempts at translation into German, with often some really wise-ass accompanying commentary, much worse than the Times. On the other hand, these mostly have nothing to do with the Chinese – and sometimes they have nothing to do with German, or indeed any language, but are simply funny signs. Nonetheless, it’s an entertaining diversion, especially for, but not only for, German-speakers.

(Oh yes, and this post’s title is of course derived from Chinglish, specifically from an entry within this Flickr photo-stream – yet another permanent Chinglish site – where a bag of Lay’s potato-chips is labeled in Chinese and in English with the tag “Numb & Spicy Hot Pot Flavor”!)

UPDATE: And now the NYT has another Chinglish slideshow made up of reader submissions!

                          

Unfortunately, these grim events are now totally obscuring the remarkable progress represented by the very fact that such a delegation of eminent Poles, headed by the President, was being allowed to go there in the first place – and by the no-less remarkable fact that Russian premier Vladimir Putin and his Polish counterpart Donald Tusk had in fact participated in a commemoration ceremony there just last Wednesday. Looking back now at news coverage of these developments – that is, written before this past weekend’s tragedy – produces a very bittersweet feeling, especially from two articles on the Katyn legacy from among the elite of the German press, here the Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt. In particular, the latter piece begins with the sentence “Seldom has the Polish public looked at Russia with so much hope as in these days” – on a webpage where, at the very same time, you can click over on the right-hand side (under “Current Videos”) to see a news-film of rescuers searching through the crash-site in the Russian forest!

(By the way, you could be sure that the German coverage of Katyn’s legacy was going to be thorough and high-quality, and not only because Germany’s sheer size of population and cultural inheritance ensures good journalism. Remember that, for decades, it was German soldiers who were alleged to have been at fault here, so you can be sure that German journalists will always be on top of this story to ensure the historic record remains set straight.)

Yes, Die Welt writer Gerhard Gnauck reminds us that the Katyn Massacre was “one of the greatest crimes and at the same time . . . one of the greatest historical lies of the 20th century.” It was the Soviets who did it, of course, specifically the NKVD, as one expression of Stalin’s conviction (one thing he shared with Hitler) that Poland needed to be wiped off of the map (again), and that liquidating the cream of that society’s intellectuals was a good first step towards that. Nonetheless, the Soviet Union was successful for decades in propagating its own “Big Lie” blaming the Germans for the tens of thousands of corpses discovered buried in the woods, going so far as to include the incident in its indictment of top German officials at the Nuremberg Trials, and even erecting a memorial at a West Russian town named “Chatyn” – it bore no actual relation to the massacre itself, but had been burnt to the ground by the Wehrmacht and so was a handy site to which to (mis)lead tourists seeking more information about the Polish victims and their deaths.

This façade of denial lasted almost as long as the USSR itself did; Mikhail Gorbatchev finally admitted Russia’s guilt, but it was not until Boris Yeltsin presided over a new state, the Russian Federation, that the Polish government was allowed to erect a memorial on the site and key historical documents started to be handed over. And then, in 2004, the wall of secrecy slammed shut again: the Russian military prosecutor initiated an investigation into the “Katyn Crime,” which meant of course that all related documents had to be kept confidential again. But by then Boris Yeltsin was gone, replaced by his hand-picked successor Vladimir Putin, who was much more interested in rehabilitating the reputation of Josef Stalin and making Russians proud of the USSR’s history once more.

That’s why the joint Putin-Tusk commemoration ceremony at the Katyn memorial is so significant. (Die Welt’s Gnauck calls it “a historical-political sensation.”) Could the Russians finally be coming back to a sober acceptance of their country’s (and, in particular, Stalin’s) guilt for what happened there? And it wasn’t only Putin at that ceremony; on Good Friday Russian state television broadcast the 2007 film “Katyn” by Oscar-winning Polish director Andrzej Wajda, followed by a panel discussion about it among a group of prominent historians and politicians. (They concluded that the film was an impressive indictment against totalitarianism, and not anti-Russian at all. By the way, Russian television once again broadcast “Katyn” just last night – Sunday, 11 April – i.e. after the plane-crash tragedy; I don’t know whether there was any on-air discussion this time.) What is more, the Russian NGO Pamyat’ (Memory/Memorial) has sent an open letter to President Medvedev urging that 1) The Russian government take up again an investigation into Katyn, so that 2) It can publish a list of all victims, 3) Name the names of the guilty, and 4) Prosecute them criminally (any of those who still might be alive, at least).

Stalin Again on the Up

Good progress, then, right? Well, there has been no reaction to that open letter from Medvedev, and no indication that there ever will be any. Meanwhile, Frank Nienhuysen reports in his SZ article that members of the Communist Party (the second-biggest in the Russian parliament, the Duma) are now pushing for the publication of archive documents that they claim will show that it was the Germans who were behind the Massacre after all. For it turns out to be rather hard to do anything to spoil the warm feeling Russians have deep down about their victory over the Germans, under Papa Stalin. Indeed, in a first since the end of the USSR, Moscow city officials have approved the hanging of portraits of Stalin in the city’s streets next May 9, during the annual World War II victory parade.

As it happens, Polish President Kaczynski had started negotiations with the Russian authorities to go attend that Moscow victory ceremony for the first time. That’s now beside the point, of course; Poland will in any case be busy for a while in mourning, and then with rebuilding its elite and replacing the many political figures who perished in the woods near Smolensk. Unfortunately, that also means that those encouraging Russian gestures towards acknowledging Katyn (including the “historical-political sensation” of Putin at the memorial) must fade completely into the background – out of sight, out of mind for the Poles and everyone else. Except perhaps for the Russians themselves; and, at this stage, isn’t their own coming-to-terms (namely “whether,” and if so, “how”) with what Stalin’s NKVD did seventy years ago in their name the only remaining important question?

UPDATE: Then again, I could be overly pessimistic here, at least according to Jarosław Kurski writing in Gazeta Wyborcza (Let this death unite us, whose English-language translation was published in the Guardian).

                          

I’m not making any of this up, as I will shortly document, at least for those of you who read German. Yet long-time readers of this weblog – Hi Mom! – will remember my fondness for the “false lead,” where impressions about what a given blogpost is about gained from its opening lines turn out to be wildly off-the-mark. Surely I am describing here the Roman Catholic institutions, run by paedophile priests, whose reputations are now being blackened by accusations leveled against their administrators by former inhabitants? Actually, no; taking as my cue a new article by Alan Posener in Die Welt (Brutal daily life in DDR youth institutions), I am referring to the establishments for problem youths set up and run by the former Communist East Germany.

There, as in any socialist land, young people who got in trouble with the law were cared for only at reform-schools run by the State, namely in “youth work centers” (Jugendwerkhöfe) if they were 14 to 18 years old and in “special homes for children” (Spezialkinderheime) if they were younger. And there abuses occurred – perhaps even inevitable abuses, you could say, if you take a dim view of human nature that regards any setting in which people are given near total power over those weaker than and dependent upon them as certain to lead to some kind of trouble. Socialist doctrine made the situation even worse; as Posener reports, the upbringing in such institutions was patterned on the doctrines of the Soviet educational theorist Anton Makarenko, which (at least in the DDR version) prescribed as a first task the breaking of a young person’s individual will, in order then to reconstruct it along more collective lines – described by one former denizen as “Don’t cause trouble, just keep your mouth shut” (Nicht aufmucken, Schnauze halten).

By doctrine and by situation, then, what resulted was a chain of hundreds of institutions throughout the old DDR (usually located in villas, or even castles, that had been confiscated from their owners, by the way) sure to create many victims. Twenty years after the Wall’s fall, those victims are now starting to make their voices heard, contacting the media as well as their representatives in the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s parliament.

And nothing of this has anything at all to do with the abuse, sexual and otherwise, of children entrusted to Catholic institutions in other lands and in the other part of Germany – by definition it does not, since the DDR was a quite strict atheist state. Yet isn’t it funny that such a report would surface at the very same time that officials of the Roman Catholic hierarchy – and, increasingly, German officials in particular – are finding themselves under increasing pressure from victims of the same sort of abuses at their hands or the hands of those they were supposed to supervise? For among the lame rationalizations put forward recently by Church spokesmen trying to deflect such criticism – officials representing a venerable, centuries-old institution founded on the Bible that has always claimed to embody much higher moral standards – has been that “Anyway, this sort of thing happens everywhere.”