danger UXB

On March 3 1942, the British RAF Bomber Command ordered a mission to destroy the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, on the fringes of Paris. Renault, at the time, built an estimated 18,000 trucks a year for Nazi forces, who had then been occupying France for two years.

One of these bombs was discovered unexploded several days ago causing 6,000 resident to be evacuated. This bomb was originally dropped 69 years ago in a successful mission involving a then record 223 aircraft.
French military experts worked from around 8am to noon to diffuse it, with the all clear being given early in the afternoon.

Men, women and children were led from their homes in the morning by some 400 policemen.
Many of the evacuees carried food and family pets with them, while some even had suitcases
"People were asked to leave their homes at dawn this morning because the bomb was considered live and dangerous," said a local police spokesman. "It was found by builders on land which was heavily bombed during the Second World War. Homes which fall within a four hundred meter radius of the bomb have been evacuated."
One of the older evacuee's shook his head and said, "It's like what happened here years ago. The horror has never stopped."

In 1942 the bombers were sent in three waves, with pilots ordered to bomb the factory as low possible so that the civilian population living nearby were not hit. Flares were also used to light up the target. Incredibly, there were no flak defences, meaning the planes could drop their explosives almost uninterrupted for a full hour and 50 minutes.
Few German fighters were scrambled against the British either, and there were no collisions, which meant that the RAF only lost a single Wellington Despite this, however, there were in fact thousands of civilian casualties, especially in apartment blocks close to the factory. While industrial areas on the outskirts of Paris were heavily bombed during the war, the historic centre of the city remained largely unscathed. The tonnage of bombs dropped – some 470 tons – was a record.
Last October in Rennes in Brittany
Sixty five years after the surrender of Germany, this city in Brittany was closed as engineers worked to defuse a 550lb RAF device. Just one of thousands dropped on northern France in 1944 as Allied troops prepared to invade.
10,000 people living in Rennes were involved in the evacuation as the center of the city resembled a ghost town.
"I remember the bombing raids during the war when hundreds were killed," said Maurice Leclerc, an 81-year-old pensioner who was among the evacuees. "The fact that the bombs are still disrupting our lives all these years on is truly incredible."
Further east, 4,500 people were moved out of Woippy, in the suburbs of Metz, as bomb disposal experts worked on devices around a former Wehrmacht supply center. It's now being converted into a bus station, but was bombed so many times during the war that its basement and foundations are littered with ordnance, including RAF and US air force devices.
All of the work was being coordinated by France's Département du Déminage - Department of Mine Clearance - which recovers around 1,000 tons of unexploded munitions every year. Since 1945, around 650 of its staff have died handling unexploded munitions, two as recently as 1998 in the former First World War battlefield of Vimy Ridge.
Their work is concentrated on the so-called 'Iron Harvest' of unexploded ordnance which is littered around the battlefields and bombing targets of northern France. Many of the devices are still live, and the workers are particularly wary of artillery shells containing chemical warfare agents like mustard gas used during the trench warfare of World War I.
Also in Italy last October the area around George Clooney's lake front villa in Italy was sealed off by Italian soldiers for a recovery operation while navy divers brought 500 pound munitions to the surface and took them to a cave to be detonated.
They had been on the floor of the lake for more than 60 years before they were discovered after a fisherman pulled a device from the lake bed.
While in Germany the affects are still felt in the unexploded bombs from the Allies. Technicians routinely clear munitions from one of the most bomb-contaminated regions in Europe -- the state of Brandenburg surrounding Berlin. In Brandenburg alone, an average of 631 tons of old munitions from the two world wars and from Soviet army exercises in East German times are found every year by builders, bomb location squads or children playing.
In the whole of Germany, more than 2,000 tons of American and British aerial bombs and all sorts of munitions ranging from German hand grenades and tank mines to Russian artillery shells are recovered each year. Barely a week goes by without a city street or motorway being cordoned off or even evacuated in Germany due to an unexploded bomb being discovered.
Most estimates for the percentage of unexploded bombs range from 5 to 15 percent -- or between 95,000 and 285,000 tons. As Germany hastily rebuilt its cities after the war, authorities didn’t have the time or the means to locate and dispose of a large part of that tonnage.

Cara - Tuesday
PS this line explodes with P's starred * Kirkus review for the forthcoming Murder in Passy: "The ideal mix of the personal, the political, the puzzling and the Parisian make Aimée's latest a perfect pleasure."

Europe: progressive ideology on course for ... civil war

Go back to where you are happy – German author on immigration issue

Udo Ulfkotte, a noted German journalist and author, known for his severe criticism of Islam, shared with RT his view on what is behind the integration dispute and where it may lead.

“What I believe is there is a place for Muslim in this world and for their culture, they have a place to live in,” Ulfkotte told RT. “And there is a place for European and Western culture to live in. What I don’t believe is they will live peacefully together. We have a clash not only of civilizations and religions, we have a clash of ideologies, like we had a clash between communism and capitalism. Now we have a clash because Islam is also an ideology. I believe that Islam is not going to win a battle.”

The journalist claimed that he does not believe that Muslims will overrun Europe. “Because I believe that what we have done in the past several times – the people will stand up and say ‘We are fed up, we don’t want that any more,’ and try to push them back. And that will be violent. I belong to Europe and to European culture and the Muslims belong to the places where they came from. Because whenever I ask the majority of Turks I speak to, and I ask them, ‘Are you German or are you Turkish?’ Even if they are second or third generation, they will say, ‘I’m Turkish.’”

“The Palestinians: if they live in Saudi Arabia as workers, they say, ‘I’m a Palestinian and my home is Palestine.’ I don’t blame them for that," said Ulfkotte. “I just say, ‘Okay. So if as they say they have their roots there, they are happy there, all the best. Take your suitcases and go back to where you are happy. I will be happy, you will be happy.” ...

Quote from end of the video ...

RT: what future do you predict for this continent?

Udo Ulfkotte: The financial and economical crisis, it looks like it will come back. And whenever you had in history... hard economical problems, ethnical unrest, and ... large groups not respect the state laws and the power of the state... when this respect is gone you had war or civil war.

Daniel Pipes, Europe's Stark Options

The possibility of Muslims accepting the confines of historic Europe and smoothly integrating within it can virtually be dismissed from consideration...

As the American columnist Dennis Prager sums them up, "It is difficult to imagine any other future scenario for Western Europe than its becoming Islamicized or having a civil war." Indeed, these two deeply unattractive alternative paths appear to define Europe's choices, with powerful forces pulling in the contrary directions of Muslims taking over or Muslims rejected, Europe an extension of North Africa or in a state of quasi-civil war.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks on the loss of freedom in Europe

It is this state of affairs that makes Christopher Caldwell’s book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration and the West ... which opens with the sentence, “Western Europe became a multi-ethnic society in a fit of absence of mind,” a chilling read...

Caldwell discusses this theme in an interesting light: he does not overlook the Europeans who feel that Islam is a danger to European values but asks, “How can you fight for something you cannot define?” And this is Europe’s problem – insecurity about who we are, what our various flags mean, why, with every turn, we spend less and less on the military.

Europe has become a place for new religions, new creeds, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, transnationalism. Everything is thus relative. This is an uncertainty that the Muslim does not share. The Muslim ethic and tribal spirit are far more resilient and fierce in war than the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism...

In reality, if Europe falls, it’s not because of Islam. It is because the Europeans of today – unlike their forbears in the Second World War – will not die to defend the values or the future of Europe. Even if they were asked to make the final sacrifice, many a post-modern lily-livered European would escape into an obscure mesh of conscientious objection. All that Islam has to do is walk into the vacuum.

Fjordman: Review of Christopher Caldwell's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

Whatever is going to happen in Western Europe over the coming decades is not going to be peaceful. In 2010 there are already conditions resembling civil war in many French and certain Dutch, British, German, Italian and even Scandinavian suburbs; Kalashnikov rifles are popular in immigrant neighborhoods in the EU capital of Brussels..

How Much Allah Can the Old Continent Bear?

American author and journalist Christopher Caldwell recently published his latest tome, "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West," ... he says ...

"It is certain that Europe will emerge changed from its confrontation with Islam. It is far less certain that Islam will prove assimilable...

When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident and strengthened by common doctrines, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter"

Cultures in Conflict (On Muslim immigrants in Europe)

Caldwell writes...

"Muslim cultures ... have historically been either Europe’s enemies, its overlords, or its underlings. Europe is wagering that attitudes handed down over the centuries, on both sides, have disappeared, or can be made to disappear. That is probably not a wise wager...

Immigration is not enhancing or validating European culture; it is supplanting it."

Mark Steyn on why the fascists are winning in Europe

... in the room where they cook up European conventional wisdom, they could easily pin a sign on the door saying: “This Political Machine Creates Fascists.” ... politics evolved to the point where almost any issue worth talking about was ruled beyond the bounds of polite society... if the political culture forbids respectable politicians from raising certain issues, then the electorate will turn to unrespectable ones... You want to talk about immigration? Whoa, racist! Crime? Racist! Welfare? Racist! Islam? Racistracistdoubleracist! Nya-nya, can’t hear you with my two anti-racist thumbs in my ears! ... The problem in Europe is not a lunatic fringe but a lunatic mainstream ever more estranged from its voters.

Melanie Phillips, The clash of uncivilisations

To those at the bottom, who live outside the bubbles of wealth or ideology, the face of intolerance is all too easy to recognise. They can see the churches of Britain being steadily replaced by mosques, can no longer find a local butcher selling pork, or are being regularly intimidated by local youths declaring ‘this is a Muslim area’. They are in no doubt that they are watching the takeover of their country and civilisation...

Freedom can only be protected if its defenders are united. But with Britain’s collective brain turned to multicultural jelly, liberals are refusing to acknowledge the civilisational battle now under way and gathering pace.

The obsession with the ‘far right’ has cemented progressive opinion into its current lethal state of cultural somnambulism. Liberals must raise their eyes, raise their game and ask where this is leading. For there is far worse on the horizon than a nasty man on Question Time.

Greg Sheridan, East Timor plan lacks action and credibility

Gillard is emerging as a strangely weak and ineffective Prime Minister in foreign policy...

With nearly 6000 illegal immigrants arriving by boat so far this year, and with the government having no strategy to stop the boats, Australia stands in a precarious position. We seem just about to embark on the disastrous European policy, which is now tearing Europe apart, of accepting a large, illegal Muslim immigration.

Not totally strange, she and Rudd are not that far apart. And Big Kev did promise to bring the spirit of Europe down here:

The European Union of course does not represent an identikit model of what we would seek to develop in the Asia Pacific.

But what we can learn from Europe is this – it is necessary to take the first step.

In the 1950s, sceptics saw European integration as unrealistic.

But most people would now agree that the goal of the visionaries in Europe who sat down in the 1950s and resolved to build prosperity and a common sense of a security community has been achieved.

It is that spirit we need to capture in our hemisphere.

Our special challenge is that we face a region with greater diversity in political systems and economic structures, levels of development, religious beliefs, languages and cultures, than did our counterparts in Europe.

But that should not stop us from thinking big.

That's the spirit of open borders.

Gillard shares the same affliction as Rudd: she has no identity. She cannot defend Australia on subjective grounds i.e. because we desire to remain homogeneous. And her brain has been pickled by the ideology of non-discrimination, so she is blind to the consequences of diversity. She is the emotionally-paralysed and brain-dead leader of the lobotomised party.






File under: ominous non-debate.

Ideology: strong for decades and then ... utterly failed

Merkel: German multiculturalism 'utterly failed'

Germany's attempt to create a multicultural society has "utterly failed," Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday, adding fuel to a debate over immigration and Islam polarizing her conservative camp.

Speaking to a meeting of young members of her Christian Democrats (CDU), Merkel said allowing people of different cultural backgrounds to live side by side without integrating had not worked in a country that is home to some four million Muslims.

"This (multicultural) approach has failed, utterly failed," Merkel told the meeting in Potsdam, south of Berlin.

Merkel faces pressure from within her CDU to take a tougher line on immigrants who don't show a willingness to adapt to German society and her comments appeared intended to pacify her critics.

She said too little had been required of immigrants in the past and repeated her usual line that they should learn German in order to get by in school and have opportunities on the labor market.

... Horst Seehofer, chairman of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the CDU's sister party, ... said last week there was no room in Germany for more people from "alien cultures."

Blah, blah, blah. Talking tough whilst the other day she sanctioned demographic suicide.

Letter from Dr Frank Ellis

Modern liberalism is truly depraved. Even now I am staggered by its boundless capacity for hypocrisy and lying ...

... however, all is not doom and gloom. More and more white people are standing up and saying enough is enough. I suspect many liberals realize that the game is up for the cult of multiculturalism. It is the awareness of this looming defeat that makes them all the more vicious, though the time when these people could automatically silence an opponent with screams of “racism” and “fascism” is gone.

As a Slavist, I take great encouragement from Solzhenitsyn who saw Communism could not endure forever: “And I sat there and I thought: if the first tiny droplet of truth has exploded like a psychological bomb, what then will happen in our country when whole waterfalls of Truth burst forth? And they will burst forth. It has to happen.”

Wilders shows the way forward ...

Geert Wilders in Berlin - Part 1/4


Speech Geert Wilders in Berlin

Despite my busy schedule at home, however, I insisted on coming to Berlin, because Germany, too, needs a political movement to defend German identity and to oppose the Islamization of Germany. Chancellor Angela Merkel says that the Islamization of Germany is inevitable. She conveys the message that citizens have to be prepared for more changes as a result of immigration. She wants the Germans to adapt to this situation. The Christian-Democrat leader said: “More than before mosques will be an integral part of our cities.”

My friends, we should not accept the unacceptable as inevitable without trying to turn the tide. It is our duty as politicians to preserve our nations for our children...

Today I am here, however, to warn you for looming disunity. Germany’s national identity, its democracy and economic prosperity, is being threatened by the political ideology of Islam. In 1848, Karl Marx began his Communist Manifesto with the famous words: “A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.” Today, another specter is haunting Europe. It is the specter of Islam. This danger, too, is political. Islam is not merely a religion, as many people seem to think: Islam is mainly a political ideology...

The American political scientist Mark Alexander writes that “One of our greatest mistakes is to think of Islam as just another one of the world’s great religions. We shouldn’t. Islam is politics or it is nothing at all, but, of course, it is politics with a spiritual dimension, … which will stop at nothing until the West is no more, until the West has … been well and truly Islamized.”

These are not just statements by opponents of Islam. Islamic scholars say the same thing. There cannot be any doubt about the nature of Islam to those who have read the Koran, the Sira and the Hadith. Abul Ala Maududi, the influential 20th century Pakistani Islamic thinker, wrote – I quote, emphasizing that these are not my words but those of a leading Islamic scholar – “Islam is not merely a religious creed [but] a revolutionary ideology and jihad refers to that revolutionary struggle … to destroy all states and governments anywhere on the face of the earth, which are opposed to the ideology and program of Islam.” ...

A dispassionate study of the beginnings of Islamic history reveals clearly that Muhammad’s objective was first to conquer his own people, the Arabs, and to unify them under his rule, and then to conquer and rule the world. That was the original cause; it was obviously political and was backed by military force. “I was ordered to fight all men until they say ‘There is no god but Allah,’” Muhammad said in his final address. He did so in accordance with the Koranic command in sura 8:39: “Fight them until there is no more dissension and the religion is entirely Allah’s.” ...

After Muhammad’s death, based upon his words and deeds, Islam developed Sharia, an elaborate legal system which justified the repressive governance of the world by divine right – including rules for jihad and for the absolute control of believers and non-believers...

In 1954, in his essay Communism and Islam, Professor Bernard Lewis spoke of “the totalitarianism, of the Islamic political tradition.” Professor Lewis said that “The traditional Islamic division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War, … has obvious parallels in the Communist view of world affairs. … The aggressive fanaticism of the believer is the same.” ...

There is one more striking parallel, but this is not a characteristic of the three political ideologies, but one of the West. It is the apparent inability of the West to see the danger. The prerequisite to understanding political danger, is a willingness to see the truth, even if it is unpleasant. Unfortunately, modern Western politicians seem to have lost this capacity. Our inability leads us to reject the logical and historical conclusions to be drawn from the facts, though we could, and should know better. What is wrong with modern Western man that we make the same mistake over and over again? ...

When the citizens of Eastern Europe rejected Communism in 1989, they were inspired by dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel, Vladimir Bukovsky, and others, who told them that people have a right, but also an obligation, to “live within the truth.” Freedom requires eternal vigilance; so it is with truth. Solzhenitsyn added, however, that “truth is seldom sweet; it is almost invariably bitter.” Let us face the bitter truth: We have lost our capacity to see the danger and understand the truth because we no longer value freedom.

Politicians from almost all establishment politicians today are facilitating Islamization. They are cheering for every new Islamic school, Islamic bank, Islamic court. They regard Islam as being equal to our own culture. Islam or freedom? It does not really matter to them. But it does matter to us. The entire establisment elite – universities, churches, trade unions, the media, politicians – are putting our hard-earned liberties at risk. They talk about equality, but amazingly fail to see how in Islam women have fewer rights than men and infidels have fewer rights than adherents of Islam.

Are we about to repeat the fatal mistake of the Weimar Republic? Are we succumbing to Islam because our commitment to freedom is already dead? No, it will not happen. We are not like Frau Merkel. We do not accept Islamization as inevitable. We have to keep freedom alive. And, to the extent that we have already lost it, we must reclaim it in our democratic elections. That is why we need political parties that defend freedom. To support such parties I have established the International Freedom Alliance...

One of the things we are no longer allowed to say is that our culture is superior to certain other cultures. This is seen as a discriminatory statement – a statement of hatred even. We are indoctrinated on a daily basis, in the schools and through the media, with the message that all cultures are equal and that, if one culture is worse than all the rest, it is our own. We are inundated with feelings of guilt and shame about our own identity and what we stand for. We are exhorted to respect everyone and everything, except ourselves. That is the message of the Left and the politically-correct ruling establishment. They want us to feel so ashamed about our own identity that we refuse to fight for it.

The detrimental obsession of our cultural and political elites with Western guilt reinforces the view which Islam has of us. The Koran says that non-Muslims are kuffar (the plural of kafir), which literally means “rejecters” or “ingrates.” Hence, infidels are “guilty.” Islam teaches that in our natural state we have all been born as believers. Islam teaches that if we are not believers today this is by our own or by our forefathers’ fault. Subsequently, we are always kafir – guilty – because either we or our fathers are apostates. And, hence, according to some, we deserve subjugation.

Our contemporary leftist intellectuals are blind to the dangers of Islam.
Former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky argues that after the fall of communism, the West failed to expose those who had collaborated with the Communists by advocating policies of détente, improved relations, relaxation of international tension, peaceful coexistence. He points out that the Cold War was “a war we never won. We never even fought it. … Most of the time the West engaged in a policy of appeasement toward the Soviet bloc – and appeasers don’t win wars.”

Islam is the Communism of today. But, because of our failure to come clean with Communism, we are unable to deal with it, trapped as we are in the old Communist habit of deceit and double-speak that used to haunt the countries in the East and that now haunts all of us. Because of this failure, the same leftist people who turned a blind eye to Communism then, turn a blind eye to Islam today. They are using exactly the same arguments in favor of détente, improved relations, and appeasement as before. They argue that our enemy is as peace-loving as we are, that if we meet him half-way he will do the same, that he only asks respect and that if we respect him he will respect us. We even hear a repetition of the old moral equivalence mantra. They used to say that Western “imperialism” was as bad as Soviet imperialism; they are now saying that Western “imperialism” is as bad as Islamic terrorism.

In my speech near Ground Zero in New York on September 11, I emphasized that we must stop the “Blame the West, Blame America”-game which Islamic spokesmen are playing with us. And we must stop playing this game ourselves. I have the same message for you. It is an insult to tell us that we are guilty and deserve what is happening to us. We do not deserve becoming strangers in our own land. We should not accept such insults...

I am very happy to be here in Berlin today to give this message which is extremely important, especially in Germany. Whatever happened in your country in the past, the present generation is not responsible for it. Whatever happened in the past, it is no excuse for punishing the Germans today. But it is also no excuse for you to refuse to fight for your own identity. Your only responsibility is to avoid the mistakes of the past. It is your duty to stand with those threatened by the ideology of Islam, such as the State of Israel and your Jewish compatriots. The Weimar Republic refused to fight for freedom and was overrun by a totalitarian ideology, with catastrophic consequences for Germany, the rest of Europe and the world. Do not fail to fight for your freedom today.

I am happy to be in your midst today because it seems that twenty years after German reunification, a new generation no longer feels guilty for being German. The current and very intense debate about Thilo Sarrazin’s recent book is an indication of the fact that Germany is coming to terms with itself.

I have not yet read Dr. Sarrazin’s book myself, but I understand that while the ruling politically-correct establishment is almost unanimously critical of his thesis and he lost his job, a large majority of Germans acknowledges that Dr. Sarrazin is addressing important and pressing issues. “Germany is abolishing itself,” warns Sarrazin, and he calls on the Germans to halt this process. The enormous impact of his book indicates that many Germans feel the same way. The people of Germany do not want Germany to be abolished, despite all the political indoctrination they have been subjected to. Germany is no longer ashamed to assert its national pride.

In these difficult times, where our national identity is under threat, we must stop feeling guilty about who we are. We are not “kafir,” we are not guilty. Like other peoples, Germans have the right to remain who they are. Germans must not become French, nor Dutch, nor Americans, nor Turks. They should remain Germans. When the Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan visited your country in 2008, he told the Turks living here that they had to remain Turks. He literally said that “assimilation is a crime against humanity.” Erdogan would have been right if he had been addressing the Turks in Turkey. However, Germany is the land of the Germans. Hence, the Germans have a right to demand that those who come to live in Germany assimilate; they have the right – no they have a duty to their children – to demand that newcomers respect the German identity of the German nation and Germany’s right to preserve its identity.

... German culture, like that of neighboring countries, such as my own, is rooted in judeo-christian and humanist values. Every responsible politician has a political obligation to preserve these values against ideologies which threaten them. A Germany full of mosques and veiled women is no longer the Germany of Goethe, Schiller and Heine, Bach and Mendelssohn. It will be a loss to us all. It is important that you cherish and preserve your roots as a nation. Otherwise you will not be able to safeguard your identity; you will be abolished as a people, and you will lose your freedom. And the rest of Europe will lose its freedom with you.

... there is no need to despair. Never! Just do your duty. Be not afraid. Speak the truth. Defend Freedom. Together we can preserve freedom, together we must preserve freedom, and together, my friends, we will be able to preserve freedom.

File under: We are not like Frau Merkel. We do not accept Islamization as inevitable.

Kaiser Wilhelm: Out of the Spotlight

Randall Stephens

What happened to Kaiser Wilhelm (1859-1941) after Germany lost World War I in 1918?

I'd never given that a thought until I read a witty, sprawling chapter in Ian Buruma's Anglomania: A European Love Affair. (A great read. Highly recommended.) Would the Kaiser fall on his sword? Attempt one last suicidal advance? March on Berlin to crush the revolution? Start a mustache grooming college?

No. "Instead," says Buruma, "the kaiser and his entourage, twelve military officers and thirty servants, including his barber, his chambermaids, his butler, his cooks, his doctor, his equerry, and his old cloakroom attendant, 'Father' Schulz, crossed the Dutch border, bound for the hospitality of Count Godard Bentinck's castle at Amerongen. The kaiser's first request, upon his arrival, was to have 'a cup of real good English tea.' He got his tea, served with English scones."

The fallen Prussian leader did more than work on his Rococo mustache, which, upturned, always looked like it was ready to take flight. He liked to dress up in various uniforms. He spent a great deal of time felling trees, a sort of compulsive hobby of his called "hackeritis." And he railed against the Jews and the English. Sometimes, he imagined them as one in the same. The kaiser was a comic, tragic, repulsive figure.

He kept a very tightly organized schedule. He spent the remainder of his life with his crew, venting, storming, and musing on current events and the future of the Aryan race. His was a toxic brew of race hatred and paranoia. (In Buruma's telling, the kaiser carried a bundle of grudges, fears, and troubles. Not least of those, his arm, paralyzed from birth, gave him a sense of physical inadequacy that he never quite overcame.)

Buruma zeros in on Wilhelm's tortured relationship with the English, and especially his English mother, "Vicky," and his grandmother, Queen Victoria. He vacillated between Anglophile and Anglophobe. Wilhelm was drawn to and repelled by the English and Englishness. In Buruma's estimation, he suffered from a Freudian sense of inferiority. Wilhelm built up the German navy to best his rival across the channel. He thundered against the effete English aristocracy and it's liberal shopkeepers. They were no match for the proud, uniformed, manly, Prussian military man.

Powerless, the kaiser could only dream about teutonic Wagnerian glory from his Dutch exile. His ravings became more maniacal with the passing years. (Surely someone has written a novel, a play, or a short story about his Dutch years? Exile on Kaiserstraße?)

The whole account would be far more comic if the kaiser's bizarre, super-charged bigotry wasn't shared by so many others in the years before his death. Reading Buruma's chapter gave me a new appreciation for Hannah Arendt's coinage "the banality of evil."

Demographic suicide: sanctioned by ... ideology

Mosques to become bigger part of German life – Chancellor Angela Merkel

Chancellor Angela Merkel has said Germans had for too long failed to grasp how immigration was changing their country and would have to get used to the sight of more mosques in their cities...

"Our country is going to carry on changing, and integration is also a task for the society taking up the immigrants... For years we’ve been deceiving ourselves about this. Mosques, for example, are going to be a more prominent part of our cities than they were before ...

... we now have to ask the question whether we should train imams here in our country who accept the principles of our state and legal order, or whether preachers should continue in the next few decades to come mostly from Turkey.

... mosques will be a more prominent part of our urban landscape than before..."

Lawrence Auster, Merkel tells Germans to accept the Islamization of Germany

The ironies are sickening. When Hitler came to power in 1933, there were 600,000, mostly highly assimilated, Jews in Germany, one percent of the population, but the Nazis viewed this one percent Jewish element as such a threat to the German nation that it had to be dispossessed and destroyed.

Now there are five million Muslims in Germany, six percent of the population of 81 million, the carriers of a way of life and a system of law totally incompatible with the West, and the German policy is to attack, not the Muslims, but a sole individual, Thilo Sarrazin, who warns that the Muslims cannot assimilate.

File under the ideology of: demography is unstoppable because we'd much rather be displaced than criticise immigrants; so shut up, we're all Kemalists now, just don't notice that Ataturk's suppression of Islam is too being defeated by demography. In other words, the brain-dead ideology of non-discriminatory immigration will be rescued by the brain-dead ideology of Kemalism? Yeah, sure. Lose, lose - the epitaph of ideology.

Video: Der "Danke-Thilo-Mann"

If you protest against immigration in Germany, can you guess what happens? Yep, der Danke-Thilo-Mann gets the "Nazis out!" chant from the pro-immigrant crowd (watch from 4:15) and he needs police protection from a threatening thug.


So, whilst we have Wilders calling Islam "a violent ideology like communism and fascism and we should deal with it that way", the reaction you get when you protest is to be called a Nazi.

File under: ominous non-debate.

Danke, Thilo!

New Book Plunges Germany into Immigration Debate

Are Muslim immigrants a drag on German prosperity? A new book by provocateur Thilo Sarrazin, a board member of the German central bank, argues that they are. His over-the-top comments have triggered yet another debate on immigration in the country...

"If the fertility rate of German autochthons [indigenous] remains at the level it has been at for the past 40 years, then in the course of the next three or four generations, the number of the Germans will sink to 20 million," he writes in the book. "And, incidentally, it is absolutely realistic that the Muslim population, through a combination of a higher birth rate and continuation of immigration, could grow by 2100 to 35 million." In another passage, he writes: "I don't want the country of my grandchildren and great grandchildren to be largely Muslim, or that Turkish or Arabic will be spoken in large areas, that women will wear headscarves and the daily rhythm is set by the call of the muezzin. If I want to experience that, I can just take a vacation in the Orient."

1 in 5 Germans would vote for Thilo Sarrazin

One-in-five Germans say they would vote for a party headed by banker Thilo Sarrazin who has polarised the country with his book on Muslims and immigration...

As the country‘s central bank prepares to fire him - and his own SPD social democrat party is poised to expel him - Sarrazin‘s book has gone to the top of the best seller charts...

His book, Germany Does Away With Itself‚ is particularly popular among both left-wing and conservative voters.

In it Mr Sarrazin says that Muslim immigrants are a drain on German society and writes: 'most of the cultural and economic problems are concentrated in a group of the five to six million immigrants from Muslim countries'.

He adds: 'I don't want us to end up as strangers in our own land, not even on a regional basis.' ...

Sarrazin, meanwhile, has had to have police guards after immigrants posted death threats against him.

German banker hits nerve with anti-immigration book

His publisher is rushing to print more copies of "Germany Does Itself In" to meet demand. Online retailer Amazon.de has a massive 207 reader reviews on its website, with the average score 4.4 stars out of a possible five...

"If I want to hear the muezzin's call to prayer, then I'll go to the Orient," he says, saying that allowing in millions of "guest workers" in the 1960s and 1970s was a "gigantic error." ...

Chancellor Angela Merkel called the remarks "completely unacceptable."

... Sarrazin's book has thrown the spotlight on the fact that Germany's record is poor on integrating its 15.6 million people with what the government calls "a migration background." ...

According to a study from Bielefeld University, one in two Germans thinks there are too many foreigners in the country.

File under: Marieke Hardy's unpublished dossyair dossieyre file of racists that can spell.

Turkish Cops to Patrol German Streets

I found this video on AltRight but it really belongs on FailBlog. Will the need for Turkish cops now mark the failure of diversity and cause a subsequent curb on immigration? Of course not, ideology never fails.

Dispatches from the Historical Society, Day 2: Christian Identities in Modern Germany

Randall J. Stephens

This Friday session, which I chaired, took place after lunch, when bellies were full and eyes were heavy. Attendees trickled in until we had a good number. The presenters engaged us on historical-theological change and continuity in Modern Germany.

Ryan Glomsrud (Harvard University) asked: How do we summarize and describe the context of theologians and philosophers? What counts as appropriate contextualization for a theologian a cultural critic, or a moral philosopher, like Karl Barth? How do we concretize some of these ideas with social and theological context?

In Glomsrud's view, Pietism is the forgotten religious context for 19th century religion and Weimar Germany. Glomsrud challenges the abstract categories--imminent, gnostic, transcendent--used to describe theologians and public intellectuals.

Pietists organized themselves around projects--youth conferences and the like. Barth launched his career in this world. Journals attached to the Pietist 19th century movement served as the bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries. Glomsrud finds a continuity in this model from one century to the next. And he asks historians to think about how this continuity might reshape what we think of the tumultuous changes of the 20th century.

Late 19th-century ecumenism certainly drew on new sentiments in Europe. Thomas Albert Howard (Gordon College) focused on the return of religious history in the ecumenical and confessional age. His paper “Christian Unity in a Secular and Confessional Age: Ignaz von Döllinger, Vatican I, and the Bonn Reunion Conferences of 1874 and 1875,” answered questions about why these conferences took place, what occured at them, and what they tell us about the era. The theological consensus fell apart, commented Howard, when Catholics questioned the participation of Anglicans. The center could not hold.

So what does this tell us about the era? Howard noted the severe limits of thinking of the 19th century as a second confessional age. But also it was no secular age either. Ecumenism was limited for a variety of reasons. Still, the legacy of the Bonn conferences lived on into the 20th century.

Nicholas Brooks (University of Virginia) began with a quote, "Paul has become fashionable again." Perhaps that is in response to the postsecular age or to his reimagining/reevaluation by Gary Wills and others.

Brooks's paper “Interpreting St. Paul for the New Germany: Martin Heidegger and Karl Barth, 1920-22,” considered the views of Barth and Heidegger on Paul. Those views, said Brooks, revealed a very specific pattern in 20th century thought and marked a break with the previous century. Where Glomsrud saw continuity, Brooks saw discontinuity. In Brooks's words: "Barth's and Heidegger's readings of Paul might be situated in the history of Paul-interpretation, and how in invoking Paul's writings, Barth and Heidegger in similar ways signaled their divergence from the intellectual and cultural heritage of the nineteenth century while providing footing for the beginning of a new era in Weimar and European culture more broadly."

Heidegger viewed Paul as an existential type that took on greater relevance in the 20th century. Paul's religion was not the religion of Jesus, thought Heidegger.

The Paul the Heidegger and Barth offered was different from the liberal version, argued Brooks. Paul's religion does not look to a unified whole, Heidegger thought. Real religion presents the world in a kind of radical chaos. It is mutable. Barth and Heidegger launched very different projects using Paul. Heidegger takes a very serious vision of finitude. Barth conceives of God as wholly other and takes on a "post-metaphysical" outlook. The work of both Barth and Heidegger on Paul had special resonance for Westerners in mid-century.

Tal Howard used Freud's term "the return of the repressed" to speak about the trouble in intellectual history with regard to religion. Each of the panelists was thinking through how theologians, divines, and philosophers reenvisioned faith or belief in a supposedly increasingly secular era. Religion has returned, though, and religious studies and religious history is strong. (See the theme for the 2011 AHA!) And these papers were great examples of the strength of the field.

Posted Soon: Videos from two other sessions. The Internet connection here is as slow as Christmas.

Remembering Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- 65 years after martyrdom

It was sixty-five years ago today that Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at Flossenburg Concentration Camp.  His execution, together with other conspirators in the attempted assassination of Hitler, including Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and General Hans Oster, came as the Soviets were bearing down on the region.  It would be just three weeks after this that Berlin would fall. 

Bonhoeffer's legacy is powerful, in large part due to the fact that he did die at the hands of such a brutal regime.  He died because of his resistance to his own nation's leaders.  Despite his own pacifism, he chose to enter into this conspiracy because he believed Hitler's continued rule was the greater evil.  He was clear, however, that such an act was not a Christian one. 

I recently read an excellent book on Bonhoeffer's involvement in the resistance, not just to Hitler, but to the legacy of generations of Prusso-German History.  My review appears in the most recent issue of the Christian Century, but unfortunately it can't be accessed on-line.  The book is authored by John A. Moses, a historian of Germany, and is entitled The Reluctant Revolutionary:  Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Collision with Prusso-German History, (New York:  Berghahn Books, 2009). 

One of the observations that Moses makes about Bonhoeffer's legacy is that he was considered by many in his country to be a traitor.  Many in the German church weren't ready to let go of their "Lutheran-Hegelian" vision of the German state, an ideology that Bonhoeffer had systematically dismantled.  The first observances of his execution were held not in Germany, but in England.  It would not be until the mid-1950s that the first Bonhoeffer conferences began to occur in Germany.  

Moses notes the difficulties that confronted the legacy of Bonhoeffer, due in large part to the German people not being ready to face the realities of an ideology that had given room for such a monstrous regime:

Clearly, Bonhoeffer was far too revolutionary a figure because his theology, as it developed, overthrew centuries of endemic anti-Judaism and simultaneously also challenged the accepted understanding of the sacrosanct status and function of the head of state as n authority answerable only to God for his decisions. . . . As Bonhoeffer eloquently phrased it, there were not two spheres, a sacred and a secular, where the secular authority exerted power int he world uncontrolled by any moral law; there was only one sphere in which everything was subject to the sovereignty of God.  Bonhoeffer had, in short, disposed of a centuries-old doctrine that justified princely absolutism and had reached its most grotesque form under the dictatorship of Adolph Hitler (Moses, Reluctant Revolutionary, p. 234).       

Because Bonhoeffer died so young, before he had the chance to fully develop his ideas, many different people have tried to interpret him and claim him as one of their own.  We must, honor him, by allowing him to be himself -- as John Moses puts it:  He was a "reluctant revolutionary."  He was a product of the German classes, and had sensibilities that were rooted in that upbringing.  And yet, he was willing to step outside that context and question ages old views of the German state and of the Christian relationship to Judaism.  Few among his peers were as willing to take the risk as was he.  For that we give thanks.

Oh Christmas Tree

For many people the world over there will be a new addition to their homes in the coming days and weeks, if that addition has not already arrived. As homes are decorated for the season a large number of families will haul an evergreen tree inside, continuing the tradition of the Christmas tree. But what is the origin and meaning of this grand holiday tradition?

There are many people who will try to tell you that the tree goes all the way back to early pagan cultures, or to the ancient Druids, or to the Roman seasonal celebration known as Saturnalia. But in actuality the Christmas tree dates back to the early years of the 8th century and the life mission of a man born as Winfred in the year 672, but who has become known in history as Saint Boniface.

Winfred was born into a wealthy family, and had to overcome the protestations of his family when he received a calling and entered the Benedictine monastery in late 7th century England. In 802, he became an ordained priest and took the name Boniface, becoming a teacher. Years later, and after previous attempts, he undertook a mission to convert the people of Frisia, an early Germanic tribe that lived along the North Sea.

The Frisians had an ancient symbol known as Thor's Oak which was dedicated to a pagan god. The location of this tree was the main point of veneration for the early Germanic people. In the year 723, Boniface approached this tree and stated his intention to chop it down, an attempt which the tribes believed would cause his death at Thor's hands.

Boniface began to chop at the tree, calling on Thor to strike him down if the tree actually held any power or symbolism. As Boniface chopped a great wind came along and helped topple the massive tree. When the tree fell and no harm came to Boniface, the Germanic people began to believe him and thus began their conversion to Christianity.

There was a fir tree growing in the roots of the former oak, and legend has it that Boniface claimed this as a new symbol saying "This humble tree's wood is used to build your homes: let Christ be at the centre of your households. Its leaves remain evergreen in the darkest days: let Christ be your constant light. Its boughs reach out to embrace and its top points to heaven: let Christ be your Comfort and Guide."

Subsequently the earliest actual references to a specific seasonal tree trace their roots to the Germanic people. Church records from the year 1539 at the Cathedral of Strasbourg mention the erection of a Christmas tree. Also during this time many guilds, or union houses, maintained a custom of preparing Christmas trees in front of their guild houses by decorating them with apples, dates, nuts, and paper flowers.

After hundreds of years as a custom in the Germanic towns, the Christmas tree slowly began to spread as a tradition into the more rural areas, ultimately moving into the aristocracy and spreading east into Russia, Austria, and into France by the mid-19th century. The British royal family also began to help celebrate the holiday season with a Christmas tree during this 19th century period.

During the 1850's, a popular ladies journal in America known as 'Godeys Ladies Book' published a picture of a family gathered around a Christmas tree with presents laid underneath. By the end of the decade the picture and its popularity had caused the tradition to begin and spread in the United States. By the 1870's, putting up a Christmas tree had become the norm here in America.

In its original tradition, the Christmas tree was brought into the home and setup with decorations on Christmas Eve, not to be taken down until after the traditional '12th day' on January 6th, which was the eve of the Epiphany, the day celebrating the 'Magi' or 'Three Wise Men' adoring the Christ child. It was the commercialization of the Christmas season that resulted ultimately in trees being erected at earlier points.

In celebrating the final Christmas of his life in 2004, Pope John Paul II spoke of the true meaning and purpose of the Christmas tree calling it "an ancient custom that exalts the value of life." He pointed out that the evergreen remains unchanged throughout the harshness of winter, and further stated that it represents "the tree of life, a figure of Christ, God's greatest gift to all men."

In past years it had become a tradition in our own family that my family would get together with my brother Mike's family and a few others. We would travel to the area around New Hope, Pennsylvania to a tree farm where we would select and cut down the tree for our respective families. We would then stop for a nice lunch or dinner on the ride home. We abandoned this long ride and tradition when our kids got older, but it remains a nice shared Christmas memory for our family.

My wife and I took part in this now wide-spread tradition in the way that has become customary in our home when we took a drive out yesterday and went to find our home Christmas tree. After making our selection with one of the many tree sales locations that spring up this time of year, we brought our tree home. We will put it up in it's stand today in our living room, let it 'settle' for a day, and then begin to decorate it tomorrow night.

As we decorate we will play Christmas music, enveloping our living room in the Christmas season. And as we do so we will look on the beauty of its lights and decorations and ornaments and we will be reminded of the light and joy that was brought into our world with the birth of Jesus Christ two thousand years ago. As you put up and admire your own Christmas tree this season, remember to consider that light of Christ, the true meaning of the tree and of Christmas itself.

Remembering the Nazi Final Solution

The Nazi Party came to power under the guidance of Adolf Hitler during the 1930's, and early on they blamed the Jewish people for many of their problems. They then began to formulate a plan for what Hitler himself called the "final solution of the Jewish question." In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were passed that saw classification of German citizens by race. If all four of your grandparents were of German blood, then you were a good German. If 3 or 4 of them were Jewish, then you were Jewish. With 1 or 2 Jewish grandparents, you were considered a 'crossbreed'. The laws prohibited marriage and intercourse between Jews and Germans, as well as the employment of German females under age 45 in Jewish households. They also stripped those of the non-German blood of their German citizenship. Efforts to begin eliminating Jews from German society began even prior to World War II, as Jews were slaughtered in mass killings and became the victims of 'pogroms', which were systematic riots against and attacks on their population centers that included physical violence and murder against people, destruction of businesses, and destruction of their places of worship. Beginning in September of 1941, all Jews living in the lands under German control were required to wear yellow patches on their clothing for identification. Jews were not permitted to become doctors, lawyers, or journalists, could not use state hospitals, and would not be schooled by the state beyond age 14. By the time that 1942 rolled around, with WWII underway fully across the globe, one million Jews had already been killed by the Nazi regime. But this was only the beginning of the worst slaughter of one group of people in the history of mankind. On January 20th, 1942 at the Wannsee Villa in Berlin, a conference named after Hitler's statement of 'The Final Solution to the Jewish Question' was held by a group of Nazi officials. It was here that the idea was born to build actual 'extermination camps' at which mass extermination of Jewish people would occur. Many Jews would also be held at 'concentration camps' if deemed healthy enough and would be utilized as slave labor, until they either died of disease or exhaustion. As the Germans conquered new territories, they set up a system of mass warehousing of Jews, and their transportation on trains to the extermination camps. Built under the direction of Heimlich Himmler in Nazi-occupied Poland, this use of actual extermination or death camps was the beginning of the final phase of the Jewish mass murders that has become known as 'The Holocaust'. This coordinated genocide of mostly Jews, but also at places including Serbs and gypsies, was accomplished by herding those who survived the arduous train rides into the camps. Here they would be led one-by-one into gas chambers, with the bodies then being either cremated or buried in mass graves. Approximately 2-3 million people, most of them Jewish, were killed during the years that the death camps operated, and perhaps 10 million more Jews were killed by the Germans when you count in mass shootings and other murder victims. Today, April 21st, is 'Holocaust Remembrance Day', on which we call to mind all of those who were murdered by the German Nazis in that final racist solution. Still today, over six decades after their use, the death camps with their gas chambers and crematories are lasting symbols of the pure evil that existed within Germany during the years just prior to and during World War II. Evil is a very real force, a real entity in our world that exists still today. We need only do what today calls on us to do, remember the Holocaust in the Nazi final solution, to plant that knowledge of evil firmly in our consciousness, and we must always be willing to fight to overcome that evil.

The Eurack Obamapean

It has been described in the adoring old media as 'a sea of humanity' and 'hundreds of thousands of adoring followers'. Of course, I am talking about the crowds at rallies for United States Presidential candidate Barrack Obama's visit this past week to Europe for his speeches in front of the 'adoring throngs' - in Germany and France. Meanwhile, back home here in the good-old United States, where the election actually matters and among his own nation, Republican candidate John McCain chose to visit with and talk problems with real Americans. The Dems just don't understand the significance of the difference. A professor on public policy at George Mason University, Jeremy Mayer, is quoted as saying "...if you look at the pictures this week, McCain is speaking at a German restaurant in Ohio, and Obama is speaking before 200,000 Germans in Berlin” as if that is somehow a negative for McCain. Obama is speaking to a lot of Germans while American hero John McCain is speaking to a regular American-dream independent businessman, but somehow Obama's Euro-speech is more significant? Only to the liberal Kool Aid-drinking, Dem-supporting academic elites and the old media. With all the attention, Obama gained nothing in the polls during his big Euro-love festival. Liberal pundits are scratching their heads wondering what they have to do to get their candidate ahead. They just don't realize that there is little that you can do to fool the full 51% of the American population of Americans who support positions to the right of their far-left agenda. It is not enough that he chose Europe to make his big public push this week, Obama was also seen globe-trotting in the war-torn Middle East. Problem was that he once again found a way to alienate our troops while over there. He continued his strategy of putting forth two different positions at once, depending on whatever audience he was in front of at the time. Pull out the troops, keep a strong presence. Keep up the fight, time to end the war. Back and forth, flip and flop, two-faced to the end. Those liberal pundits will continue scratching their heads as to the tight polls right up until their election loss in November. They just don't get it, that the majority of Americans will always chose a real, proven American hero over a Euro-candidate any year.