PrintJuly 23, 2008
Obama's Berlin Moment
Obama's Premature Inauguration Syndrome is still giving him trouble, witness the mass Obama rally scheduled for Berlin's SiegessSaeule or Victory Column, to celebrate his penetrating insight in foreign affairs. Google's top listing of this Ueberphallic Prussian monument has to be seen to be believed: It is a favorite Berlin gay newspaper, as you can see. You have to admit those Germans have a sense of humor.
What superficial American tourists never understand, of course, is that just about all those magnificent European monuments stand for historical massacres. Even the big cathedrals symbolize the religious wars of the Reformation, which killed more people than anything before Napoleon and the World Wars. The Arc de Triomphe in Paris commemorates Napoleon's imperial invasions of just about all of Europe (with 41 million dead). The Prussian Victory Column in Berlin, before it became a gay icon, was a proud celebration of Prussian victory against Napoleon's invasion of Germany, Spain, Russia, the Low Countries, Sweden, and Egypt. It reminds Germans of the Prussian victory over Napoleon at Waterloo (with Lord Wellington playing a minor role), plus the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and of course World War I. It all adds up to tens of millions of dead people.
Just like one of those embarrassing American tourists, Obama insenitively reminds Europeans of past massacres and the war propaganda and hysteria that marked the Prussian rise to dominance. The German crowds probably won't chant "Hoch! Hoch!" at Obama, as they used to when der Kaiser's Prussian troops went marching by on the way to the killing fields of World War I. But what will they chant? Or is chanting forbidden, along with banners?
As a German politician remarked,
"The Siegessaeule in Berlin was moved from the Reichstag (German parliament) to its current position by Adolf Hitler," Rainer Bruederle, deputy chairman of the opposition Liberal Party, FDP, said in an interview with Bild am Sonntag. He said he questioned, "if Barack Obama has been well advised to use it as the site of a speech outlining his vision of a world of cooperation."
Yes, well. Good taste is not exactly the mark of Obama's rallies so far. The Germans are lucky that Obama isn't opening with the Decemberist rock band playing the Soviet National Anthem, as they are wont to do, the same way his famous "75,000 person rally" opened in Portland, when he beat Hillary in the Oregon Primary. The real Decemberists were secret Russian revolutionaries, whose movement ultimately led to the mass murder of some 100 million unfortunate people during the reign of Marxist regimes in Europe. That ended with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in the late 1980s, at the urging of Ronald Reagan. But Obamanistas wouldn't know about that.
The history of Europe is all glorified blood, blood, and more blood. Today, Eurosocialists claim to be all about peace. But in fact socialism has been a classic European imperialist movement -- what do you think the Soviet Union was all about? Today Eurosocialism is limited to peaceful imperialism, but not a few decades ago it taught agitators like Pol Pot how to kill, and sent him off to Cambodia to murder three million of his people. As long as the massacres happened far away, European socialists were happy. They still are.
In fact, Eurosocialism still contains all the seeds of classic European imperialism: The endless sense of Europe's superiority over the rest of the world, the preachiness of how the rest of the world must live, the constant efforts to impose global carbon taxes, poverty taxes, and UN rules on subject nations (like the US) for the greater glory of Germany-France-Spain-Britain -- all the classic European imperial powers look at the US with green imperialism envy.
Imperialism never stopped in Europe. It just stopped being violent for a while, because America beat European imperial powers in WWI, WWII, and the Cold War. And don't think they don't know it. Why do you think Europeans loved to hate America over the overthrow of Saddam? Saddam's Baathist Party was modeled after Europe's fascist parties, after all.
As Roger Cohen just wrote in the New York Times, itself the very home and soapbox of Eurosocialism in America,
"Barack Obama has already won the U.S. election by a landslide. In Europe, that is. Polls show the French putting the first African-American in the White House with 86 percent backing. Obamania is about as intense in Germany and Britain, the two other European countries the Senator will visit this week."
Welcome back to Europe, Senator Obama. They will recognize you there, although they might be just a little bit nervous about those screaming mass rallies on their home grounds. That hasn't really happened a lot since you-know-who.
James Lewis blogs at dangeroustimes.wordpress.com
