Apam helyett · Apr 02, 2011
Gyorgy Peter konyvrecenzio a NOL-ban:
nincsenek benne semleges viszonyulásra módot adó pihenők, normális pulzussal tudomásul vehető sorok. Ez a szerző erénye, de a kor bűne is, melyben újra nyomasztóra nőtt a jogállam lebomlását kísérő közöny súlya. Azé a közönyé, melynek folyamatosságáról szól ez a kötet, mely a főhőst egykoron a halál küszöbére sodorta, azután pedig éltette őt, elkísérte a munkaszolgálatosok bori táborától a kommunistaként átlelkesedett évtizedeken keresztül a radikális antiszemitákkal való antiglobalista szövetségig.
Az apa, aki kamaszként meglátja a társadalomból kivetett sorstársát a magyar parasztban, ekképp harcostársait a népi írókban, s így nem vesz tudomást azok antiszemitizmusáról, öreg antiglobalistaként jobbikos harcostársainak radikális antiszemitizmusáról nem lesz majd hajlandó tudomást venni. Aki belátja ezt az ívet, az antiszemitizmus iránti közöny vissza térését hat évtized múltán egy zsidóként halálra szánt ember életében, az bizony sok mindent megért.
Future value of money · Mar 31, 2011
For someone age 40, each dollar you spend is actually costing you about $4. Even if you’re in your mid-50s, each dollar you spend is actually taking about $2 out of your retirement fund. And for somebody age 20, for whom the money can grow for at least 45 years, each dollar is actually costing you nine.
Mini Countryman review · Mar 31, 2011
In answer to your question, I would say all of it, but it doesn’t start with this model of Mini. My wife and I bought the original Rover designed Mini. A sensible small car that handles brilliantly, has a cute and usable interior and an extremely efficient use of space. When BMW exited its horrifying acquisition of Rover, keeping the Mini brand I would think mostly to save face from one of the most grandly moronic business decisions in a recent auto industry of grandly stupid business deals, there was a need at the company to make Mini into something. They completely redesigned the principal Cooper to size closer to the VW Golf in an attempt to appease their German overlords and shareholders by making a case that they were going to conquer the small car market from VW. This of course was an absurd thought and had no bearing in market reality, but hey they’re BMW; they can do anything. The car that the Germans designed, like the current BMW Rolls Royce, the VW Bentley, the now defunct Mercedes Crossfire, and the 300C are not real cars. They are parodies of cultural icons seen through the prism of one culture to another. They are outsized, or overemphasized in design. They fail to capture the true design aesthetics of say an American car with its sharp Bill Mitchell inspired crease lines, or an English car with they carefully rolling volumes and light airiness that made those cars distinctly English.
After all that blather my point is simple, to draw the line at the Countryman is absurd. The outsized gauge pod of that first redesigned Cooper or the bloated exterior dimensions showed that the failure of design was already there. The Countryman is just an extension of poor, arrogant and culturally removed german design being applied where it can not and should never have gone. BMW lost Billions on its acquisition of a moribund socialist day care center for the should have been unemployed, not that Rover was making bad cars … it was just losing a fortune on every single on of them, but when the intention is to keep people employed and not make money, that is what will happen. The thing is that until BMW makes the effort to understand the brand that it bought, not created, it will continue to drive further and further away from the values that made the brand sell.
Necons, revisited · Mar 29, 2011
Hard-core lefty writes on Syria, gets this reader comment:
The first thing we need to do to help the people of Syria, Helena, is to ignore the sorry blather of people like yourself who for years have been fawning over Assad and wildly applauding his crazy animus towards Israel and his fellow Arabs. I wonder how it must feel to you to wake up in the morning and look in the mirror these days, now that it has been decisively shown in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Jordan, Yemen and Syria, that Arabs do crave freedom and don’t hold Israel responsible for their lack of it. Do you say, “Oh my G-d, the neocons have had it right all along”? No, of course you don’t. For that, you would have to have an honest bone in your body.
Who is Helena Cobban?
Translate book cover blurbs · Mar 29, 2011
“luminous prose” = too many goddam words
“a tour-de-force” = threw it across the room
“a triumph” = huge advance
“a commanding new voice in fiction” = girlfriend’s brother wrote it
“sublime” = didn’t know what the hell was going on
“unflinching artistry” = lots of boobs and stabbing
“grabs you on page 1 and won’t let go” = stuck reading it on long flight
“achingly beautiful” = really long sentences
“brilliant” = smarty-pants
“profound” = written by old person
“a story for the ages” = ripoff of Tolstoy
“taut” = limited vocabulary
“finely wrought” = namby-pamby
“best of the year” = only thing I’ve gotten around to reading
“deeply imagined” = makes no sense
“incredible range and breadth” = all over the place
“ingenious” = confusing
“radiant” = already been blurbed by people more famous than me
“lyrical grace” = either is girl or writes like one
“rich language” = not enough paragraph breaks
“devastating” = dropped it on my toe
“goes straight for the heart” = sappy
“trenchant satire” = poop jokes
“clever” = thinks it’s being clever
“fiercely resonant” = author looks hot in publicity photo
“a small gem” = will sell five hundred copies, tops
“first-rate” = grad school pal
“bracing” = fits nicely in box headed for used bookstore
“tightly coiled and edgy” = contains fucking
“humane” = contains murdering
“you’ll feel forever changed” = you will never get those hours of your life back
“transcends its genre” = stuck in its genre
“affirms the human spirit” = contains scene of winning big game
“searing…glorious…a fury of dazzling transcendence” = I’m just stringing random words together now
String theory - French theory · Mar 29, 2011
Excerpt:
A review of D’un Ton Guerrier En Philosophie
Habermas, Derrida & Co
572pp. Gallimard. 25euros.
978 2 07 012947 8
Click here to read more ...
Today's fellow travellers · Oct 07, 2010
The Jerusalem Post on J Street’s supporters:
Many are confused liberals with little Jewish background who Ben Ami once described to the New York Times as being primarily intermarried youngsters who attend “Buddhist Seders.” Some are genuinely angered when accused of providing support to those seeking to destroy the Jewish state and maintain that they are partaking in constructive dissident activity which they believe remains within the framework of pro-Israel activity. They are in many respects, reminiscent of the Jewish fellow travelers during the Cold War. They too, were muddled liberals being manipulated by hard core communists into supporting bogus peace festivals and indulging in pro Soviet activities which unquestionably furthered the interests of the “Evil Empire.”
Support for Israel · Aug 18, 2010
... is decreasing in the US and Europe:
Greenberg has analyzed the poll results and says that the section of the American public where Israel is most rapidly losing support is among Liberal Americans who align themselves with the Democratic Party.
Arlington cemetery · Jul 31, 2010
Edward Lucas in Eastern Approaches
ARLINGTON cemetery, like the rows upon rows of war graves in Normandy, is a poignant reminder of the sacrifices made by Americans for other people’s freedom over the past 100 years. Any European who feels that transient blunders and scandals somehow justify snootiness, moral superiority or outright anti-Americanism should take a long walk round the Arlington cemetery before opening his mouth.
Orban es Amerika · Jul 21, 2010
Nol emlekezteto:
A Népszabadság annak idején többször megírta, mit vártak volna el az amerikaiak egy fehér házi meghívásért cserébe: a Csurka István zsigeri antiamerikanizmusától való személyes elhatárolódást és nyilvános védelmet a jobboldal „bizonyos köreiben” terjengő antiszemita nézeteket felhánytorgató Nancy Goodman Brinker nagykövetnek. Az eredményt ismerjük.
The Russian spy ring · Jul 06, 2010
Edward Lucas on the recently discovered Russian spy ring. He links to several blogs, where journalist who are “mercifully spared from knowing anything about the subject” are laughed at for writing about intelligence or where a funny title says it all.
All of this underlines Democratist’s oft-made point that almost the entire Russian political-economic system is rotten from (especially) top to bottom: These arrests, and any subsequent ones (perhaps also in other countries) over the next few months, are going to do a superb job of repeatedly and brutally highlighting that this is true even for the holiest of holies; the “illegals,” and that they and their superiors are just as incompetent and crooked as everyone else in the nomenklatura. This is bound to strengthen calls for meaningful reform, regardless of whether Medvedev or Putin takes on the Presidency in 2012 (but as we mentioned before, tends to benefit Medvedev at Putin’s expense).
Despite their nationalist bluster, Russia has always been obsessed by the West, especially the US, as a kind of mirror-image and rival to which they can compare themselves (as half an hour watching Russia Today will quickly confirm). Over the next few months, maybe even years, the Russian political class and intelligentsia is going to be continually reminded just how bad things have become, at a time when the government is in no position to rattle enough sabres to mask the howls of anger.
Lucas finally quotes the RFE/RL and two of his own pieces in The Telegraph and Daily Mail.
German guilt · Jul 06, 2010
The Jerusalem Post on the recent Bundestag resolution
The German Bundestag has not issued cross-party resolutions blasting the United States for its blockade of Cuba or members of the United Kingdom’s armed forces who were involved in human rights violations in Iraq. Unanimous German parliamentary resolutions targeting Hamas’s firing of over 8000 missiles on Israel in recent years are conspicuously missing from the orders of legislative business.
I would add that nobody asked for international investigations on the death of scores of Afghans at the hands of the German military (or another strike). Onwards:
How can one explain that Israel’s most reliable partner in Europe approved a parliamentary resolution that endangers Israel’s security interests? There is no other country that in Germany can arouse such intense emotional feelings of loathing as Israel.
The Dutch Jewish author Leon de Winter, writing in The Wall Street Journal in June, attempted to explain this outbreak of hatred.
De Winter noted that Europeans “have grown tired of carrying the guilt for the destruction of the Continent’s Jews. They have started to long for some form of historical release.”
So Germany’s obsession with targeting Israel for blame is largely an effort to cleanse its deeply anchored guilt about the crimes of the Shoah. Israel and Jews represent a permanent living reminder of the Holocaust
Thus, the anti-Israel Bundestag resolution is not an expression of prudent foreign policy criticism, rather an act of absolution for a guilt-ridden country that frequently views Israel as a disturber of the peace instead of a liberal democracy with shared Western values.
In short, it’s German guilt, stupid.
Breakdown of the special relationship · Nov 20, 2009
Obama’s neglect of Britain gets noticed.
Useful idiots? Nah, just idiots · Nov 19, 2009
The Spectator on Neil Kinnock’s (and, more broadly, Labour’s) relationship with the Soviets.
Good books · Nov 18, 2009
I posted earlier about this list. Here it is in full:
The final list was:
BOOKS OF THE 1940s
1. Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex (Le Deuxieme Sexe)
2. Marc Bloch: The Historian’s Craft (Apologie pour l’historie, ou, Metier d’ historien)
3. Fernand Braudel: The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (La Mediterranee et le monde mediterraneen a l’epoque de Philippe II)
4. James Burnham: The Managerial Revolution
5. Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus (Le Mythe de Sisyphe)
6. Albert Camus: The Outsider (L’Etranger)
7. R. G. Collingwood: The Idea of History
8. Erich Fromm: The Fear of Freedom (Die Furcht vor der Freiheit)
9. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklaerung)
10. Karl Jaspers: The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (Der philosophische Glaube)
11. Arthur Koestler: Darkness at Noon
12. Andre Malraux: Man’s Fate (La Condition humaine)
13. Franz Neumann: Behemoth: The structure and practice of National Socialism
14. George Orwell: Animal Farm
15. George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four
16. Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation
17. Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies
18. Paul Samuelson: Economics: An introductory analysis
19. Jean-Paul Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism (L’Existentialisme est un humanisme)
20. Joseph Schumpeter: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
21. Martin Wright: Power Politics
BOOKS OF THE 1950s
22. Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism
23. Raymond Aron: The Opium of the Intellectuals (L’Opium des intellectuels)
24. Kenneth Arrow: Social Choice and Individual Values
25. Roland Barthes: Mythologies
26. Winston Churchill: The Second World War
27. Norman Cohn: The Pursuit of the Millennium
28. Milovan Djilas: The New Class: An analysis of the Communist system
29. Mircea Eliade: Images and Symbols (Images et symboles)
30. Erik Erikson: Young Man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history
31. Lucien Febvre: The Struggle for History (Combat pour l’histoire)
32. John Kenneth Galbraith: The Affluent Society
33. Erving Goffman: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
34. Arthur Koestler and Richard Crossman (eds): The God That Failed: Six studies in Communism
35. Primo Levi: If This Is a Man (Se questo un uomo)
36. Claude Levi-Strauss: A World on the Wane (Tristes tropiques)
37. Czeslaw Milosz: The Captive Mind (Zniewolony umysl)
38. Boris Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
39. David Riesman: The Lonely Crowd
40. Herbert Simon: Models of Man, Social and Rational
41. C. P. Snow: The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
42. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History
43. J. L. Talmon: The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy
44. A. J. P. Taylor: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe
45. Arnold Toynbee: A Study of History
46. Karl Wittfogel: Oriental Despotism: A comparative study of total power
47. Ludwig Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen)
BOOKS OF THE 1960s
48. Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil
49. Daniel Bell: The End of Ideology
50. Isaiah Berlin: Four Essays on Liberty
51. Albert Camus: Notebooks 19351951 (Carnets)
52. Elias Canetti: Crowds and Power (Masse und Macht)
53. Robert Dahl: Who Governs?: Democracy and power in an American city
54. Mary Douglas: Purity and Danger
55. Erik Erikson: Gandhi’s Truth: On the origins of militant nonviolence
56. Michel Foucault: Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the Age of Reason (Histoire de la folie a l’age classique)
57. Milton Friedman: Capitalism and Freedom
58. Alexander Gerschenkron: Economic Backwardness in Historial Perspective
59. Antonio Gramsci: Prison Notebooks (Quaderni del carcere)
60. H. L. A. Hart: The Concept of Law
61. Friedrich von Hayek: The Constitution of Liberty (Die Verfassung der Freiheit)
62. Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
63. Carl Gustav Jung: Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Erinnerungen, Traeume, Gedanken)
64. Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
65. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie: The Peasants of Languedoc (Les Paysans de Languedoc)
66. Claude Levi-Strauss: The Savage Mind (Le Pensee sauvage)
67. Konrad Lorenz: On Aggression (Das sogenannte Boese)
68. Thomas Schelling: The Strategy of Conflict
69. Fritz Stern: The Politics of Cultural Despair
70. E. P. Thompson: The Making of the English Working Class
BOOKS OF THE 1970s
71. Daniel Bell: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
72. Isaiah Berlin: Russian Thinkers
73. Ronald Dworkin: Taking Rights Seriously
74. Clifford Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures
75. Albert Hirschman: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty
76. Leszek Kolakowski: Main Currents of Marxism (Glowne nurty marksizmu)
77. Hans Kueng: On Being a Christian (Christ Sein)
78. Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State and Utopia
79. John Rawls: A Theory of Justice
80. Gershom Scholem: The Messianic Idea in Judaism, and other essays on Jewish spirituality
81. Ernst Friedrich Schumacher: Small Is Beautiful
82. Tibor Scitovsky: The Joyless Economy
83. Quentin Skinner: The Foundations of Modern Political Thought
84. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Gulag Archipelago
85. Keith Thomas: Religion and the Decline of Magic
BOOKS OF THE 1980s and beyond
86. Raymond Aron: Memoirs (Memoires)
87. Peter Berger: The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty propositions about prosperity, equality and liberty
88. Norberto Bobbio: The Future of Democracy (Il futuro della democrazia)
89. Karl Dietrich Bracher: The Totalitarian Experience (Die totalitaere Erfahrung)
90. John Eatwell, Murray Milgate and Peter Newman (eds): The New Palgrave: The world of economics
91. Ernest Gellner: Nations and Nationalism
92. Vaclav Havel: Living in Truth
93. Stephen Hawking: A Brief History of Time
94. Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
95. Milan Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
96. Primo Levi: The Drowned and the Saved (I sommersi e i salvati)
97. Roger Penrose: The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning computers, minds, and the laws of physics
98. Richard Rorty: Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
99. Amartya Sen: Resources, Values and Development
100. Michael Walzer: Spheres of Justice
Twenty years of liberty · Nov 09, 2009
The Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago today. The European War of 1914-1989 did not spontaneously end, just as Communism did not spontaneously vanish.
Instead, let’s give well-deserved credit to (1) four decades of US containment of the Soviet Union, (2) the international institutional framework created by the US at the end of WWII (“Pax Americana”), (3) Ronald Reagan, who had strategic vision, courage and luck, (4) the US military buildup of the 1980s which the Soviets could not ultimately match, (5) European leaders like Margaret Thatcher, for going against their own chattering classes (6) spiritual leaders like Pope John Paul II, who encouraged the Poles not to be afraid, (7) the Helsinki process, which contrasted the Soviets’ lofty rhetoric with their totalitarian practices (8) to reform-minded Communist leaders like those in Hungary who ever so subtly explored the perimeter of the possible (9) to Mikhail Gorbachev, who neither intended nor did he (initially) anticipate this outcome, but who did the right thing, when push came to shove, by not interfering, and thus prevented blood shedding of epic proportions, and (10) to dissidents, whether famous or not, successful or failed, for simply trying to uphold human dignity in the face of one the most seducing, yet pernicious, utopias ever.
Last but not least, three cheers to the institutions of liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Their absence doomed the Communist experiment, despite the feverish hopes of assorted naïfs and lunatics around the world.
Jokes · Nov 09, 2009
Credit were credit is due.
Q: What do Tupperware and a walrus have in common?
A: They both like a tight seal.
Q: What has three teeth and sixty feet?
A: The front row at a Willy Nelson concert.
Q: What is the new O.J. web site address?
A: slash.slash.backslash.escape
Q: What did the lesbian frog say to the other lesbian frog?
A: They’re right! We do taste like chicken!
Q: What did the banana say to the vibrator?
A: What are YOU shaking for? She’s going to eat me!
Q: What is the difference between erotic and kinky?
A: Erotic is using a feather….kinky is using the whole chicken.
Q: What do you call a gay dinosaur?
A: Megasorass
Q: What is the difference between Michael Jackson and a grocery bag?
A: One is made of plastic and is dangerous for children to play with … the other is used to carry groceries.
Q: How can you tell if you’re at a bulimic bachelor party?
A: The cake jumps out of the girl.
Q: What do a clitoris, an anniversary, and a toilet have in common?
A: Men always miss them.
Q: Why do so many women fake orgasm?
A: Because so many men fake foreplay.
Q: What’s the difference between Bill Clinton and the Titanic?
A: Only 1500 went down on the Titanic.
Q: What’s the new game they’re playing in the White House?
A: Swallow the Leader.
Q: How can you tell if your wife is dead?
A: The sex is the same but the dishes pile up.
Q: Why doesn’t Mexico have an Olympic team?
A: Because everybody who can run, jump, and swim are already in AmericA:
Q: How are twisters (tornadoes) and marriage alike?
A: They both begin with a lot of blowing and sucking, and in the end you lose your house.
Q: What’s the difference between a blimp and 365 blow jobs?
A: Ones a Goodyear. The other is a great year.
Q: What’s the difference between a golf ball and a woman’s G-spot?
A: A man will spend 20 minutes looking for the golf ball.
Q: What’s the difference between a whorehouse and a circus?
A: One is a cunning array of stunts…...
Q: How do you suprise Helen Keller?
A: Leave the plunger in the toilet.
Q: Why can’t Frankenstein have children?
A: Because his nuts are on his neck.
Q: What’s the difference between a bitch and a whore?
A: A whore sleeps with everybody at the party, and a bitch sleeps with everybody at the party except you.
Q: Who is the most popular guy at the nudist colony?
A: The guy who can carry a cup of coffee in each hand and a dozen donuts.
Q: Who is the most popular girl at the nudist colony?
A: She is the one who can eat the last donut!
Q: What has 6 legs and turns in a paddock?
A: A ram doing a ewey
Q: Why did God create man?
A: Because you can’t cut the grass with a vibrator.
And now, for something completely different
The only substitute for good manners is fast reflexes.
If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
Boycott shampoo! Demand the REAL poo!
Black holes are where God divided by zero.
All generalizations are false.
Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math.
Sometimes I wake up grumpy; Other times I let him sleep.
I didn’t fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a vegetarian.
Give me ambiguity or give me something else.
A premature obituary · Sep 09, 2009
The New Criterion features a review of and reply to Sam Tannenhaus new book The Death of Conservatism.
“On the one side,” he [Tannenhaus] writes, “are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, whether the restoration of America’s pre-New Deal ancient regime, a return to Cold War-style Manichaeanism, or the revival of pre-modern family values.” In recent years, he concludes, the “revanchists” have gotten the upper hand over the Burkeans, and have thereby run the conservative juggernaut over a cliff and into irrelevance. In an entry that gives the reader a flavor of some of the exaggerated rhetoric contained in the book, Tanenhaus writes that, “Today’s conservatives resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology.”
The argument that contemporary conservatives are reactionaries or revanchists is wrong on its face. The market school of economics cannot be dismissed because it is critical of the New Deal or of Keynesian policies, nor are free-market thinkers reactionary in any sense of that term. Tanenhaus does not inquire seriously into the reasons why conservatives are uneasy with the welfare state, why some see in it a threat to liberty and others an encouragement to the breakdown of the family and self-government. The market revolution of the last thirty years, moreover, contributed greatly to world prosperity over that period, to the fall of Communism, and to much else that was beneficial besides. It may be true that the current economic crisis presents a challenge to market thinking, but it certainly does not vindicate central planning or the welfare state, and there is nothing about that challenge that justifies the conclusion that market economics is dead.
It is certainly true, as Tanenhaus says, that conservatism as a political doctrine has its flaws and weaknesses, which are magnified when it is judged in the immediate aftermath of a lost election or in isolation from alternative approaches to public life. When judged in relation to liberalism, however, modern conservatism takes on a more favorable outlook. Many of the sins Tanenhaus attributes to conservatives—overly zealous attachment to principle or ideology, unwillingness to adapt to change, impatience with popular opinion—are on display as much or more among liberals. If Tanenhaus or anyone else wishes to see liberalism in action, he might venture on to an elite college campus where only liberal and leftist views are permitted peaceful expression, or out to Sacramento or up to Albany where liberal Democrats, long in control, have spent their states into near bankruptcy. The liberal faculty and public employee unions that control those institutions and jurisdictions have not exactly distinguished themselves for their far-sighted and open-minded leadership. As for New York and California, the public employee unions that control the Democratic party, and thereby the state governments, have exploited the prosperity of recent decades to build up huge government establishments that will no longer be affordable in the forthcoming era of austerity, especially as taxpayers and businesses flee to other states like Texas and Florida that have followed more conservative paths. As California and New York unravel, voters will undoubtedly turn to conservatives to restore levels of growth and prosperity sufficient to fund their social programs and educational systems. Liberals will come to understand that in order to fund their programs, they will have to tolerate conservatives and conservative policies. That will be a hard and painful lesson for liberals to learn.
Read it all here, and better yet, subscribe to the New Criterion!
A new German disease? · Apr 20, 2009
Obamaphilia, that is. And a transient one, argues Claus Christian Malzahn in Spiegel. He explores some of the reasons why Germans oscillate between extremes of love and hate vis-a-vis American presidents:
Indeed, all this love and hate of American presidents is not simple heartfelt interest or true partisanship. Rather it would seem to reveal the basic traits of the authoritarian personality which seeks to project its own aggressions and deficiencies onto others, while preserving its own preternatural innocence and rightness. Can that instinct on the part of Germans serve Obama well in the long run?
When Bush was in the White House, not a day passed in Germany when someone wasn’t making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States and his administration. But there was little risk involved in these statements which helped boost the German feelings of superiority and innate self-righteousness.
Americans live in a society which of course celebrates commerce and selfishness — but behind the bluster, a mere inch beneath the surface, there are often huge reservoirs of idealism and selflessness in individual Americans. We Germans, however, live in a world which in ways is much fairer and more organized for the public good. Yet, so many of our experiences from the Thirty Years War onwards have contributed to a hard egotistical core which lurks just beneath the dutiful surface of the national psyche.
Losonczi Agnes: Sorsba fordult történelem · Apr 16, 2009
Balo Gyorgy Fregoli, 2007. július 9.
“A helyzet megjelenítése helyett hadd idézzünk fel egy képet, fantáziakép, de szereplői és az egyes történetek valósak. A hosszan kígyózó százakra, majd százezrekre tehető sorban itt öten állnak egymás mögött a kárpótlási hivatal előtt.
Elől áll a deportált zsidó ember, a haláltábor túlélője. A háború alatt mindenétől megfosztották, családját megölték.
Mögötte a csendőr, aki 1944-ben részt vett a zsidók deportálásában, és ezért a háború után évekig börtönben ült.
A csendőr mögött egy zsidó munkaszolgálatosból lett rendőr áll, aki 1945-ben a csendőrt letartóztatta, később ávós lett, a koncepciós perek idején saját társai megvádolták, megkínozták, börtönbe vetették.
Mögötte áll az az ’56-os forradalmár, aki egy pártembert mentett meg a lincseléstől, a lakásában bújtatta. A forradalom után mégis börtönbüntetést kapott ellenforradalmisága miatt, mert a pártember ellene tanúskodott.
A forradalmár mögött az a pufajkás áll, aki az ellenforradalmárok felszámolásakor ellene tanúskodott, majd katonatisztként a vád szerint baloldali összeesküvésben vett részt, és több év börtönre ítélték, így ő is koncepciós per áldozata lett.”
Losonczi Ágnes Sorsba fordult történelem.