Observing Hermann...

When Angela Merkel is not in town, that is. Instead of following the Chancellor’s lead and showing a little backbone by openly receiving the Dalai Lama in the German capital, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (SPD) will officially have other pressing engagements to attend to when the Tibetan leader comes for another visit on May 19 (Angie will be doing South America).



Steinmeier chose not to elucidate further what he will be doing that day, but sources close to him are pretty sure that it will include hiding under his desk while prostrating, kneeling and repeatedly bowing toward China in abject submission.

Clearly preferring to follow the lead of his once fearless leader Gerhard Schröder instead, Steinmeier is beleived to have a mortal fear of the mere thought of possibly ever coming even remotely close to “hurting the Chinese people’s feelings” by making such a risky move like meeting and maybe touching and possibly even talking to Mr. Lama while others are watching so he is absolutely positively determined to stay in hiding until that awful Buddhist madman goes away again.

After all, had we listened to statesmen Schröder and those like him, China and Tibet (but especially China) would not be in the awful mess they now find themselves in today.

„Zu den Gründen dafür machte er keine Angaben.“

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Everybody knows that Americanization is bad. Just ask any German you may or may not know and he or she will gladly tell you so, although he/she won’t necessarily be able to tell you just why that is. Just is. And this is especially so when it comes to national foreign policy, German national foreign policy, I should say. We don’t need no education, no Americanization, I mean.



So that’s probably why Chancellor Merkel’s CDU is about to unveil a totally way cool and original new foreign policy platform idea which has never been tried before in the Western World and has been custom-made just for Germany. It goes like this: They are planning to consolidate most of Germany’s foreign policy authority directly within Merkel’s Chancellery and thereby create a super-special-super-staff which will then have the capacity to coordinate security policy right there! Wow. Why didn’t we think of that? They are going to call it "the National Security Council", I think, only in German, which will make it sound even more secure. Or maybe they’ll just call it the mini-National-Security-Council-me instead.

None of those reckless, American-style experiments here folks. And it only gets better. Word is that they are also going to propose that Germany take steps to better protect itself from the threat of a nuclear attack from so-called rogue states (no, not France - they mean Iran or something) by supporting the introduction of something they are planning to call “a missile defense shield over Europe”. This is friggin’ brilliant if you ask me, which you won’t, but for that I’m now asking myself why didn’t any of those Schlafmützen (sleepyheads) back in Washington ever think of this. I mean, like what the hell do these people get paid for anyway?

The SPD seems to be against all of this for some reason and has ordered her talking head types to continually repeat the mantra “American-style mistakes, American-style mistakes…”, which wasn’t really necessary because that belongs to their standard mantra repertoire already but sicher ist sicher (better safe than sorry).

Amerikanische Verhältnisse bis zum Umfallen.

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Proving yet again that you can be a smart and politically-aware German intellectual type and still not have the slightest idea what the Berlin Wall was, photographer Kai Wiedenhoefer and his Left and Green Party supporters in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district will be exhibiting an exhibition which will equate the West Bank “Wall” with the Berlin one. This exhibitionism will be taking place on the eastern walls of the East Side Gallery, itself a wall, the largest remaining section of the Berlin Wall, get it? Am I going too fast?



That he doesn’t know why the Israelis have built the wall in the West Bank is perfectly understandable (he doesn’t want to understand, that would only make him sad), and that the US Americans only want to oppress Mexico by building the one along their border to that country is an established establishment fact (Canada is next, by the way), and that there are many, many, many much more such walls out there of this nature than he or his friends or most of the rest of us are even aware of is also understandable (hmmm, makes you wonder why he picked out Israel, doesn't it?), but die Mauer itself? He really doesn’t know why it was built? I’ll give him a little hint: It was built to keep people in.

But to be fair, Herr Wiedenhoefer has explained why he is so concerned and why an exhibition like this is so absolutely positively necessary right now. “The UN said border walls are illegal,” he said in an interview. “People need to take notice of this.” Well there we have it. Now if the UN ever gets around to making suicide bombings and illegal immigration and all that other nasty stuff some of us insist upon relating to illegal border walls like this illegal, too, well, that will be a great leap forward for mankind or something. Think of all the exhibitions we will be able to do then.

“We don’t need no education.”

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Anyway, I had this strange dream last night. It went something like this:

Hermann: Now, you've got to listen to me! Do you have any idea what you'd have to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of ten, we'd both wind up in a concentration camp. Isn't that true, Louie?

Louie (the shady French cop working in Berlin for some inexplicable reason): I’m afraid Mayor Wowereit would insist.

Tempelhof airport: You’re saying this only to make me go.

Hermann: I'm saying it because it's true. Inside of us, we both know you belong with Victor, whoever that is. You're part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that last Tempelhof plane leaves the ground and you're not on it with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

Tempelhof airport: But what about us?

Hermann: We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we lost it until you came to Casablanca, wherever that is. We got it back last night.

Tempelhof airport: When I said I would never leave you.

Hermann: And you never will. But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of. Tempelhof, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of four million people and the Mother of all Airports don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now, now... Here's looking at you kid.

A kiss is just a kiss.

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It’s bad enough for a straight-A wind energy Musterschuler (model student) like Germany to suddenly fall back to fifth place in class (at least when it comes to the number of turbines installed last year, that is), but to be passed up in the process by the Mother of all Umweltsünder (environmental sinners), the United States of America herself, well, that’s about enough to knock the wind out of you, as in them, which is of course what it did.



It seems that new turbine installations in Germany have dropped a full 25 percent in the past few months, primarily due to subsidies that the government doesn’t want to pay anymore. So you see, for all of the loud talk about new breakthrough technology and wave of the future and the next big export industry thing and saving the planet, blah, blah, money, it seems, makes the turbine go round after all. If these windmills don’t get subsidized here, they don’t get built. At least not for now, they don’t.

But I have confidence that Germany’s wind ideologues will be back up on their feet to be blown off them again in no time. After all, when it comes to energy policy, there is only one thing Germany has more of than wind, and that’s hot air.

“Wer Wind sät, wird Flaute ernten.”

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PS: Thanks for the global change link, EuroYank.

Think the old Pink Floyd “we don’t need no education” line only replace it with democracy and that’s what you’ve got here in Germany, folks. If you trust these latest survey results, that is (which I don’t, nicht wirklich). Hey, that was from The Wall, wasn’t it? How ironic.



Anyway, according to the Leipzig Institute for Market Research, only 60 percent of Germans surveyed have confidence in the democratic system as it is practiced today in the Federal Republic of Germany (in the eastern part of Germany it’s less than half at 44 percent). But when it comes to authority, the survey says that 85 percent of Germans trust authority figures, like their police.

Don’t get me wrong, I think trusting the police is a good thing. But how does all of this fit together? On the one hand you’ve got this perpetual gebetsmühlenartig (repeated like a mantra) “Nie wieder Krieg!” and “Nie wieder Faschismus!” and down-with-authority chant going on 24/7, while on the other hand the same people seem perfectly prepared to toss their tried and true democratic system out the window (the only system that has ever really worked here, by the way) and maybe even make themselves comfortable for a while in the next police state experiment while they’re at it. Or what else does this mean?

And these are the same Germans who want a permanent seat in the UN, too? Like I said, none of this fits together. But how do those other old lyrics go again? "You don’t miss your water until your well runs dry."

Democracy schmockracy!

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Germans can be einfach kompliziert (simply complicated) sometimes. And they don’t even seem to notice or mind all that much when they are being that way, too; which is kind of what makes all of this so complicated, which is simple enough, when you get down to it, really.



Take Oskar Lafontaine of the Left party, for instance, please. This guy belongs to a party that just got over “an issue” about firing one of its own for openly being a communist (the Left party, communist in essence you see, does everything it can to gain some middle ground here by telling everyone that they are in fact not) and now he wants to yank the rudder back over again by calling for parts of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto to be officially adopted as party policy (the Communist Manifesto, unlike Mein Kampf, is not banned in Germany, by the way). Whatever.

It seems that he finds parts of the work to be very contemporary because of all of the “naked, shameless, direct and brutal exploitation” going on in Germany these days. Uh, okay. I haven’t seen those parts of Germany yet but I’m sure that they must exist if Oskar says they do because he’s a street fighting kind of man who has had to punch and claw his way up from the dregs of society or something to the top of the heap where the other dregs live to become the multi-millionaire media megalomaniac he is today.

Of course Oskar’s real problem is something else altogether. He, like Marx, wants to be “Europe’s most dangerous man” and it’s just not happening. He is certainly one of Europe’s most ridiculous men and/or political Witzfiguren (laughing stock figures), I think, but he may not have the wherewithal to distinguish himself as the clear number one among all the others out there. The competition never sleeps, you know (see Berlusconi). Quoting Marx in 2008 isn’t a bad move, I must say, but something tells me it just won’t be enough.

Karl Marx: “Ich bin kein Marxist.”

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It looks like there’s a new twist to German plans to bury their excess CO2 when nobody else is looking and no one really is looking all that close if you ask me.



The new twist seems to be that piping their hot air underground was more of a pipe dream than anything else and won’t wirklich (really) work so they’ll just begin shutting down some of their coal-burning power plants this summer instead, in old-fashioned American-style rolling blackout fashion, and get rid of even more CO2 than they were not getting rid of before by not creating it in the first place.

That half of Germany’s electricity is produced with coal is bad enough, I guess, but that they won’t even be able to pump the CO2 created in the process into some super cool secret underground repository for future generations to let out into the atmosphere later when they need to is, well, that’s even worse, I think.

Give me warp power, Scotty.

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Well, not really. It’s just that whenever American intelligence agencies do this kind of thing, it gets laughed and sneered at and called conspiratorial at best and hysterical at worst, or vice versa. Well, at least it does over here. Germans are generally much more cool, calm and collected than Americans are, you see. So that’s why whenever the German BND issues one of its monthly warnings about imminent al-Qaida attacks to take place in Germany which never take place, this time because al-Qaida has set up a new base in North Africa somewhere (huh?), well, people get hysterical, I mean conspiratorial, I mean listen.



That Germany still has a lot of its North African operatives still operating down there shouldn’t really surprise anybody, but a lot of these guys must be pretty old by now and, like, how reliable can these reports be (think senility and Alzheimer’s)? And that Germany should feel more threatened by an al-Qaida base in North Africa than one in, say, Pakistan is not really clear to me either, but then again I’m not an intelligent, I mean intelligence guy.

Anyway, Germany’s top spook has just announced that "The BND is monitoring with great concern what is growing over there, which has a new quality and is bringing the jihad to our door."

Germany is of course known the world over for its staunch stand against all things unpleasant and un-nice and uncomfortable to hear and many objective observers now believe that international Islamic terrorism might actually be one of them. Not that they would ever actually do anything against it or anything (like, say, shoot at them), but they are “monitoring the situation with great concern” at least.

I just hope that the CIA doesn’t come out with the same report any time soon, then the whole thing will have been nothing but another big scam.

“Panzer rollen in Afrika vor.”

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It’s not very often that German disinformation gets blamed for contributing to the grim process that led up to the invasion of Iraq, so I feel it’s very important to get the word out as much as possible whenever the truth sticks up it’s ugly little head as, well, this kind of intelligence screw-up couldn’t have happened to or have been disseminated by a nicer country.



Of course no self-respecting politically correct person anywhere has ever liked being reminded of the fact that intelligence specialists from all over Europe and elsewhere were convinced that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was preparing weapons of mass destruction before the American-led invasion took place, just like the CIA claimed, but remember one must, or at least should, but you won’t have to of course, so don’t worry.

Nope, ‘the biggest intelligence fiasco’ of a lifetime was not an exclusive American affair, despite everything you may have been told or have chosen to believe to the contrary. And it wasn’t just English, French, Russian or the other usual-suspect-type intelligence agencies’ disinformation either, it seems. German spooks THEMSELVES were also more than eager to believe the claims made by an Iraqi asylum seeker they called ‘Curveball’, for instance, claims that Saddam Hussein was building mobile biological weapons laboratories.

Hey, stuff happens. Even to peace-loving German intelligence types. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it or anything if I were you. Nor will you, of course.

I spy, you spy, we all spy.

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