Posted on 03/07/2005 3:41:43 AM PST by Lukasz
More optimism my friend, Rome wasn’t built in one day.
I know, I know, I know; and of course it took America more than 90 years to gradually evolve into a true (or at least less false) democracy--the history of the New England profiteers, the land agents in the eastern Middle West, make present-day Ukrainians seem scrupulously law-abiding.
The more I read about it, the more it seems to me Poland is in an enviable position, historically, sitting in between two crumbling empires, Russia and Old Europe.
If Poland can keep its head, and play its cards correctly, it is possible Poland can emerge (not tomorrow, not next week, not next year, but some time in the future) as the greatest power on continental Europe, as it had been during the Middle Ages.
I got no problem with Poland ultimately absorbing Moscow, Berlin, Brussels, and Paris, although such a situation would take 50, 75, 100 years to evolve. They had theirs, and now it's time for you guys to get yours.
It's the attitude prevalent in the American "Old West," sir; you know, all those cowboy movies starring John Wayne, Ward Bond, and James Arness.
"Okay, these guys have run things around here long enough, and they've run things into the ground--and so now it's time to let these other guys over here run things....."
I don't expect Poland to become a great power in my own lifetime, of course, but I do expect to see, in my own lifetime (a) the European "Union" being bothered, pestered, picked apart, shattered, by its eastern members who resent Paris, Brussels, and Berlin as much as they resented Moscow, and (b) the emergence of yet another "New World Order," whose nature I cannot foresee; only God can.
But it's going to be great fun and amusement the next ten years--a ten-year non-stop television comedy--watching you guys cause the Old Men in Old Europe the dithers.
The love affair, with a brief interruption during the 1810s, between the perfidious Gauls and Moscow is hundreds of years old, and one hardly expects it to change.
However, Moscow and Paris are now two wizen, wrinkled old men for whom even half a ton of Viagra could not re-animate.
And the Germans of course have always been the destroyers, the wreckers, of people and cultures in Europe. I say this with a straight face--I have no sympathy for the Germans.
This is a poker-game going on here, sir, and I have no doubt that no matter which playing-cards are dealt the young men of Young Europe, they can outwit the decayed cerebral capacities of the old men of Old Europe.
I would not trust the Germans more than my nose could smell, sir.
This is a very large house out on the prairies of Nebraska, in which are more than 6,000 books (hardcover, no paperbacks), nearly all of them history and biography.
Yeah, there's about 200 large books with copies of Dutch, Flemish, and northern German painters of the 15th and 16th century, and about 200 more of photographs of railway passenger trains, but the rest of them are history and biography.
Among all those books about Germany, there is not a nice word written; I have looked for books complimentary to Germany, and not succeeded. The books that say nice things about Germany are as if written by Soviet propagandists.
Even Julius Caesar, 2100 years ago, noticed there is something sinister about Germany.
This is not to denigrate others of German ancestry now living in other parts of the world, including here in America; geography, climate, terrain, changes people. This pertains only to Germans still in Germany.
Many years ago, I was offered an opportunity to spend nine months in western Germany--I was a student at the University of Nebraska at the time--all my expenses paid by someone else.
I turned down the offer, and instead spent my own money spending the time wandering around France. My "excuse" was that I did not wish to trod on the soil fertilized not by honest sweat and toil, but by the blood of millions of innocents throughout the centuries.
Others thought I was silly--especially since I spent a lot of my own money in France--and I was only 19 years old at the time, but what good are principles, if one does not use them?
During the second world war, there was a "plan" proposed around America, called the "Morgenthau Plan," devised by the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau.
This plan suggested that since Germany was a cancer on the body of Europe, that after the war was won, Germany be shattered into 600 different little tiny principalities, and its populace reduced permanently to medieval, if not Stone Age, standards of living, so as to cure this cancer.
That was a good plan, but unfortunately the exigencies of the Cold War demanded a strong, vibrant, healthy, vigorous western Germany as protection for the west against the Soviet Union, and so the plan was shelved, forgotten.
Thanks for the post. Interesting.
My attitude about Germany was formed when I was 10, 11, years old, and the library got a collection of ancient black-and-white moving-pictures from the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
These were "news-reels," as shown in German theatres 1933-1945.
The one that has haunted me ever since--and it has been a very long time since I was 10, 11, years old--are flickering pictures lasting perhaps three minutes.
A woman with an infant in her arms is being escorted to something (a train, or the "showers," is not seen); the woman is about 30 years old, and is between two German soldiers, about 18-19 years old.
The woman could have been Jewish, Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Czech, Slovak, Russian; I do not know.
Shortly when the film begins, one of the two German soldiers indicates he would like to carry the infant, because everyone likes infants. He has a smile on his face, and assures the woman.
She hands her infant over to him.
Then the German soldiers begin playfully tossing the infant to-and-fro, between them, as if a game, or something. The mother smiles, the infant laughs and chortles, the two German soldiers beam.
Then suddenly the mother gets nervous, anxious, and asks for her infant back. The German soldiers continue tossing the infant back-and-forth between them; the infant laughs, the two German soldiers smile--but the mother is now begging and pleading, and pulling, to get her infant back.
And then suddenly one of the two German soldiers tosses the infant up into the air, shish-kabobing him with the bayonet, right there in front of the mother.
This was no "Schindler's List," with well-paid actors acting out pain and suffering; these were real people, and the impact was powerful.
Human nature does not change; this was Germany then, this was Germany before then, and this is Germany now, and Germany in the future.
All peoples in all times have committed acts of cruelty and atrocity against others--including we here in America--but no people at no time seem to have committed as many, proportionately, as the Germans throughout their history.
After seeing something like that ancient black-and-white news-reel, I am still asking, a very long time later, how can one possibly justify the existence of Germany?
"He added that the United States now intends to make Russia its "colony." "
Who need it ? Half of Russians is addicted or have AIDS. Anyone sane wouldn't take this crap even for free.
BTW Show us the chart.
What a awful story, I cannot even imagine even that I have seen many documental films about brutality of the nazis during WWII.
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