Let's Not Be Beastly to the Hun

My mother reminded me of this song this evening, after she went to movie night at her retirement community and saw "The Man Who Never Was."

Noel Coward had a lot of different versions. He sung this one during the war and this one afterwards.

Wir Fahren Gegen Engelland

The Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, has resorted to xenophobia in an attempt to shore up her political standing. She has primarily lashed out at Turkish immigrants. Germany, however, is in a situation where it needs to import more labor.

Germany did not permit those immigrants to come out of the goodness of the German soul. Germany would not be where it is today without the workers who immigrated there after the Second World War. The Nazis, however, never went away. They just went underground and are still there in all but name only.

More to the point of the title of this post: Every time that the Germans have become interested in what it means to be a German and "the purity of the German nation", blood has covered much of Europe. The last time a German leader talked about the preservation of German culture, millions of people were put to death for not being sufficiently "Aryan".

German nationalism is awakening. Those nations that have, as parts of their territory, land that the Germans have regarded as theirs, including France, the Czech Republic and especially Poland, had better start dusting off their war plans and mull over the state of their militaries.

For they may see the Wehrmacht coming for another visit again.

"It Was the Poles Who Made Germany Invade Poland"

That is essentially the outlandish claim by a now-former member of Chancellor Merkel's government in Germany.

This clown represents the so-called "expellees", the ethnic Germans who had resided in other countries in Eastern Europe. Given that Germany had used the fabricated plight of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia as an excuse to invade that country prior to the official start of the war, I find it far less than shocking that, after the war, Germany's neighbors decided that they would not run that risk again.

But since that group is aging out (like much of the base of our own confederate party), their leaders feel the need to be more and more outlandish, at elast until it gets them fired.

And Yet Their Grandfathers Conquered Most of Europe

Germany is so unwilling to engage in combat operations in Afghanistan that their troops are getting fat as they sit behind the wire in their bases. The death of scores of Afghan villagers has been blamed on the Germans' disdain for getting out in the field. (H/T)

Meanwhile, our own troops exhibited the utmost bravery by storming a hospital and searching the women's ward.

And the allegations that Hamid Karzai has stolen the presidential election in Afghanistan just keep on coming.

So, we are backing a tinpot dictator who maintains his hold on power by holding fraudulent elections, members of his family are engaged in grand-scale criminal activity, his army is ineffective in the field, the cops are corrupt, his government is both completely ineffective and thoroughly corrupt, the American people are losing their patience after several years and the insurgents have full sway everywhere in the country that is not under the gaze of a foreign soldier.

Yeah, I've seen this movie before.

It is probably time to confront the obvious: The only interests that we have in Afghanistan is that the nation not be used as a launching pad for terrorism and that they not grow poppies on a huge scale. Other than that, I can't think of a damned reason to care about the place or who governs it. That's a concern of the Asian powers (Russia, China, India, Iran, Pakistan), but it is not our concern.

So let's tell the Asian powers that we are going to leave and it is up to them whether they want to help us do so orderly or if they want to deal with the aftermath if we just go.

The Firebombing of Dresden, 1945

What the Munchkin Wrangler said. Go read it.

Then, if you want, go read The Fall of Berlin, 1945. Find the account where a German soldier is sitting on a tram in Berlin and he tells everyone that based on the horrors that the Germans inflicted on the Russians, that what was going to happen to Berlin would be both unspeakably horrible and wholly deserved.