Ralf Goergens

The latest Carnival of German-American is hosted by Davids Medienkritik and Extrablog.

The editors of the Atlantic Review on the Carnival:

The two carnival hosts have picked the submissions they liked best and present them on their blogs: Davids Medienkritik has written an English carnival post introducing both English and German articles about transatlantic relations. And Extrablog has written a German carnival post (English translation by Google) introducing both English and German articles about transatlantic relations. Please read both carnival posts, since they introduce different articles.
Besides, check out our Carnival Submissions Blog, which presents abstracts of all submissions and helps you to discover some new blogs and learn about a wide range of fascinating issues, like Red Hot Cuppa Politics article about German Prisoners of War in Texas and their reunions. There are many more interesting posts listed in the right column of the Carnival Submissions Blog.

If you have positive or negative post about Germany or German-American relations, and want to make sure that both a lot of German and American readers get to seeit, here’s your chance: You can submit a post for the next Carnival on September 11th, and send a trackback to their Carnival Submissions Blog.

I have delayed posting my own thoughts, so I’m substituting those of Kaiser Wilhelm II. for now.

The first item is an interview published in the Daily Telegraph in October 1908. You wouldn’t realize it from reading it, but it actually was supposed to be some kind of olive branch towards the British.

The second item are the “Willy-Nicky” letters the Kaiser and the Russian Czar Nicholas II. exchanged over the decades. Being cousins they indeed addressed each as “Willy” and “Nicky”, respectively. The link only leads to Wilhelm’s side of the correspondence. The letters were found after the Czar’s execution by the Soviets.

Interesting to note is that “Willy” and “Nicky” kept corresponding until March 1914. Wilhelm had tried to maintain cordial relations with his cousin to the last, in the hope of keeping Russia from going to war with Germany after all.

As noted at the site, interpretations of the letters are very different – some claimed that the Kaiser had lured the Czar into the disastrous war with Japan in 1905, others that he had planned an European conflagration decades, while yet others saw him as a unsuccessful peacemaker.

I’ll need a day or two to respond to Lex’ substantial post here. My own post is going to be controversial, so I’ll need time to prepare. My apologies for the delay.

ynet reports that:

While three major British newspapers published reports contradicting Israel’s claims that its military was not responsible for the murder of seven members of the Ghalia family on a Gaza beach over a week ago, a German newspaper casts doubt on the authenticity of pictures taken soon after the bloody incident….

Quoting the relevant parts here would exceed the boundaries of fair use, so interested readers should please follow the link and look for themselves.

Anyway, the original German article is here, and it contains just what ynet says. It also mentions ‘Pallywood’ and the numerous deceptions the Palestinians had previously committed. The lastest they were caught at happened this Tuesday, when terrorists from ‘Islamic Jihad’ tried to remove a short range missile from a car the Israeli air force had just taken out – they had wanted to make it look as if the IDF had killed innocents on a road trip.

While the article of the Süddeutsche Zeitung probably doesn’t prove Palestinan guilt with one hundred percent certainty, it is the much more likely explanation.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa from the Independent Institute:

A secret report commissioned by the Mexican government on Mexico’s “dirty war” under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 1970s has caused a major scandal after being leaked to the press. It accuses the military of carrying out a genocidal policy against suspected subversives in the south between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s.

…

The exercise is not academic, of course: many killers remain at large, five hundred people are still missing, scores of families will probably never see justice done, and the PRI is still a major force in Mexican society. During my visit to Mexico last week, I had a chance to talk to some of the presidential candidates as well as a broad spectrum of intellectuals, business representatives, and journalists. The overall consensus is that the PRI will continue to wield colossal power through the state and local government structure as well as Congress, where it will command a solid bloc of votes. Even though Roberto Madrazo, the candidate of the party that ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century, is running third, he cannot be written off.

…

…What we did not know until this report came out, was that the revolutionary fervor actually masked what—by the PRI’s own standards—can only be called a fascist or extreme right-wing policy of genocide, obliterating entire villages and killing scores of innocent victims.

The PRI obviously understood the times. So long as it maintained a corrupt aid to revolutionaries inside and outside Mexico and an inflamed anti-imperialist rhetoric, it had carte blanche from all sorts of intellectuals, civil society movements and human-rights groups to practice a systematic negation of everything the PRI, a supposed progressive animal, stood for. …

Mexicans would do well to remember this when they go to the polls in July and non-Mexicans should take notice of this new reminder that, even in the hands of governments we might feel inclined to support, the state can sometimes be, in Nietzsche’s words, the coldest of all cold monsters.