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Sep 05 2008

Pride and Prejudice

Letter to the Editor

By MWC NEWS

Translation

Pride and Prejudice

Now that both major US political parties have finished their orgies and festivals of patriotism and the world can commence the two month wait for a decision between its two corporate paladins, perhaps it is appropriate to say a word about the "pride" that saturated both conventions and will no doubt continue to accompany the campaign.

If you follow the rhetoric of American political culture even further one notices another point: everyone is constantly "proud" of America. If we take them at their word, they are proud of Wounded Knee, proud of the Trail of Tears, proud of every African sold as chattel, mutilated or lynched, proud of every textile worker burned in the sweatshop fires, every miner killed either in the pits or by Pinkertons, proud of every Native American murdered or starved to death, proud of ever ton of HE dropped on a foreign country and especially proud that they were the first to vaporise two cities in Japan. Yes, Americans have much of which they can still be proud.

We are not proud to be Germans. It is enough that we love our homes, our families, our friends. In a famous but not too often repeated episode of German post-war history, the West German president, Gustav Heinemann, was asked by reporters whether he loved his country: he responded that he loved his wife. We are able to show our affection for athletic prowess both locally and internationally. However, you will have great difficulty finding anyone who shouts how "proud" he or she is of Germany. Germany does not have anything of which to be proud. There have been great and famous talents born in this country- but their place of birth was an accident like it is for everyone else. Germany has been the home of some really vile people and these people have controlled vast political and economic forces which wreaked havoc on Europe.

The German state has a history as stained with blood as any in Europe and in recent history more stained than most. Yet today if one discounts the constant interference of the US and its allies-- both overt and covert-- the German state has managed to deliver a respectable amount of social and economic equity and a modicum of participatory and representative democracy which could be envied. Still this does not fill us with pride. Rather we are grateful. We are grateful that the NSDAP although it left its tracks all over the post-war government still does not rule or represent the standard of political culture-- even among conservatives. We are grateful that a truly vicious regime was defeated in war although some of us wish it could have been defeated in peace.

Next year this country will elect its federal parliament and there is every reason to believe that the present chancellor, a puppet of the US, will be returned, by hook or by crook, to her office. But one thing is sure we will not go to the polls or have to listen to endless and nauseating litanies about the pride in Germany. We will go and vote and some of us will hope that our government will not follow the US into its next war.

Brother Bede Vincent Curley

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Comments (1)

1. 09-09-2008 10:56

Before the Fall

One thing I can always remember my grandmother saying; it is as clear as a bell on a quiet summer's day that still rings warnings in my mind even today. Whenever I would get up full of myself, a 'bit big for my boots' she would say, ominously, "Pride cometh before the fall". She had many sayings, some of them, like that one, because of the language, sounded biblical, many were shakesperian, but all of them acutely wise. She was wise with experience. Germany, like most of Europe, is wise with experience (though most have not had the courage to own up to their complicity in "The Final Solution" - they still lack the courage to face what is engraved in their hearts). Most of Europe opposed America's immoral, illegal war of aggression in Iraq. They know something from experience. The US and Israel today demonstrate as nations two things we know at the individual level. The young sometimes learn from the old but often must learn from their own bitter experience (though some mistakes, we only make once) and it is often so that the abused child grows up to be a child abuser. The US today puffs up with pride even to overshadow what their few remaining friends in the world are telling them and the self-obsessed Israel, with it's sadistic hatered and oppression of it's Arab neighbours are teamed up for a final climatic act in the human play. There is not much you can say to someone whose mind is utterly possessed by hatered, but to the United States we could well say "Pride cometh before the Fall". But they did not listen then and will not listen now.

Registered

Allen L. Jasson

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