USA And The Future Of The World -II

[ramana]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->OPED | Monday, October 12, 2009 | Email | Print |


West’s double-talk

Premen Addy

<b>The West was gripped by paranoia at the prospect of a united Germany, fearing that a reinvigorated country would pose a threat to European peace and stability. Today Germany is Europe’s industrial juggernaut. Post-Cold War verities have triumphed over Cold War fears</b>

Brought up on a dodgy diet of Western human rights and ethical pieties on the Berlin Wall, public opinion in these parts was programmed to believe that the great and good in Nato and the EU were all for pulling it down and reconstituting a divided Germany into a single democratic entity. Did not President John F Kennedy stand before the infamous concrete watch-towers and declare to swelling applause from the natives that he, an American, was also a Berliner? He spoke the words in German, which added to the theatre. But good theatre demands the willing suspension of disbelief from audiences.

Never a true believer in the ritual pronouncements of Western rectitude, I was aware that <b>the USSR — with Stalin still the dominant force in the Kremlin — had proposed the reunification of Germany as a neutral state a full half century and more ago. The West shot this down, preferring a divided Germany, whose larger and most productive part would continue as its embedded Cold War security construct for Continental Europe.</b>

Almost a half century later the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and with it crumbled East Germany’s Communist regime and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, Nato’s mirror image. At about this time <b>the Indian President Shankar Dayal Sharma, on a visit to the UK, made a courtesy call on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 10 Downing Street. Her host was accompanied by a senior Indian diplomat (the source of this story), who was privy to the exchanges that followed. Britain’s ‘Iron Lady’ took the precautionary step of banishing her note-taker and principal foreign policy aide, Sir Charles Powell — she wanted no undesirable leaks even from a someone so trustworthy — before letting her hair down on past German iniquities and the dangers a reinvigorated German people would pose to European peace and stability. Her decibels rose and with it her venom. Shankar Dayal Sharma, gasping for breath in this anti-German dust storm, was rescued by his escort’s intervention. The emollient diplomat soothingly explained that an Indian President was scarcely the right person to repose such exoriating confidences, especially about a country with whom India had friendly ties.</b>

But the page had barely turned when the most red-blooded Thatcherite in the British Cabinet, Sir Nicholas Ridley, invited Dominic Lawson, then editor of the pro-Tory Spectator magazine and son of Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first Thatcher Government, for an extended private conversation in the sanctuary of his home.

All being fair in love and war and politics, <b>Lawson placed a strategically concealed tape in the bushes in the sylvan setting of the Ridley rose’s garden, where the Minister, not smelling treachery, spoke passionately but none too wisely about the looming German threat. Reference was made to Adolf Hitler coupled with a tirade against Germany’s myriad sins of omission and commission. The ferocious broadside was recorded verbatim and duly published. The politician’s favoured ruse of being wrongly quoted was clearly unfit for purpose. A traumatised Nicholas Ridley, in keeping with his aristocratic roots and mien, did the honourable thing by falling on his sword and resigning. He has been gathered gloriously to his fathers, his duty done. No samurai could ask for more.</b>

The latest turn in an unfolding saga concerns a young Russian researcher in the Gorbachev Foundation in Moscow, who flew into London with a set of documents, which he reckoned would be of interest to the British Press. Publishing these, The Times ran the risk of damnation by Thatcherite loyalists such as <b>Andrew Roberts, the Cambridge academic long wedded to the proposition of Britannia ruling the waves in company with Uncle Sam.</b>

So what dark secrets were revealed? <b>Nothing more nor less than Thatcher’s fraught encounter with Mikhail Gorbachev, in which she tried to talk him out of beating ceremonial retreat from East Germany and bringing down the Berlin Wall. She was gripped by paranoia at the prospect of a united Germany, fearing the wakened demons of its Nazi past.</b>

She summoned a conclave of leading British historians of Germany to Downing Street to read the German runes. Her German counterpart, chancellor Helmut Kohl, let it be known that he found Thatcher the most disagreeable of foreign leaders.

On German unification she was apparently joined at the hip by French President Francois Mitterrand, who with a touch of Gallic wit pronounced that he loved Germany so deeply that he wished for two Germanys! His top aide Jacques Attali swore that, faced by a unified Germany, he would desert planet Earth for a less stressful existence in another galaxy. In such manner has post-Cold War truth triumphed over rancid Cold War fiction.

To which I shall add my own afterword. Russian oil and gas pipelines constructed on the seabed of the Baltic, say some, bypass Poland and the Baltic states for a possible Russo-German condominium of the future. Of special relevance was the appointment of <b>former German chancellor Gerhard Schroder </b>as head of Russia’s state-owned Gazprom oil and gas company in Germany. <b>Mr Schroder, in an interview with a German news magazine, has told of his desire to build a Russo-German association on the lines set out for Germany and France by Konrad Adenaur and Charles de Gaulle</b>.

Germany is Europe’s industrial juggernaut, its exports are the largest of any nation, its engineering skills a continuing marvel. <b>The global financial meltdown is the doing of the US and the UK.</b> The Anglo-Saxon economic model is now a discredited nostrum with much of Continental Europe. <b>German industry from Bismarck’s time has been drawn to the Russian market and Russia’s abundant natural resources.</b>

The European Union and Nato are set to continue, but maybe as looser constructs, which will allow Berlin (and perhaps Paris) greater diplomatic and strategic space.

<b>Hans Seekt, the Weimar Republic’s foremost military figure, disturbed by his country’s estrangement from Russia, penned a pamphlet in the last days of 1932 entitled “Germany between East and West.” In it he warned prophetically that alienating Russia would one day have Poland on the Oder: Word becoming flesh in the aftermath of World War II.</b>

Germany now has the experience to cultivate East and West proportionately since the world today is being becoming.
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The Brits were passing the Empire torch to the US who didnt understand the burden of Empire. Read the earlier book also that I posted above: Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson.