Communism Pretty Much Sucks

A couple of statistics about Germany:

Among more than 600 members of management and supervisory boards at Germany’s 30 largest companies, fewer than a dozen lived in the German Democratic Republic when the Berlin Wall fell on Nov. 9, 1989. Many of them are politicians or labor union officials, not executives.

That is 2% of the nation's executives from an area that makes up around 20% of the population.

The rapid productivity gains eastern workers made after reunification have stalled: they are still only 76% as productive as western ones. That is partly because the east German economy is concentrated in less productive industries, like construction and agriculture. But even in others, like finance, eastern workers have made smaller productivity gains than westerners.

Unless there were major regional economic  differences between the east and west of Germany before World War 2, and as far as I'm aware the east wasn't considered notably poorer, it illustrates just how much an atrocious political idea can deplete the human capital of a country. That the legacy of communism is still so pronounced more than 25 years after it collapsed is a pretty damning indictment of the system.

"Shut Up" He Explained.

The far left's approach to winning arguments:

An open call was issued Jan. 12 for owners of Sarrazin's book to turn in their copies at galleries and museums across the country. The books are to be on display and then, according to the artist, "recycled for a good purpose" at the end of the festival, which runs from April 27 to July 1.

 No, not like book burning at all.

There is a broader point to be made about the tactic of trying to make certain positions simply off limits rather than matters of debate. This happens a lot- albeit usually in a less Hitlery fashion than Martin Zet does here- with speech codes, pressure on newspapers not to report certain topics etc. To do this requires a huge ego- as it assumes that your own position is not only right but that it is impossible for you not to be.

Insider Information

Good post by Laban about what Germany will do about the Eurozone crisis (and how to profit from it). The four options seem about right to me:

a) print ?
b) bail out Southern Europe ?
c) neither - at which point defaults start, absent
d) Euro-area fiscal union - with Germany running the show hands-on, because while they may trust the Irish, Dutch and Finns, they can't trust the Greeks or the Italians, and maybe even the French ?

The political committment to the Euro is sufficiently strong that I can't see (c) being allowed to happen as it would unravel the whole thing.

In the short run I'd say (b) leading to (d) in the long term.

Guilt Tripping The Germans

For the last 65 years the Germans have been easy to guilt trip into paying for Europe by invoking WWII and the Holocaust. Sadly this appears to be changing and they are acting like a normal country again as shown by their reluctance to bail out Greece, so other countries will now have to start paying their own way.

It is for the best though, it has always seemed absurd that generations of Germans born after the war were treated as being somehow responsible for it.

German demilitarisation is probably the next thing to go unless they realise what a good deal they have going on with not having pay for their own defence. The rationale behind demilitarising Germany was that given its size it would inevitably dominate Europe, but since the USA took up it+s role as a world power in 1941 Germany have not been able to dominate Europe even if the Germans still wanted to (which they don't seem to).

Anti-Ostalgie

With the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall (metaphorical fall, the Germans are quite good at engineering), the commemorations are portraying it as the trigger for the fall of communism. However the event occurred about two weeks after the Hungarian government authorised multiparty elections, so I wonder whether undue significance has been placed on the Berlin Wall because of it's obvious symbolism.

I remember at the end of 1989 the news seemed to be coming from a different Eastern European capital each week as one by one the old regimes fell like dominos. The Romanian revolution was probably the most dramatic although not as I remember for the events which seem most significant in hindsight- the Ceaucescus on the balcony and their later execution- but for the brief civil war that occurred between the army and the secret police. The Western reporters would be on the streets filming the Army when shots would be fired from a tower by secret police snipers and everyone would react but the snipers would have disappeared by the time the army got there.

Mr Bono....

Tear down this wall.

What Part Of "Free Speech" Don't They Understand?

I don't usually like defending Liberal Democrat spokesmen but this headline on the BBC website about Chris Huhne is utterly misleading:

Holocaust denier gets MP backing

Obviously if he backed a Holocaust denier then he would be unfit for office, but of course that is not what he has done, he has simply made it clear that he regards free speech as being for everyone even if you disagree with them.

The story is about the Holocaust denier, Gerald Toben, who has been arrested on an European arrest warrant in order to be extradited to Germany to stand trial for holocaust denial. Whilst I do not approve of Germany's laws regarding Holocaust denial I can understand why they have them, but Toben's didn't go to Germany to spread his lies, he did so online from his website in Australia. It is outrageous that Germany is trying to impose its restrictions on free speech against everyone else.

It goes without saying that the colossal self pity of Toben is hypocritical considering that he is an apologist for a far, far greater level of persecution than this mere inconvenience as this son of a Holocaust survivor wryly notes.

The Obamessiah Speaks.

I haven't seen a politician enthuse a large rally of Germans like that since..... oh you can complete the rest yourself.

History Boys

After reading this critique of the late American historian Arthur Schlesinger I had intended to compare him unfavourably to another left wing historian A.J.P. Taylor whose political views were positively obnoxious, but whose personal politics did not drive his works. However it was an exceedingly dull post and had too many caveats and exceptions to be of any use to anyone. The article does offer get to the heart of what is wrong with Schlesinger's brand of liberalism that dominates the American left.

It's one thing to favor a bad policy, as liberals did in the controversy over busing in the 1970s. It's something else to castigate all opponents of busing as racists, and deny even the possibility that decent, intelligent people might have legitimate misgivings about that dubious policy. This "punitive, ram-it-down-their throats quality," in Nicholas Lemann's phrase, belonged to a politics that antagonized people on purpose, because they were deemed to have it coming.

The belief that your opponents aren't merely wrong but evil remains a core trait of the left to this day.

Onto A.J.P. Taylor, one of his political stances was an intense hostility to Germany. A claim in his Wikipedia entry, which I can't find else where, is that:

He held fierce Germanophobic views. In 1944, he was temporarily banned from the BBC following complaints about a series of lectures he gave on air in which he gave full vent to his anti-German feelings

The BBC banned someone for insulting Germany during World War 2? Whilst I could imagine the modern BBC being shocked at the thought of being judgmental I hadn't realised that this trend was so deep rooted. Actually given that the BBC was riddled with loyal Stalinists back then it suggests that Taylor's views must have been pretty wild to cause offence back then.