Germany – Page 6 – Common Infirmities

Same as it ever was

The battle over climate science in US environmental policy has come to an odd watershed:

The Senate overwhelmingly voted, 98-1, in favor of an amendment stating that “climate change is real and not a hoax.” In an amusing twist, the chamber’s most notorious climate denier, Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, signed on to the amendment at the last minute, mostly because it didn’t attribute a cause to global warming. “The climate is changing. The climate has always changed,” Inhofe said. He then criticized supporters of man-caused climate change by saying that the real “hoax” was “that there are some people that are so arrogant to think” they can change the climate.

This reminds me of an obscure event in modern German history. Searching for an appropriate new president to succeed the highly esteemed Richard von Weizsäcker in 1993, the first new Bundespräsident since reunification, Helmut Kohl looked east, and selected the little-known former theologian and then justice minister of Saxony, Steffen Heitmann. Unfortunately, Heitmann scuttled his own candidacy by proving himself to be even more prone to embarrassing press comments than Kohl himself.

For the first time in nearly 50 years Germany was not occupied, but rather was preoccupied, with the “Schlussstrich” debate. It’s an untranslatable German word for the line drawn under a column of numbers before totting them up. The question was whether Germany should stop examining its conscience about the Nazi period and Cold War, and draw a balance, the better to march forward to a bright new dawn, as the right wing (!) wanted. (I’m presuming they assumed the balance would come out negative, though what the sum would be was never really a part of the discussion.) Exactly the opposite of Faulkner’s famous dictum about the past, and this was the position that Heitmann allied himself with, which was controversial enough. But his choice of words really grabbed people’s attention:

Ich glaube, daß der organisierte Tod von Millionen Juden in Gaskammern tatsächlich einmalig ist – so wie es viele historisch einmalige Vorgänge gibt. Wiederholungen gibt es in der Geschichte ohnehin nicht.

I do believe that the organised death of millions of Jews in gas chambers was unique — just as there are so many unique events in history. In any case, history never repeats itself.

As one commentator satirised it, “Of course you are my one true love, darling. As are all my girlfriends.”

I was also intrigued by the following comment, cited by Jonathan Chait,

“I do think there are those [who] think there is some kind of climate change happening and are tired of fighting the science or just don’t want the fight and who would rather focus on the economics — I don’t think that means they are ceding the argument that manmade climate change exists, though,” said one Republican Senate aide in a comment echoed by several others.

I’ve never seen such an explicit statement from inside the Republican party that science is seen as an enemy to be “fought”, rather than a discipline that should inform all sensible policy.

What’s German for “lame stream media”?

Don’t take words out of my mouth! … or out of my protest sign!

Der Spiegel has posted a short video of a recent anti-Islam demonstration by PEGIDA, a German organisation whose name is an acronym for Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West. In one brief segment, starting at about 1:35, a journalist speaks with a demonstrator who is carrying a sign with the message “Islam = Karzinom” (Islam = Carcinoma, i.e., cancer).

Reporter: I wonder if you could explain your sign to me, why you draw this equivalence between Islam and a carcinoma?

Demonstrator: I don’t say they are equivalent, as you’re trying to suggest.

R: But it says there “Islam equals Carcinoma”.

D: Exactly.

R: Well, then, explain to me what you mean by that.

D: I’m not giving you any more information.

You really need to watch it — even if you don’t understand the language — to appreciate the mixture of befuddlement and hostility in this smug old protester, who seems to think that expecting demonstrators to account for their over-the-top slogans is just one of those devious tricks typical of highbrow lefty journalists. (I don’t think there’s a German word for lame stream media.)

A small majority

From SPIEGEL’s article about the Oxford PPE degree, where the rich and powerful met when they were only rich and young:

Tatsächlich kommt die Mehrzahl aller Oxford-Studenten von Privatschulen, die sich nur sehr wohlhabende Eltern leisten können: Obwohl nur sieben Prozent aller britischen Schüler auf Privatschulen gehen, machten sie 2013 in Oxford satte 44 Prozent der Studienanfänger aus.

Indeed, the majority of Oxford students come from private schools, that only very wealthy parents can afford: Although only seven percent of British children attend private schools, they were 44 percent of the matriculants at Oxford in 2013.

Even a government minister who studied PPE could tell that 44 percent isn’t a majority…

The article continues, quoting Danny Dorling, on Oxford Geographie-Professor in Oxford as saying

Vier Privatschulen und eine hochselektive staatliche Schule schicken mehr Studenten nach Oxford als die restlichen 2000 staatlichen zusammen genommen…

Four private schools and one highly selective state school send more students to Oxford as the remaining 2000 state schools put together…

I have to assume that this has been misquoted or mistranslated. There are not 2000 (or 2001) state secondary schools, but more than 3000. There are about 6600 undergraduates from state schools and 5200 from private schools. That would mean that at least 1400 undergraduates — about 400 a year — come from this one state school, and presumably a lot more.

My guess is, what he really said (or meant to say) is that these five schools send more students to Oxford than the bottom 2000 schools. Which doesn’t sound so strange, actually. The average number of Oxford places per school is less than one/year. In any given year most schools would send no one to Oxford. Even if schools were all equally good, if there are highly selective schools, they would be expected to send a large number of students to Oxford.

Is it better if they spy accurately?

There’s a fascinating article in the Guardian about how Berlin has become a centre for “digital exiles”, people — mainly Americans — whose online activism has put them in the crosshairs of various security services, leading to low-level harassment, or occasionally high-level harassment, such as this frightening story

Anne Roth, a political scientist who’s now a researcher on the German NSA inquiry, tells me perhaps the most chilling story. How she and her husband and their two children – then aged two and four – were caught in a “data mesh”. How an algorithm identified her husband, an academic sociologist who specialises in issues such as gentrification, as a terrorist suspect on the basis of seven words he’d used in various academic papers.

Seven words? “Identification was one. Framework was another. Marxist-Leninist was another, but you know he’s a sociologist… ” It was enough for them to be placed under surveillance for a year. And then, at dawn, one day in 2007, armed police burst into their Berlin home and arrested him on suspicion of carrying out terrorist attacks.

But what was the evidence, I say? And Roth tells me. “It was his metadata. It was who he called. It was the fact that he was a political activist. That he used encryption techniques – this was seen as highly suspicious. That sometimes he would go out and not take his cellphone with him… ”

He was freed three weeks later after an international outcry, but the episode has left its marks. “Even in the bathroom, I’d be wondering: is there a camera in here?”

This highlights a dichotomy that I’ve never seen well formulated, that pertains to many legal questions concerning damage inflicted by publication or withholding of information: Are we worried about true information or false information? Is it more disturbing to think that governments are collecting vast amounts of private and intimate information about our lives, or that much of that information (or the inferences that also count as information) is wrong?

As long as the security services are still in their Keystone Cops phase, and haven’t really figured out how to deploy the information effectively, it’s easier to get aroused by the errors, as in the above. When they have learned to apply the information without conspicuous blunders, then the real damage will be done by the ruthless application of broadly correct knowledge of everyone’s private business, and the crushing certainty everyone has that we have no privacy.

It’s probably a theorem that there is a maximally awful level of inaccuracy. If the information is completely accurate, then at least we avoid the injustice of false accusation. If the information is all bogus, then people will ignore it. Somewhere in between people get used to trusting the information, and will act crushingly on the spurious as well as the accurate indications. What is that level? It’s actually amazing how much tolerance people have for errors in an information source before they will ignore it — cf., tabloid newspapers, astrology, economic forecasts — particularly if it’s a secret source that seems to give them some private inside knowledge.

On a somewhat related note, Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber has given concise expression to a reaction that I think many people have had to the revelations of pervasive electronic espionage by Western democratic governments against their own citizens:

It isn’t long since the comprehensive surveillance of citizens… was emblematic of how communist states would trample on the inalienable rights of people in pursuit of state security. Today we know that our states do the same. I’m not making the argument that Western liberal democracies are “as bad” as those states were,… but I note that these kinds of violations were not seen back then as being impermissible because those states were so bad in other ways — undemocratic, dirigiste — but rather were portrayed to exemplify exactly why those regimes were unacceptable.

The Return of the Ampelmännchen

I’m in Berlin now, for the first time in ten years. I lived here for much of the 1990s, and much has changed since then. But the change that I found most striking is in the Ampelmännchen, the anthropomorphic red and green traffic signals that tell you to walk or not walk. When I was first in Berlin, the backlash against Western triumphalism was just starting. With the unification of Germany, all kinds of things that had been standardised within each of the former countries now needed to be standardised between them. In principle, this would have involved some sort of consultation and compromise between the two sides. In practice, the East was treated like a colony, and the western standards were simply imposed. (I wrote a long essay at the time about my perceptions of the resentment in East Berlin.)

The resistance converged on the Ampelmännchen. The East had sort of jaunty 1950s-era conspicuously male figures, while the West had sleek, modern, gender-neutral figures. They looked like this:

By the time I arrived, quite a few signals had already been changed in East Berlin, and the Rettet die Ampelmännchen campaign (“Save the Ampelmännchen“) was fighting to stop the losses. They distributed stickers with images of the Eastern Ampelmännchen, and hoped to slow their destruction. It was an inspired choice, since these Eastern Ampelmännchen are just so adorable. The arguments for the others — in particular, gender neutrality — may be convincing, but it is hard to contemplate their utter extinction without a pang.

Now, 20 years after the struggle broke out, I find that the Ost Ampelmännchen are everywhere in Berlin, even in the West. So, something has been saved. The rulers of the GDR vowed to create a Neuen Menschen (new man), but their only enduring success was the creation of a Neues Ampelmännchen.

“For he is an Englishman…”

For, in spite of all temptations

to belong to other nations

he remains an Englishman.”

Bringing together my posts from last year about cases of US citizens being expelled from or denied re-entry into their country, with my recent remarks on a senior UK politician’s suggestion that British citizens who fight with Islamists in Iraq and Syria have their citizenship revoked. This is of a piece with my earlier observations that xenophobic excesses which would be confined to the tub-thumping fringes in other countries, very quickly find resonance in the British political establishment, with the major parties falling over themselves not to be outflanked in expressing their hostility toward the alien.

To be fair, though, some moderately senior German politicians have made similar statements. The German constitution makes it absolutely explicit that citizenship cannot be revoked (except when a new citizenship is acquired, or when citizenship was acquired by fraud), which may make the belligerent exploitation of anti-Islamist chauvinism in these terms more or less despicable, depending on your perspective. (The US constitution is slightly less explicit, but reasonably clear on the subject.) By contrast, the UK — lacking both a written constitution and the clarifying experience of Nazi and Communist dictatorships — clearly makes revocation of citizenship a live option: 20 British dual nationals had their citizenship revoked last year, and the law — originally a 2006 Labour government product — was recently amended to allow the Home Secretary to deprive even single-nationals of their citizenship, rendering them stateless, showing blatant contempt for the 1961 UN Convention on Statelessness.

The only requirement for a naturalised British citizen — which includes many people born in the UK — to be deprived of his or her citizenship is that

the Secretary of State is satisfied that the deprivation is conducive to the public good.

Of course, “public good” is a pretty flexible concept, particularly when the Home Office is required to present neither an explanation nor evidence, and invariably takes the step when the individual is travelling outside the country, sending the notification to the home address in the UK (from which the person is known to be absent), allowing 28 days for appeal. Certainly the Nazi Home Secretary was satisfied that allowing Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann to return home would not be conducive to the public good. The GDR had the same trick of revoking citizenship when troublesome individuals were temporarily out of the country.

Lest anyone think the UK is recapitulating the march of tyranny, though, the Home Secretary has promised that this power will be used “sparingly”. That should be enough of a bulwark against fascism to satisfy anyone. And unlike the Nazi law on deprivation of citizenship, property is not confiscated, so it’s something completely different.

Creative destruction (Updated)

Headline on the NY Times website:

TV Chief Takes 2-by-4 to a Proposed Cable Merger

I was at first confused by the reference. Having grown up around my father’s lumberyard, I naturally think of a 2-by-4 as a basic element of house construction. For those whose experience of lumber is shaped by Mafia films, it’s an implement of destruction. (It’s interesting how the pop-culture image of organised crime has been shaped by the somewhat coincidental situation of the New York-New Jersey crime families who largely laundered their money through construction firms. Think “cement overshoes”.) I am reminded of the period in the early 1990s when skinhead mobs in Eastern Germany and Berlin suddenly started attacking foreigners, particularly but not exclusively asylum-seekers. The favoured weapons were baseball bats. I remember an article from around 1993, where a police expert was interviewed about why it was that baseball bats were ideally suited to be used as weapons, in addition to their advantage of having a legal use that endows carrying them with a superficial legitimacy, despite the fact that, as the German association of baseball enthusiasts admitted, the total number of baseball players in Germany was estimated at just a few hundred, substantially smaller than the number of baseball bats that had been sold in the past year. In any case, baseball bats (“Baseballschläger”) have become routine emblems of violence in German newspaper headlines, with no further explanation required, specifically xenophobic neo-Nazi violence. For example, when Der Spiegel reported on a government-sponsored youth music initiative with a CD of songs opposing neo-Nazi violence, the article was titled

Tonträger gegen Baseballschläger (Recordings vs. Baseball Bats)

Interestingly, when Bill Gates handed over control of Microsoft to Steve Ballmer, Der Spiegel covered press reports with a headline “Baseball bat in his hand”, referring to an LA Times report that said

Ballmer, der dafür bekannt ist, dass er bei internen Besprechungen herumbrüllt und manchmal Anordnungen gibt, während er einen Baseballschläger in der Hand hält… (Ballmer, who is known for screaming during internal conferences, and sometimes holds a baseball bat in his hand while giving orders…)

It sounds much more menacing in German.

Update: Somehow I forgot the famous lyric from the gospel song Oh Mary Don’t you Weep (what I take to be Pete Seeger’s revised lyrics; at least, it’s clearly not part of the original spiritual, and does appear on Pete Seeger’s recordings, and later versions):

Moses stood on the Red Sea shore

Smotin’ the water with a two-by-four.

Pharaoh’s army got drowned.

Oh, Mary, don’t you weep!

Mutually reinforcing headlines in Munich

I’m spending a couple of weeks in Munich, and I had to burst out laughing when I saw this tabloid on sale from a stand. The headlines seem to be unintentionally commenting upon one another:

New war in Iraq

followed by

This is your true legacy!

(I have to admit that my translation above, while literally more or less correct, and corresponds to the way I first read it due to the juxtaposition, is not really idiomatic. In the context of large tabloid headlines it’s clear that an appropriate translation would be “This is the right way to leave an inheritance”, and the article is all about how to write your will and avoid paying inheritance tax.)

Return address

From a recent article in The Guardian about the rise of antisemitism in Europe.

A similar normalisation may be under way in Germany, according to a 2013 study by the Technical University of Berlin. In 14,000 hate-mail letters, emails and faxes sent over 10 years to the Israeli embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel found that 60% were written by educated, middle-class Germans, including professors, lawyers, priests and university and secondary school students. Most, too, were unafraid to give their names and addresses – something she felt few Germans would have done 20 or 30 years ago.

That sounds very convincing. “Unafraid to give their names” sounds like an impressive fact, showing how socially accepted antisemitic threats have become, in contrast to 20 years ago. But then it reminded me of an interview given by Ignatz Bubis, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, almost exactly 20 years ago (14 December 1992, to be precise):

SPIEGEL: Mr Bubis, have you received any antisemitic letters today?

BUBIS: Yes. They range from threats to ridiculous pamphlets explaining that Jews meddle in everything, to insults. A man wrote to me recently to say, he saw me on television, and was greatly impressed by what I said — until it occurred to him, that I belong to another race, and so everything I said was terrible.

SPIEGEL: What is new about this antisemitism?

BUBIS: The only thing that is new, is that the letters now come with name and return address. Antisemitism is now socially acceptable. It is once again permitted.

(original German below the break)

Perhaps it is just wishful thinking, to suppose that there must have been a brief shining moment when anti-Semites were ashamed to sign their names to their threatening letters.

Continue reading “Return address”

The death of irony: Snowden edition

I have commented before on the self-contradictions in the attempts by the US to portray Edward Snowden as a common criminal, while themselves taking an “everybody does it” approach to flouting other countries’ laws, and, indeed, its own Constitution.

Now comes a report in Der Spiegel, on a legal opinion presented by the US to a German parliamentary investigatory committee that is considering inviting testimony from Snowden:

Es sei bereits eine “strafbare Handlung”, so der US-Jurist, wenn der “Haupttäter” (gemeint ist Snowden, Anm. Redaktion) etwa durch deutsche Parlamentarier veranlasst werde, geheime Informationen preiszugeben. Gegebenenfalls könne das als “Diebstahl staatlichen Eigentums” gewertet werden. Je nach Faktenlagen könnten Strafverfolger gar von einer “Verschwörung” (conspiracy) ausgehen.

It would be in itself a “criminal offence”, according to the US lawyer, if the “offender” (meaning Snowden) were induced by, for example, German members of Parliament, to reveal secret information. This could be considered “theft of state property”. Depending on the exact circumstances, it could even be prosecuted as a “conspiracy”.

Are US intelligence services really advocating the principle that acquiring secret information from other governments is a criminal offence, one for which individual legislators or indeed an entire parliamentary committee (and why not the whole German Bundestag, and the government to boot?) could be prosecuted? I think it shows the extent to which the US government is, in the Age of Obama, sees international law as a set of rhetorical tricks for expressing the hopelessness of any resistance to US government interests, rather than any set of rules and principles to which all might be subject.

But maybe they really mean to establish the principle that asking for information is illegal. The only valid way to obtain information is theft or torture.