Menace In Europe - Part 13
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Part 13

22. Ibid., p. 185.

23. Ibid., p. 186.

24. Ibid., p. 18687.

25. Ibid., p. vii.

26. Ibid., p. xii.

27. Ibid., p. 57.

28. Ibid., p. 138.

29. Michael Driessen, http://www.wisemonkeynews.com/article/politics/ 40/Jose+Bove+fights+the+Mc-Domination+of+the+world/ 30. Hal Hamilton, "Reflections from France." http://www.sare.org/ sanet-mg/archives/html-home/46-html/0025.html 31. The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 121.

32. The World Is Not for Sale, p. 185.

33. The Pursuit of the Millennium, p. 83.

34. http://www.foodfirst.org/action/2003/josebove.html 35. The World Is Not for Sale.

36. Donella Meadows, The Global Citizen, July 13, 2000, http://www.pcdf.org/meadows/Jose_Bove.html 37. James W. Ceaser, "A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism," Public Interest, Summer 2003.

38. The World Is Not for Sale, pp. 6061, 78.

39. Ibid., p. 71.

40. The True Believer, p. 81.

41. I am indebted to the Brazilian poet Nelson Ascher for corresponding with me at length about these connections. I no longer recall which thoughts were originally his and which were mine, so to be on the safe side, let's say that all the good ideas are his.

42. The World Is Not for Sale, p. 27.

43. "Le Peuple Palestinien est debout," interview with Jose Bove by Fatiha Kaoues, April 24, 2002. My translation. http://oumma.com/ article.php3?id_article=378 44. The World Is Not for Sale, 11.

45. The True Believer, p. 11.

46. H. L. Mencken, Memorial Service, first printed in the Smart Set, March 1922. Cited in H. L. Mencken on Religion, S. T. Joshi (New York: Prometheus, 2002), p. 297.

CHAPTER 8 : BLACK-MARKET NATIONALISM: I HATE.

1. John Felstiner, Paul Celan : Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 39. The translation is Felstiner's.

2. Translated by Evan Goodwin, "Little Blue Light-Georg Trakl," Littlebluelight (May 29, 2003). http://www.littlebluelight.com/ lblphp/quotes.php?ikey=27.

3. Gottfried Benn, Morgue and Other Expressionist Verse (19121913). Translated by Supervert32C Inc., 2002. http://supervert.com/elibrary/ gottfried_benn.

4. Der Kongress zur Nurnberg 1934 (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., Frz. Eher Nachf., 1934), pp. 13041.

5. Wolfgang Spahr, Billboard, August 7, 1999.

6. Winston c.u.mmings, "Teutonic Values," Hit Parader, December 1998.

7. Colin Devinish, "Rammstein Raise Furor over Video with n.a.z.i-Era Footage," Sonicnet, August 1998, at www.vh1.com/artists/news/ 500908/08311998/rammstein.jhtml 8. Gabriella, New York Rock, November 1998, at www.nyrock.com/ interviews/rammstein_int.htm 9. Chris Gill, "Rammstein: Battering Ramm," Guitar World, 6:9 at www.rammsteinsite.com/articles6.html 10. http://www.newsfilter.org/antimtv/bands/rammstein.htm 11. Wojtek Goral, "n.a.z.is? Heil No!," London Records, 2001.

12. Examples of posters in this genre may be found at http://motlc. wiesenthal.com/gallery/pg01/pg9/pg01931.html and http://www. calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/posters/rad.jpg 13. "Teutonic Values."

14. Hugo Ringler, "Heart or Reason?: What We Don't Want from Our Speakers," Unser Wille und Weg, 7 (1937), pp. 24549. Translated by Robert D. Books, May 1972.

15. Interview with Flake Lorenz, Deutscher Video Ring Magazin, May 2001.

16. Dante Bonutto, online interview with Rammstein in Blistering, http://www.blistering.com/fastpage/fpengine.php/templateid/7967/ menuid/3/tempidx/5/catid/4/editstatus//restemp/N%3B/fPpagesel/2 17. I thank my editor at Azure, Daniel Doneson, for pointing this out to me and for directing me to a number of interesting sources for the study of the relationship between music and politics.

18. Schwarmerei means excessive or unwholesome sentimentality. Richard Wagner, uber deutsches Musikwesen, Samtliche Schriften und Dichtungen: vol. I, translated by William Ashton Ellis, The Wagner Library, Edition 1.0, http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/ prose/wagongm.htm 19. Andrea Nieradzik, "Beautiful Sons," Musik Express, March 2001.

20. See the final lines of Susan Sontag's "Fascinating Fascism," Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975).

21. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, "Das Turkenproblem," Die Zeit, September 12, 2002.

CHAPTER 9 : TO h.e.l.l WITH EUROPE.

1. Pascal Ceaux, Franck Colombani, and Alexandre Garcia, "L'agresseur de M. Delanoe n'aimait ni les elus ni les h.o.m.os.e.xuels," Le Monde, October 8, 2002. My translation.

2. No one can discuss the rise of modern nationalism without revealing the influence of the seminal theorist of nationalism, Benedict Anderson. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991).

AFTERWORD FOR THE PAPERBACK EDITION : I TOLD YOU SO.

1. "Islamic Terrorism Is Too Emotive a Phrase, Says EU," Telegraph, April 12, 2006.

2. "Germany in the Crosshairs," Spiegel Online, August 22, 2006.

3. "Train Bombers Funded by British Businessmen," Times of London, July 17, 2006.

4. Aftenposten, August 5, 2006.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

My agent, Daniel Greenberg, is what every writer dreams of in an agent. He's aggressive on my behalf, ever-tactful and encouraging with me, and his advice, generously offered, is always good advice. Best of all, he always answers my phone calls and e-mails right away. (Other writers will appreciate how rare and wonderful this is in an agent.) Thank you, Daniel, for seeing the potential in this book and for finding it a good home.

That good home was with Crown Forum, and specifically with my editor, Jed Donahue. An editor who publishes books about politics needs to be able to see not what is in the headlines that day, but what will be in the headlines in two years' time. When Jed first saw the proposal for this book, Theo van Gogh was alive, London had not been attacked, and no one was giving a moment's thought to the suburbs of France. Jed had the foresight to antic.i.p.ate Europe's crisis at a time when many people did not. He has also forced me to return again and again to this question: Why should anyone care what happens to Europe? If more writers were asked by more editors why anyone should give a d.a.m.n about their books, I suspect a lot of books would be a lot better.

My thanks to Crown Forum's art director, Whitney Cookman, for this book's eerily menacing cover; to production editor Susan Westendorf; to indexer Leoni McVey; and to copy editor Toni Rachiele, who scrubbed this ma.n.u.script with a Karcher. If Toni sees a reference to the world's forty-nine least developed countries, she is the kind of copy editor who goes to the footnote, counts each country by hand, then reports that there are in fact fifty on the list I cite. She applied the same meticulous care to every word in the book. It is customary at this point for authors to avow complete responsibility for any errors remaining in the text, but frankly, I don't think it's necessary; I can't imagine anything escaped her. (If something did, it's still my fault.) I am also particularly thankful for the excellent editorial advice I received from David Hazony and Daniel Doneson, editors of the journal Azure. Azure published two chapters of this book in abridged form. I thank them, as well, for inviting me to the Shalem Center and permitting me to air my ideas among their colleagues. I also thank Policy Review and the Washington Post for publishing some of the material in this book and giving me the chance to think out loud, in print, about the significance of the decline of faith in Europe and the limits to Europe's integration project.

Many people were kind enough to read this ma.n.u.script, in part or in whole. I thank in particular Damian Counsell, William Hill, Steven Lenzner, and Ulrich Schollwock. Norah Vincent offered not just intellectual but emotional support on those days when the phrase "To h.e.l.l with Europe" seemed like more than just a good t.i.tle for a chapter. To Bill Walsh, who again saved me from committing to print errors too embarra.s.sing to contemplate, I extend my limitless grat.i.tude. I also thank Mustafa Akyol, Nelson Ascher, Cristina Iampieri, Bruce Gatenby, Jeffrey Gedmin, Judith Wrubel Levy, Phiroze Neemuchwala, Rubel Quadar, and of course Zia Rahman, who were all notably generous with their time and thoughts about Europe, both in correspondence and conversation.

As always, I thank my father and brother. Every chapter in this book began as a conversation with one or the other of them. I also thank my father and grandmother for their translations of Rammstein's lyrics-the reader may imagine what my grandmother thought of that task-and my mother for her thoughts about the German musical tradition.

David Gross traveled with me through Europe while I looked for answers to my questions. He took many photographs of what we saw together. Some of these can be seen at www.mimetic.com. I could not ask for a more patient and curious companion on the long journey- or a better friend.

And one final word in memory of my grandfather. No one knew this continent better than he, and no one taught me more about it. I'm sure he knows how grateful I am.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR.

Claire Berlinski, born and raised in the United States, has lived and worked in Britain, France, Switzerland, Thailand, Laos, and Turkey as a journalist, academic, and consultant. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and Policy Review, among other publications. She holds a first-cla.s.s degree in modern history and a doctorate in international relations from Oxford University, as well as a diploma in French literature from the Sorbonne and a degree in philosophy from the University of Washington. Berlinski is also the author of Loose Lips, a novel. Menace in Europe is her first nonfiction work. She now divides her time between Paris and Istanbul.

1 These remarks are particularly rich inasmuch as Drewermann is best known for complaining bitterly in an interview with Der Spiegel that Americans "live in the delusion that they, as a magnificent nation, were specially appointed by G.o.d to direct the course of world events." Interview with Eugen Drewermann, "Psychoa.n.a.lysis: Why Bush Must Conduct This War," Der Spiegel, February 11, 2003.

2 Courage in conjunction with lamentable military strategy is, of course, not much to celebrate.

3 The message is obviously of Koranic inspiration. "22/1 Mankind, have fear of your Lord! The quaking of the Hour is a terrible thing. 22/2 On the day they see it, every nursing woman will be oblivious of the baby at her breast, and every pregnant woman will abort the contents of her womb, and you will think people drunk when they are not drunk; it is just that the punishment of Allah is so severe." (Sura al-Haj, 'The Pilgrimage') 4 The fruits of this peculiar conception of tolerance may also be seen in the Netherlands' policy on euthanasia, one that may briefly be summarized as Don't get sick in a Dutch hospital. A policy widely applauded for its tolerance in fact permits Dutch doctors to kill deformed newborns, the r.e.t.a.r.ded, and a great many elderly people who have specifically indicated that they have no desire to die. According to the Dutch government's own investigation, an average of sixteen people in the Netherlands are killed each day by their doctors without their consent. See the Remmelink Report by the Committee to Investigate the Medical Practice Concerning Euthanasia, Medische Beslissingen Rond Het Levenseinde, Sdu Uitgeverij Plantijnstraat (The Hague: 1991). On the so-called Groningen Protocols concerning the killing of infants by doctors, see, e.g., Toby Sterling, "Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies," a.s.sociated Press, November 30, 2004. See also Richard Miniter, who reports that more than 10 percent of Dutch senior citizens surveyed feared being killed, against their will, by their doctors: "The Dutch Way of Death: Socialized Medicine Helped Turn Doctors into Killers," Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2001.

5 He wasn't paying attention, then. Only seven weeks before, Marco Biagi, a senior adviser to Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, had been gunned down by the Red Brigades. The fact that Verhofstadt was either unaware of this or indifferent to it suggests something about the degree to which Europe has truly been integrated: not so much as some claim, evidently. It is true that Fortuyn's murder was the first political a.s.sa.s.sination in the Netherlands since 1584, when William the Silent was shot to death in the city of Delft. Perhaps the Belgian prime minister was inadvertently expressing a common, if rarely articulated, European sentiment: Italians can be expected to shoot their politicians (that's Sopranoland down there, after all), but when the placid Dutch begin shooting one another, it is time to worry.

6 In this regard, it is true, Fortuyn's support for Holland's euthanasia policy did have something in common with fascism-n.a.z.ism, in particular-but in the modern European political tradition, it has been the Left, not the Right, that has favored permissive laws on euthanasia. It is one of those many issues where the line between the modern Left and the historic Right begins to blur.

7 Le Pen is, indeed, a Holocaust denier and a crypto-fascist.

8 "Brown" is shorthand for Brownshirt, or n.a.z.i.

9 Because they were written in Arabic, they were unread and ignored by the CIA. Had they been read, September 11 would not have come as such a surprise. For an important account of this intelligence failure, see Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism (New York: Crown, 2002).

10 British universities subdivide university graduates on the basis of their final examination results into Firsts (superclever), Upper Seconds (diligent), Lower Seconds (lazy or athletic), and Thirds (abject dullards). Examination results are published annually, resulting in an unseemly spectacle of lordly gloating-cloaked in false modesty-among those who have received Firsts.

11 Oxford University comprises thirty-nine self-governing colleges, each with its own character and traditions. Generally, it is nearly impossible to transfer from one college to another. The circ.u.mstances must be quite unusual, as in this case they were.

12 Zia later asked me to stress that this boy is now a friend of his. Consider it stressed.

13 Council estates are the equivalent of housing projects.

14 Delicious though this rumor may be, it is almost certainly untrue.

15 In Britain, a doctor's office is called a surgery.

16 He has asked me to use a pseudonym; this is not his real name.

17 There are, of course, debates about the ability of certain groups to a.s.similate successfully in America, but these have focused on Hispanics, not Muslim Asians. Even Hispanics, it should be noted, have high rates of military enlistment and rank well on other key indices of identification with the host country.

18 "Here, some six hundred years before Christ, debarked Greek sailors from Phocaea, a Greek city in Asia Minor. They would found Ma.r.s.eille, bringing the light of civilization to the West."

19 It is difficult to establish, statistically, the degree to which Ma.r.s.eille differs from other French cities. Groups that compile statistics on anti-Semitism in France use different methods, and moreover compile these figures to different political ends. Consequently, numbers vary wildly: For example, in 2001, SOS Racisme claimed there were 405 anti-Semitic incidents in France, the Representative Council of Jewish Inst.i.tutions of France reported 330, the Interior Ministry found 163, and the Consultative Commission on the Rights of Man discovered 146. To confuse the methodological issue further, statistics generally reflect absolute numbers of incidents in a city, rather than per capita incidents, and do not take into account the size of a city's Jewish population. A city with 10,000 Jews is apt to report more anti-Semitic crime than a city with 10 Jews, but this does not necessarily mean Jews in the first city are in greater danger. Finally, it is particularly difficult to distinguish between a crime wave and a crime-reporting wave: The French government, in its campaign to combat anti-Semitism, has encouraged Jews to report even the smallest incident of aggression; this policy has been pursued vigorously in Ma.r.s.eille. But an increase in reported crime does not necessarily mean that real crime has increased. My claim that anti-Semitic violence is less prevalent in Ma.r.s.eille than elsewhere in France is largely based on anecdotal evidence, but it is strong anecdotal evidence: Everyone in France accepts it as a given, and it can be confirmed by even a casual perusal of French newspapers over the past several years. Horrible things just don't seem to happen in Ma.r.s.eille as often as they do elsewhere.

20 Al-Manar proved unable to resist the temptations of on-air Jew-bashing and has now been banned again.

21 It would be intellectually indefensible to propose this as a complete explanation for Muslim separatism in France or elsewhere. Islam obviously gives rise to both radical and moderate interpretations; in its moderate interpretations, the acceptance of secular state sovereignty is perfectly admissible-and the great majority of Muslims in France adhere to the moderate view. One question, then, is why the radical element has in recent years gained ground. The growing influence of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism surely plays a sinister role: Saudi Arabia now provides 80 percent of the funding for mosques and Islamic centers in France. Another reason, as Zvi Ammar pointed out, is the explosive proliferation of radicalizing Arab media, disseminated through French cable and satellite television providers. France's perennially high structural unemployment rate does not help matters; economically marginalized youths who see no prospect of advancement in French society will obviously find more to admire in radical separatism than those who view integration as a sure path to social advancement. Finally, most of France's previous immigrants came from Europe, and therefore from cultures more similar to France's own. It is simply easier to bridge the gap between, say, Polish culture and French culture than it is to bridge the gap between Algerian and French culture. If nothing else, consider the subjugated status of women in most Islamic countries, one that is rightly repellent to European sensibilities. Islam has always seen in Christian Europe a rival, not an a.n.a.logue. It requires a much greater stretch for someone born and raised in the Islamic world to become French than it does for someone born and raised in Portugal.

22 The list: Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Benin, Bhutan, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cape Verde, the Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Kiribati, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nepal, Niger, Rwanda, Samoa, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Solomon Islands, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tuvalu, Uganda, Vanuatu, Yemen, and Zambia. Of this list, only Afghanistan and Sudan notably export terrorists. Terrorists tend to come from Chechnya, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Iraq, the Israeli Occupied Territories, Pakistan, Sudan, Syria, and Uzbekistan. These places obviously have something in common, but it is not underdevelopment.

23 There is some debate whether this distinction belongs to Italy or Spain. It's more or less a tie.

24 In fairness, strikes cannot necessarily be taken as important indicators of popular opposition. Italians are known to strike at any provocation, and work stoppages have a remarkable tendency to coincide with important football matches.

25 This a.s.sumes the mortality rate is a constant. In Western Europe these days, it is.

26 The Italian tradition of political graffiti dates from the Roman era, so perhaps this is not remarkable.

27 When this a.n.a.logy is made, it is for some reason always forgotten that Vercingetorix ultimately permitted himself to be given up to the Romans. The Gallic chieftain languished in the Tullianum at Rome for five years before his public beheading in 46 B.C.

28 They might well have rejected it anyway, on some other pretext: as in many African countries, the government of Zimbabwe is quite keen to starve its own people as a political weapon.

29 Given the Cathars' celibacy, one wonders why the pope did not bide his time and wait for their natural extinction.

30 These views have not been limited to Europe. As Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit remark in Occidentalism (New York: Penguin, 2004), these ideas have been exported around the globe, resurfacing in cultures as various as that of imperial j.a.pan and the modern Islamic jihadis. Paul Berman makes this point as well in his excellent Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003).

31 "When I think of Germany at night, I cannot sleep."

32 For brevity's sake I have selected a representative sample; a complete catalogue of Rammstein lyrics in German and their English translation can be found at http://www.herzeleid.com/en/lyrics.

33 The song continues for about six more verses in exactly the same vein. The melody itself calls to mind Sir Thomas Beecham's remark that the English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes.

34 Kruspe recently became Kruspe-Bernstein when he married a Jew and adopted his new wife's name. His philo-Semitic marriage has been seized upon with great relief by fans eager to believe that the band's music has nothing to do with what it seems to be about.

35 It is instructive to contrast this song, Rammstein's interpretation of "Here Comes the Sun," with the Beatles' original.

36 Du Hast means "You have." "You hate" is properly spelled Du Ha.s.st. But Rammstein translates the song as "You hate." This translation is on their official website; it is the translation they send to fans upon request, and it is the way they sing it when they sing the song in English.