What’s the difference?

What’s the difference …? (October 2000) … between France and England In France it was the Romans who first brought civilization to the country and left a profound imprint on its language. The second major civilising force was the Church. It built lofty cathedrals, fostered learning, provided welfare services and slaughtered Christians of a different hue. In the fifteenth century Frenchmen Venerated a village maid who ‘heard Voices’ and defeated the national enemy. In the seventeenth they still remembered the Black Prince and hated les rosbifs. In the eighteenth they cut off their own king’s head. In the nineteenth they built Up an empire. In the mid-twentieth the government faced a revolt of Poujadist shopkeepers who physically threatened tax inspectors. In England it was the Romans who first brought civilisation to the country and left a substantial imprint on its language. The second major civilising force was the Church. It built lofty cathedrals, fostered learning, provoked welfare services and slaughtered Christians of a different hue. In the sixteenth century Englishmen venerated a Virgin Queen who, possessing ‘the feeble body of a woman and the heart of a king’, defeated the national enemy. In the seventeenth century they cut off their own king’s head. In the eighteenth they heartily despised France for its combination of ‘popery and Wooden shoes’. In the nineteenth Britain built up an empire. At the start of the twenty-first the government faced a revolt by Poujadist hauliers and farmers who physically threatened oil tanker drivers. Vive la difference! … between Iran and Israel In present-day Iran the political process operates within a constitutional straitjacket designed by the ‘Imam’ Ayatollah Khomeini. This gives the ‘supreme guide’ ^ a position at present held by Ayatollah Khameini – the power of veto over decisions taken by the popularly elected President Khatami. The hobbling of Israel’s political Process by clerical obscurantists is not actually written into the constitution – but encouraged by its commitment to Proportional representation. Sephardi former Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosefs pivotal position in the kaleidoscopically changing power structure gives him a licence to imperil the lives of secularist spokesmen and peace activists by dubbing them ‘Amaleks’. When he defamed Holocaust victims as ‘sinners in a previous incarnation’ his command of eighteen Knesset seats essential to coalition-building overrode the outrage all politicians – whether in or out of government – must have felt. … …between Wessles and Ossies In 1945, with half of Germany in ruins, imposing a Versailles-style punitive peace on her would have been a labour of supererogation. Then, as if in keeping with its disconsolate debris-littered landscape, the very country split in two. However the Bonn Republic, benefiting from Western aid and Cold War amnesia about Nazi crimes, speedily turned itself into an economic Wunderland. Meanwhile the misnamed German Democratic Republic, its economy stymied by Soviet dismantling and central planning, endured miserable living standards. Deprived of any but the most basic foodstuffs and consumer goods, new housing, foreign travel and security from denunciation, 18 million East Germans enacted vicarious atonement for the wartime crimes of all their compatriots. Today the jackboot’s on the other foot. With a steadily rising tally of dark-skinned murder victims to their credit, young Ossies are apparently readier to repeat those crimes than their Wessie counterparts. … between Hero and Villain In 1933 the Reichstag Fire Trial took place in Leipzig in an atmosphere of Nazi triumphalism and terror. In the dock the Bulgarian Communist Georgi Dimitrov stood up to Goering’s bullying tactics to such good effect that he secured an acquittal. (His fearless conduct also inspired the quip ‘The only man left in Germany is a Bulgarian’.) In 1935, now Moscow-resident, Dimitrov was appointed head of the Communist International. One day during a session of the Comintern Executive he suddenly addressed the veteran Hungarian Communist leader Bela Kun as ‘citizen’ instead of the customary ‘comrade’. It was no lapsus linguae. The meeting over, Kun was arrested as he left the room. This incident set in train the purge of hundreds of foreign Communists who had sought Russian shelter from their Fascist persecutors at home. What’s the Difference…? (continuation) [November 2000] …between Communists and Nazis Although both perpetrated previously unimaginable atrocities, they differed in one essential respect: while the Nazis murdered strangers – or people they branded as such (i.e. German Jews) – the Communists, in the main, killed their own nationals. What makes the Communists marginally less repellent is the fact that their subsequent victims had actually had a share, however •marginal, in elevating their scourges to supreme power. Tens of thousands of Russians fought in the Civil War from which Stalin eventually emerged as a Red Czar more absolute than his Romanov predecessors – and many more battled in China to bestow omnipotence on Mao. In contrast, not a single one of the millions of Nazi victims in Eastern Europe had had 2ny share whatever in bringing Hitler to power in Germany. To put it in a nutshell: the Communists butchered ‘their own’ and the Nazis ‘others’. …between Stanley Baldwin and TS Eliot In March 1936 when Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht into the demilitarised Rhine- ‘and, Britain and France could have stopped him in his tracks. Instead Prime Minister Baldwin stood supinely by and the French followed suit. Thirty-two months later, on the Sunday evening after Kristallnacht, ex-PM Baldwin made a radio appeal for funds for the Kindertransports. In other words, the man applauded for ‘saving the nation’ during the General Strike was salving his conscience ^s the results of appeasement became clear. In so doing, he differed markedly from T S Eliot whose interwar poetry had bristled with Sturmer imagery – from “the Jew squats on the windowsill” via “Rachel nee Rabinowitz, tears at grapes with murderous claws” to “the rats are underneath the pile, the Jew is underneath the lot”. For a post-war (and post-Holocaust) reprint of his poems Eliot made one significant alteration: ‘the Jew’ (who Squats, etc) became ‘the Jew’. …between Milner’s Kinder and others of that ilk In 1902 Britain won the Boer War The ‘Op official who oversaw the subsequent incorporation of the Boers into British South Africa was Lord Milner. He surrounded himself with younger colonial administrators nicknamed ‘Milner’s Kindergarten’. By the late 1930s some of Milner’s Kinder had advanced to key positions in the Establishment (Geoffrey Dawson was Editor of The Times, Lord Lothian Ambassador to Washington etc.). They had also mutated from self-confident Empire builders into arch-appeasers and formed an influential lobby nicknamed the Cliveden Set (after Lady Astor’s country house). The late 1930s produced a totally different batch of Kinder. These eventually formed a lobby called RoK whose influence can’t be compared to that of the Cliveden Set. …Germany and Austria The German symbol is the eagle, sovereign of the avian Kingdom under whose mighty wingspan eaglets like Prussia, Saxony and Bavaria all nestle. In law German identity is biologically and not culturally transmitted. Descendants of settlers whom Catherine the Great had ‘planted’ in the Volga Region automatically receive German citizenship on their return – a privilege denied to German-born second generation immigrants from Turkey or Yugoslavia. But the ‘biological’ definition does not operate in reverse. A whole phalanx of foreign-descended luminaries – Beethoven (Dutch), Fontane (French), Busoni, Brentano, Chamisso (Italian) – are defined as German. As to Hitler, the Germans classify him as Austrian and the Austrians return the compliment. The Austrian emblem is the double eagle symbolising the German-speaking and non-German speaking haloes of the Habsburg state. Since its demise the country has been schizoid about national identity. It felt ultra-German in 1938, and deeply Austrian in 1945. No less schizophrenic is the partly Slav-descended population’s Slavophobia. This flies in the face of the heavy Slav input into Austrian culture – with Wessely and Horvath prominent in theatre, and Kokoshka and Wotruba in art. Actually it is in light music, the quintessential Austrian art form, that ‘foreigners’ like Suppe (French) Johann Strauss Jewish) Lehar (Hungarian) and Benatzky Jewish), made the greatest contribution.