Giggles

Guess who has referrred to Angela Merkel in these terms?

“Ms. Chancellor, you can go to …,” he said, pausing for effect and eliciting giggles from the audience, a group of military officers, cabinet ministers and government officials. “Because she’s a woman I won’t say anything else.”

“She is from the German right, the same that supported Hitler, that supported fascism, that’s the Chancellor of Germany today,” he said.”

You can find the answer here. It’s the giggles of the sycophants that really get me.

Habermas, Religion, Public Life

By way of Norm I’ve come across these opinions attributed to Jürgen Habermas. While keeping in mind Norm’s caveat about their accuracy, I’d like to take issue with a couple of them.

He [Habermas] rejected the argument of secularists who seek to exclude religious discourse from civic discourse, saying that religious faith must inform public life.

I find it hard to think of any decent reason why religious faith must inform public life. Given that a lot of people in a lot of countries have some form of religious belief then it’s likely to have some form of influence on public life. That’s fine but it’s not the same thing.

Muslims in Europe “must not only superficially adjust to a constitutional order. They are expected to appropriate the secular legitimation of constitutional principles under the very premises of their own faith,” Habermas said.

Now I have no insider knowledge of Muslim attitudes but I have plenty with regard to another religion with an important number of followers in Europe, namely Roman Catholicism, and I can state quite categorically that the adhesion of the Catholic Church to the man-made constitutional order is indeed superficial and that the Catholic Church believes that its own social doctrine should be the basis of law, binding on believer and and non-believer alike. Anyone who doesn’t want to rely on my intuitions in this matter should check out the behaviour of the bishops in Spain during the recent election campaign there.

So what right does anyone have to ask Catholics or Muslims to root around in the premises of their faith for legitimation of, not just acquiescence to, the democratic constitutional order? I´d say, none at all. What they can be asked to do is assent to the democratic constitutional order on the grounds that it offers them the best chance to practice their beliefs in liberty.

And that’s as good as it gets; there can be no truck with special claims arising from the supposedly distinctive nature of religious belief and there’s no intrinsic reason why religious belief should inform public life anymore than than any other sort.

To See With Only One Eye

What is striking about these arguments of Judt’s is their unqualified, their completely one-sided, character. It is true that the Jewish tragedy in Europe is sometimes misused to justify or excuse Israeli policies that should not be defended. But to say this without noting that there is also anti-Semitic hostility to Israel, in the Arab world and in the West, some of it perfectly overt and some of it more discreet, is to pretend that anti-Semitism is a smaller problem than it is. To lament such misuses of the Holocaust without mentioning the misuses in the opposite direction that equate Israel with the spirit and the methods of the Nazis is to see with only one eye. The same goes for writing as if the most serious sources of anti-Semitism might be arguments used by defenders of Israel or an over-emphasis on the Shoah. Really? This is a centuries-old hatred, and yet here we find ourselves in a situation where it is defence of the Jewish state and memory of the genocide against the Jews that are the stimulants of anti-Semitism; these, at any rate, are Tony Judt’s sources of choice.

Norm savages an article by Tony Judt. Read the rest here.

Blitzkrieg

I came across this review article here. It says that,

There is a distinctive German way of war. Its distinctive characteristic is the muster of overwhelming force and a rapid advance into enemy territory. The successive Prussian and German states were surrounded (and felt themselves threatened) by vastly larger ones and so aimed at short, decisive wars of movement: the Bewegungskrieg–though the term blitzkrieg is more common in English.

And later, referring to the invasion of Russia in 1941,

In the first six months of fighting, the German army achieved 12–repeat, 12–great encirclements on a par with the victories at Sedan in 1871 and the Ardennes in 1940.

My knowledge of this area is a bit rusty but I was under the impression that the term blitzkrieg could only be correctly applied to the attack on France and the Low Countries in May 1940 and refers to the rapid  penetration of armoured units into enemy territory   creating a sense of paralysis and confusion and not to attempts to surround and capture enemy forces. The great encirclements of 1941 would, therefore, not be examples of the success of blitzkrieg but rather its antithesis: wasting time and effort rounding up and destroying the Russian army when the thing to do would have been to press on as hard and fast as possible with the intention of toppling the regime.

Feinmann Watch III

José Pablo Feinmann, en la novena entrega de su estudio sobre Peronismo que sale con Página/12 los domingos, dice

Cuando Clausewitz habla de aniquilamiento habla de aniquilamiento en batalla y de acuerdo a las leyes de la guerra.

Clausewitz murió en 1831 y su obra maestra Vom Kriege fue publicada al año siguiente. Los primeros pasos en codificar leyes de guerra fueron tomados más de 20 años después y la primera Convención de Ginebra es del año 1864.