Bleg for good texts on immediate post-WWI Germany and Russia.

Specifically, I need books that are readable, and not barking mad insane, on both 1920s German radical groups and the Russian communist factional rivals to the Bolsheviks.  I’m not one for obsessive historical research – I think that doing that often gets people stuck in neutral when they should be writing – but it wouldn’t hurt this one time to know just who all the players were.  And, yeah, I read Pirate Utopia, but that’s pretty much Italian-themed and I’m going to be leaving Mussolini right where I found him.

Germany starting to reestablish border controls, ‘thanks’ to refugee crisis.

I don’t know what’s more fascinating: that Germany is reestablishing border security with Austria, or that The Guardian thinks that it’s a good idea.

Germany’s decision to re-establish national border controls on its southern frontier with Austria deals a telling blow to two decades of open travel in the 26-nation bloc known as the Schengen area.

The abrupt move to suspend Schengen arrangements along the 500-mile border with Austria will shock the rest of the EU and may spur it towards a more coherent strategy to deal with its migration crisis. Yet there will be little sympathy for Berlin from Hungary, Italy or Greece, which are bearing the brunt of the mass arrivals of people from Syria, Iraq, Eritrea and Afghanistan.

It’s a fascinating time to be a Pan-European, nu? The Austrians are insinuating that the Hungarians are Nazis. The Swedes are yelling at the Danes because the latter is firmly moving refugees right along to Sweden (which is apparently a popular refugee destination spot). The French (and most of central Europe) are dealing with mutterings from its own populace that maybe they should be accepting Christian refugees first. The Italians (who have lots of ports, remember) are screaming for everybody else to start taking refugees like they’re supposed to. And the British are digging in their heels on refugee quotas while support for leaving the EU entirely continues to grow.  In short: it’s not really going well for the aforementioned Pan-Europeans.

The entire thing would be quite the knee-slapper, except that I have children who will be of military age in about, oh, ten years or so. I would rather that we not be faced with yet another general European war in that time – and, no, I don’t think that we can avoid getting sucked into one. We have yet to avoid getting sucked into a general European war. Why would we change our losing streak in that regard now?

Moe Lane (crosspost)

PS: I have sympathy for Europe with regard to their refugee problem.* However, if Europe would like my advice, here it goes: next time, mind your own business when it comes to our election process. You’re in this mess because Barack Obama doesn’t know how to fight a war properly. So maybe you shouldn’t have been so accommodating in 2008 when he wanted to use your countries as backdrops to his campaign commercials?

*I also have a great deal of sympathy for the refugees themselves (including the young males, or at least the ones who are just trying to get away from being forced to join Islamic State).

Tweet of the Day… Yeah. Yeah, I Guess It Would Have, At That edition.

Don’t get me wrong: gambling is a bad thing to be addicted to. I urge sufferers to seek help for it.

But Dad probably cleaned up on betting on Germany like that.

Why the homeschooling situation in America is different than it is in Germany.

While I am fully in agreement that it would be bad for Germany’s attitudes towards home schooling (they hate it, and are apparently prepared to shoot children over it*) to be replicated in the United States, there is fortunately at least one thing that’s different here: home schooling is not exclusively practiced among the Right. The Unitarians**, for example, are pretty friendly on the concept. In fact, religion is not the primary reason given for homeschooling in this country (H/T Breitbart)…

home-school

Don’t get me wrong: religious issues, and how they relate to the public school curriculum, still loom large in many people’s decision to homeschool.  But concerns about the schools themselves apparently loom larger.

Moe Lane

*From the article:

A Nazi-era law, still in force today, mandates that all German children attend a school teaching the state curriculum. In the court order authorizing the raid, the judge signed off on use of force “against the children” if necessary, noting that the children had “adopted the parents’ opinions” regarding home schooling.

So take it up with them.

**My wife’s UU.

#rsrh German Chancellor Angela Merkel feels that Europe is… Nicht in Ordnung.

It’s all so very, ah, sloppy.

[T]he respected German weekly Der Spiegel reported in its latest edition that Merkel wants EU leaders to forge ahead with deeper political integration within the unwieldy 27-nation bloc.

Merkel has long advocated closer political integration as a means of preventing the European project from unraveling under the strain caused by the eurozone crisis.

…You know something, Germany? Fine.  It’s just not worth it.  Are the French on board?  Good.  You going to leave the Brits alone, when they tell you to sod off?  Glad to hear it.  No barbarism planned, this go-round? Very smart of you.  OK.  Yeah. Go ahead and have your Wholly German Empire, and don’t make us come over there again.

#rsrh Shorter Victor Davis Hanson: Germany looking around…

…and starting to be comfortable with the idea of saying that, when it comes to Europe, Alles nicht in Ordnung ist*.

No, I’m not entirely comfortable with that, either.  But, heck, at least they’re unlikely to actually invade Belgium this time.

Moe Lane

*I think that I got the German right: I am much like Mark Twain in spirit when it comes to that language – and much less like him when it comes to its syntax, grammar, and vocabulary.

#rsrh Third time’s the charm?

Theodore Darlymple (via Instapundit) comes up with a somewhat bizarre thought experiment:

If for some inexplicable reason you wanted to reawaken German nationalism, how would you go about it? I suggest a three-part strategy.

First, you would replace the rock-solid German currency by one with very shaky economic foundations, against the wishes of almost the whole German population (which, of course, you would not deign to consult).

Second, you would make sure that same population paid for the gross and dishonest profligacy of the Greek government: a profligacy that was rendered possible by the adoption of the very currency that the German population did not want in the first place.

Third, you would do everything possible to ensure that the crisis will spread, last for a long time, cost a fortune in failed attempts to solve it, and fall mainly to the Germans to pay for.

Continue reading #rsrh Third time’s the charm?

Germans will walk out if Ahmadinejad speech involves Holocaust denial. Huzzah.

(Via Hot Air Headlines) I have a problem with this.

Germany will walk out of the U.N. General Assembly if Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust in a speech he will give Wednesday, and it wants other European Union countries to do the same, the foreign ministry said.

My problem with this is that intolerance to Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism should be so instinctive and reflexive that nobody would have let Ahmadinejad talk at the UN in the first place. The Canadians aren’t bothering to wait for the inevitable vileness; they’re just going to walk out (via Instapundit).  So on that curve the German response gets down graded from its original A to a B-.

Mind you, that’s a heck of a lot better than the F that we’re getting. Did somebody at the UN with a malignant sense of humor schedule this one?  The President is going to speak the same day as Iran’s Ahmadinejad, Libya’s Gadhafi and Zimbabwe’s Mugabe; you have to wonder whether Syria’s al-Assad and/or North Korea’s Il-sung Jong-Il had scheduling conflicts.  Doesn’t anybody at the White House check people’s work before they send it out?

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Germany disinclined to acquiesce to Obama’s Uighur request.

Means ‘no*.’

As Track-A-‘Crat notes, the administration is at best spinning its difficulties to get anybody else to take the Uighurs. The President is claiming that there have been no hard commitments, which implies that negotiations for giving some over to Germany are still going on:

Strictly speaking, that may be true. But according to information obtained by SPIEGEL, Germany has long since blocked the idea of accepting Guantanamo detainees — and has done so without having to issue an outright rejection.

In talks at the end of May, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble presented US Attorney General Eric Holder with a list of criteria to be fulfilled before Germany would take nine Uighur detainees. Schäuble said Washington needed to present a clear case as to why the Uighurs, members of a Muslim minority in north-western China, couldn’t be taken in by the US or other countries. He also said America had to offer proof that they weren’t dangerous, and that they had a personal connection to Germany. He told Holder that Germany was unable to accept people who couldn’t travel to the US on a simple tourist visa.

Continue reading Germany disinclined to acquiesce to Obama’s Uighur request.