Bill SprichtJust another WordPress weblog

A hat tip to Ulrich Speck of Kosmoblog for pointing me to this Spectator article about Germany (free reg required) by Wolfgang Munchau. A snipped is below, but also visit Kosmoblog’s entry for the footnotes. Snippet:

When I returned to Germany in the 1990s, what surprised me most was not the poor performance of the economy — this I expected. I was most shocked by the extraordinary loss of self-confidence among the political and business elites, combined with a poisonous cocktail of the three big As: anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and anti-capitalism.

Until then, post-war German politicians had been adept at keeping such sentiments hidden from public debate. This changed in 2002, when Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, won a general election through a blatantly anti-American campaign. It was not the fact that he opposed the war against Iraq that won him the election. He won because he managed to mobilise his party base with outright attacks on US President George W. Bush.

The same is happening again, only worse. Franz Müntefering, the chairman of Mr Schröder’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), has managed to combine the three big As in a single campaign for the forthcoming state elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s largest state. He compared foreign financial investors to ‘locusts’ — the kind of language that the Nazis used to describe Jews. This was no slip of the tongue. He repeated it. Even worse, he drew up a list, the ‘locust list’, of financiers of mostly Jewish-American origin, whom he accused of making exorbitant profits by asset-stripping German companies. Publishing lists of Jewish names was a hallmark of Nazism.

Mr Müntefering is no Nazi, simply a ruthless political operator with no scruples, a bad education and no sense of German history.

Good stuff. Though I question whether the ‘locust list’ is really a list “of financiers of mostly Jewish-American origin.”. It could be: I simply don’t know. Here is the list, by the way, according to Handelsblatt:

• Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co (KKR)
• Goldman Sachs
• Apax
• Carlyle
• BC Partners
• Advent
• WCM
• CVC (Citigroup Venture Capital)
• Permira
• Saban Capital
• Blackstone Group

Related posts:

1. Who won the Cold War? Thoughts on the German election.
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3. The next German government
4. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the Caliph’s exit
5. Rhein-Main ends flying operations