FAITH MATTERS: Tariq Ramadan, point man of the Caliphate

Islamist scholar Tariq Ramadan

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

Martin Luther considered the rise of Islam a sign of the impending apocalypse and God’s ferule for the backs of a wayward church. He was by no means the first great theologian to believe this. St. John of Damascus (676-749 A.D.) and the medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202 A.D.) viewed Islam as an anti-Christian power of the end of time and Mohammed as a precursor of the Antichrist.

None of these sages presumed to speculate on a precise date of Christ’s Second Coming in the way some contemporary sects do today. “The Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him,” Christ himself said (Matthew 24:43-44), and: “I will come like a thief” (Revelation 3:3). Therefore, warned Luther, predicting a date for this event was impossible and unnecessary.

Nonetheless, watching the blood-curdling events unfold in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, it is worth remembering the historical circumstances under which John, Joachim and Luther interpreted Islam in apocalyptical terms. All three witnessed a weak, confused, splintered and often unfaithful Church.

In John’s day, Islam wiped out flourishing Christian cultures in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean regions undermined by bickering, often heretical churches; some of these Christians even welcomed Muslims as liberators from their oppression by other Christians. Joachim was born in the aftermath of the Great Schism of 1054 A.D., which split Christendom into two hostile camps, the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox. In Luther’s day, the Turks had conquered much of southeastern Europe and were laying siege on Vienna.

The parallels between those historical sets of circumstances and today’s scenario must not be overlooked. True, the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are also beset by schisms and the encroachment of modernity. But it is also true that among them are forces with more determination and, much clearer goals and seemingly more staying power that most Christians.

TV showman Glenn Beck has been foolishly ridiculed for insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood, which seems to play a key role in the Egyptian crisis, is busy scheming to establish a worldwide Caliphate ruling by Islamic law. But this is no wayward notion. Ever since it was founded by the Egyptian schoolteacher and imam Hassan al-Banna in 1928, the Brotherhood has displayed incredible flexibility and strategic skills in pursing this goal, including courting the Nazis and collaborating with Marxist-Leninists.

Amazingly, of all major American media personalities, only Beck has mentioned the Muslim Brotherhood’s point man the West, a Teflon character by the name of Tariq Ramadan. He is a Swiss citizen, a much-admired scholar. He is also al-Banna’s grandson, and he speaks, in the words of French journalist Caroline Fourest, “from both corners of his mouth.” Currently a professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, he claims to champion the re-interpretation of Islamic texts and emphasizes the heterogeneous nature of West Muslims, he sounds alarmingly duplicitous to discerning European ears.

When in 2003 Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French interior minister, now president, asked Ramadan about his brother Hani’s justification of the stoning of adulteresses, he replied, “I am in favor of a moratorium so that they stop applying punishments of this kind in the Muslim world. What’s important is for people’s thinking to evolve. What is necessary is a pedagogical approach.” Should we perhaps read this as a suggestion to teach first, and stone later?

Ramadan also termed terrorist acts “contextually” justified, told French television that “violence is legitimate” and, according to Swiss intelligence, been involved with Al Qaida leaders such as Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Omar Abdel Rahman as long ago as 1991. In 2009, the traditionally liberal Erasmus University of Rotterdam fired him for chairing the “Islam & Life” program of Press TV, a network wholly owned by the Iranian regime.

In that same year, the Obama administration issued Ramadan a 10-year scholar’s visa after he had been banned from entering the United States in 2004 when offered a professorship at Notre Dame University. The reasons why the Department of Homeland Security then prevented his entry then are rarely discussed. According to Islam critic Daniel Pipes they included: Ramadan’s praise for the brutal policies of the Sudanese political leader Hassan a-Turabi; Ramadan’s contacts with an Algerian terrorist and his “routine contacts” with an Algerian indicted for Al Qaida activities; his public references to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and to the bloodbaths of Madrid and Bali as mere “interventions.” Still, Foreign Policy magazine rated him 49^th among the world’s most important intellectuals today.

Tariq Ramadan, who wrote his doctoral dissertations on German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, knows the feeble state of Western Christianity well. Living in Europe, he cannot help observing the consequences of the scarcity of clergymen in France where the church no longer provides pastoral care, and where in most cases old ladies now conduct Christian funerals because no priests are available. A scholar of his intelligence won’t find it hard to appreciate the depravity of Protestantism in Germany where the synods (parliaments) of most of the 22 state-related regional churches voted to allow homosexual pastors to live with their partners in parsonages. When Ramadan eventually reaches U.S. shores he will find a similar state of affairs in American mainline denominations.

“You don’t have a decent way of life that we can import,” British radical Islamist Anjem Choudary told Fox news anchor Sean Hannity in an otherwise disgraceful interview recently – disgraceful because Hannity lambasted him on the air, calling him “one sick miserable S.O.B.,” instead of allowing his viewers to draw exactly the same conclusion after watching a professionally crafted interview that could not be misconstrued as further evidence of the decline of Western standards.

It is easy to see how radical Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood might interpret the current state of Western Christianity as an open invitation to push it over and recreate a caliphate on its ruins. It is also easy to read all this as a sign of the impending apocalypse. However, this would not be Christian by any biblical measure. It’s a warning, yes, a reliable timetable to Judgment Day it is not.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, the former religious affairs editor of United Press International, has been an international journalist for 54 years, covering North America, Vietnam, the Middle East and Europe for German publications. Dr. Siemon-Netto currently directs the League of Faithful Masks and Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life in Irvine, California.

Potsdam-Honolulu-Bordeaux: A Musical Arc

The “Father of Hawaiian Music” was a Prussian military bandleader

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

What did Germans export before Mercedes-Benz cars were invented? Well, princesses, an old adage will have you believe. Actually, Germans enriched the world with another product too: musicians. One of these left a lasting impact on Hawaiian culture.

Some Anglo-Saxon linguists claim that there is something oddly Germanic about certain Hawaiian words. The consonant “w” is often pronounced like a “v”. According to George Kanahele, author of “Hawaiian Music and Musicians,” this seems to be the “fault” of one Heinrich August Wilhelm Berger (1844-1929) who taught folks in Honolulu to sing their songs that way. He was a Prussian, hand-picked by Kaiser Wilhelm I to whip the Royal Hawaiian Band into shape. Berger did this so well that his friend, Queen Lili’uokalani (1838-1917), later proclaimed him the “father of Hawaiian Music.”

A musical father he is for Hawaiians to this very day. When they chant “Hawaii Ponoi,” their state’s anthem, they sing a tune Heinrich (“Henry”) Berger has written for them, borrowing heavily from “Heil dir im Siegerkranz,” the hymn of imperial Germany, which sounded exactly like “God save the Queen” and the national songs of assorted other countries, including the principality of Liechtenstein.

How Berger, the former bandleader of the Second Guards regiment in Potsdam, came to be the premier musician in the history of Hawaii, is a wonderful tale, for it is the high point in the love affair between 18th- and 19th-century German speakers and the people of this faraway cluster of Pacific islands. This love affair had its origins in the South Sea romanticism, which gripped some of Central Europe’s most significant thinkers and poets of that time, including philosopher Immanuel Kant and poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and French-born Adelbert von Chamisso who visited Hawaii on the Russian brig “Rurik” in 1815-16, and then wrote the first grammar of the Hawaiian language – written in German and published 1838 in Leipzig.

As Niklaus R. Schweizer related in his book, “Hawaii and the German Speaking Peoples,” cultured Germans poured into Hawaii in the early 19th century, founding companies and serving the public upon whom they made such a favorable expression that King Kamehameha III wrote King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in 1846: “No foreigners in Our realm are more orderly and behave more correctly than Your Majesty’s subjects and other Germans.”

The romance between German speakers and Hawaiians took a distinctly melodious turn when in 1869 the Austrian frigate “Donau” (Danube) limped into Honolulu harbor with engine trouble. Being an Austrian military vessel, it had of course an excellent orchestra on board. So as the ship was waiting for engine parts to be sent from Europe these musicians delighted the public with brilliant performances around Honolulu and particularly on Emma Square. But when the “Donau” finally left in 1870, Hawaiians became disgruntled with the comparatively low quality of their own royal band. So the people petitioned King Kamehameha V to “revitalize” his own band, directed by a German by the name of William Merseburgh but consisting of merely 10 instruments, including a flute, a clarinet, a bassoon, a French horn and drums, according to “The History of the Royal Hawaiian Band,” an MA thesis by David Wayne Bandy.

And Kamehameha V obeyed his people. He asked Wilhelm I, Emperor of newly united Germany and King of Prussia, to send him a conductor, and so Wilhelm loaned him for four years Heinrich Berger, the bandleader of one of his favorite regiments, a tuba and double bass player by training but also a brave veteran of the Prussian wars against Denmark (1864), Austria (1866) and France (1870-71), a man who had played with orchestras led by Johann Strauss, the “king of the waltz.”

On June 3, 1872, Berger arrived in Honolulu on board the steamer “Mohongo” and one week later conducted his first public concerts. It took him just two months to receive this accolade from the “Pacific Commercial Advertiser”: “The Band, under the able direction of Mr. Berger, has resumed the practice initiated two years ago by the band of the Austrian frigate Donau… The neighborhood of Emma Square looked quite lively for an hour or so on Thursday afternoon where lots of people in carriages and on foot had assembled to hear the really fine sounds of the ‘Hawaiian Military Band.’ As was remarked by one of the Honolulu delegation in the Assembly when the appropriation for the support of the military was under discussion: ‘The band is by far the best part of the army.’”

After four years, Berger returned to Germany, had himself released from his duties in the Prussian military and then came back to Hawaii for good. He gave 32,000 concerts, composed 250 Hawaiian songs, some of which are still being sung around the world, and 1,000 other tunes. He wrote down indigenous hymns that had until then only been passed on orally. And on Sundays, taking turns with his friend, Queen Lili’uokalani, he played the organ in Kawaiaha’o Congregationalist Church. Lili’uokalani was a formidable composer in her own right. Her song, “Aloha ‘Oe” (Farewell to Thee), became world-famous. Berger had arranged it for her.

Henry Berger was by no means the only high-ranking German in Honolulu in his day. Queen Lili’uokalani’s finance minister, Hermann Adam Widemann, was German, as were her attorney-general Paul Neumann, and Maj. Henry Bertelmann, her adjutant. But she was so fond of Berger that she made him commander of the Royal Order of Kapi’olani and commanded her subjects to honor him on his birthday every year, an order their descendants are following to this day. Every year, the Royal Hawaiian Band still gives concerts in his memory.

Berger died in 1929, three decades after the former kingdom of Hawaii had been annexed by the United States. But the musical arc he has created between Europe and Hawaii is still there. In Coswig near Wittenberg where he once lived, a school of music has been named after him. And in Bordeaux, France, an American classical guitarist and composer by the name of Mark Billam-Walker, is trying to emulate him. He is the great-grandson of Henry Berger and his wife Leilehua, a New Zealander. Reached by telephone in Bordeaux, he said he was in awe of the way his ancestor composed. “He did not actually write complete scores for his compositions, but instead jotted down the notes for each musician individually. Then he handed every player his notes, raised his baton, and they all played. This is brilliant. I could not do that.”

Billam-Walker is now editing his second symphony. He says he hopes that the Royal Hawaiian Band, his great-grandfather’s old ensemble, will one day accept and play this work.

(From the September 2010 issue of The Atlantic Times)

An Audacious Hope Became Joyful Reality

Commemorating the Demise
of the Iron Curtain

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

For students entering college this autumn, the Berlin Wall might seem like distant history. But to those in mid-career, who are still young from this writer’s perspective, the hope that this monstrosity would ever come down appeared audacious. Yet it happened. Twenty years ago, Germany was reunified. The Iron Curtain disappeared. To commemorate this exhilarating event, and to keep its memory alive among the next generation, the League of Faithful Masks and Concordia University Irvine are offering a unique Celebration of Freedom.

We will celebrate this anniversary with a variety of events on the campus of Concordia. There will be a German Film Week. There will be a month-long exhibition of artifacts, documents and works of art pertaining to Germany’s division, to life in East Germany and to reunification. And there will be, on October 6, a rich conference featuring classical music and jazz, a brand-new documentary and, most importantly, the historical witness of fascinating persons who have experienced reunification from a variety of perspectives.

You will find a wealth of details about our German Days, including programs and sidebar stories, on the “front page” of a special edition of The Mask. (www.germanday.org). The point of the present article is to explain why The League of Faithful Masks is doing this. The League’s stated mission is to champion the worldview of vocation, a worldview strongly shared by Concordia University. It holds that all humans are called to serve each other altruistically. It is hard to imagine any good-neighborly service more urgently needed than providing witness to history, for as the old adage has it: no history, no future.

Five anecdotes of recent weeks might illustrate the exigency of a return to the appreciation of history and its twin, geography, to assure the survival of our civilization in this age of information, an age whose principal mark seems to be that it renders our contemporaries increasingly uninformed. For the sake of trans-Atlantic evenhandedness, I am taking my examples from four different countries.

United States: As I was preparing the German Day program, a well-meaning American acquaintance with an M.A. degree cautioned me against referring to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), arguably the most brilliant mind in German cultural history. She insisted that a direct line linked Goethe to Hitler, and that the proximity between Weimar, Goethe’s place of work for decades, and the Nazi extermination of Buchenwald was “no coincidence.”

France: At a dinner conversation, the name Martin Luther came up. Said a local politician at my table: “Martin Luther? Wasn’t that the black guy from Switzerland?” She confused Martin Luther with Martin Luther King, the U.S. civil rights leader, and with reformer John Calvin who, though born in northern France, spent the most important years of his ministry in Geneva.

England: Again at a dinner, a British friend told me of a teacher he knew who had taken a class of English grammar school (high school) students to Dover. The teacher pointed to the English Channel and asked his pupils: “What lies beyond this body of water?” Some opined: “Perhaps the United States?” Others said, “No, no, it must be Africa.” It was news to all of them that by crossing the Channel they would soon reach France on whose shores perhaps their great-grandfathers had died.

Germany: The features editor of a well-known newspaper proposed to his editor-in-chief producing a special issue commemorating the 450th anniversary of the death of Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), Luther’s most significant associate. The editor-in-chief, a man in his early thirties, rejected this idea outright. It turned out that he had no idea who Melanchthon was, the man educated Germans have venerated since the late 16th century as the “Praeceptor Germaniae” – Germany’s teacher.

USA again: In a recent journalism class, students interviewed a 15-year old girl of Vietnamese descent. “What publications do you read?” they wanted to know. She mentioned The Economist, a British weekly magazine of high quality. “Why The Economist?” they asked. “Well,” she replied, “I don’t want to be a moron like the other kids in my class who don’t even know who the current President of the United States is.

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer spent a postdoctoral year at Union Theological Seminary in New York in 1930, he was horrified by the cluelessness of the students he had to listen to in seminars. “They talk a blue streak without the slightest substantive foundation and with no evidence of any criteria,” he wrote. This clueless verbosity Bonhoeffer observed 80 years ago has now become an all-Western property, much to the detriment of the young people who are so often deprived of the basic historical guideposts for their journey through an in increasingly dangerous and inscrutable world.

The most tragic aspect of this is what has really been stolen from the younger generation: a historically grounded basis for hope. What happened in Germany in 1990 provided such a footing. Being hopeful seemed audacious for many of us. But then hope became a reality. This is why The League of Faithful Masks, Concordia University and their partners are inviting you to celebrate with us. The demise of the Iron Curtain, which looks like just a fact of distant history to some, has given all of us cause for courage.

A Warning from a Grave

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

I have arrived at a period of my biological and professional life when rummaging through my archives and library seems in order. And so I am rereading books that were of formative value for my career as a journalist, especially as a war correspondent. The following passage I found on page 113 of The Two Vietnams by my late friend, the historian and social scientist Bernard B. Fall, probably the world’s foremost expert on the French and the American debacles in Indochina. Referring to Hanoi’s brilliant Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap who developed North Vietnam’s victorious strategies against France and subsequently the United States, Fall wrote:

“Giap’s own best contribution to the art of revolutionary war was probably his estimate of the political-psychological shortcomings of a democratic system when faced with an inconclusive military operation. In a remarkable presentation before the political commissars of the (Communist) 316^th Division, Giap stated:

The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: He has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn-out war….

“In all likelihood, Giap concludes, public opinion in the democracy will demand an end to the ‘useless bloodshed,’ or its legislature will insist on knowing how long it will have to vote astronomical credits without a clear-cut victory in sight. This is what eternally compels the military leaders of democratic armies to promise a quick end to the war --- to ‘bring the boys home by Christmas’ – or forces democratic politicians to agree to almost any kind of humiliating compromise rather than to accept the idea of a semi-permanent anti-guerilla operation.”*

The Two Vietnams was first published in 1963. It lay on the bedside table of most respectable American and European reporters, diplomats and senior officers I met while working in Saigon. I have never ceased to wonder why so few of my illustrious colleagues took Bernard B. Fall’s warnings to heart. When I first met Fall, this Austrian-born Frenchman was a professor of Howard University in Washington, DC. Having fought valiantly in the French Resistance, he proceeded to record the West’s follies and blunders in dealing with Vietnamese Communism with greater penetration than any scholar whose work on this subject I am familiar with.

Fall must have added the paragraphs cited above to the original 1963 edition of his seminal work on Vietnam shortly before his last journey to that country. On Feb. 21, 1967, while accompanying a platoon of U.S. marines in Thua Thien Province in the northernmost part of South Vietnam, 40-year old Bernard B. Fall stepped on a landmine and was killed along with Gunnery Sergeant Byron B. Highland.

Thus Fall did not live to see the day when his warning and Gen. Giap’s prediction became bitter reality in America’s self-inflicted defeat in 1975 – self-inflicted precisely because many media stars and political leaders ignored Gen. Giap’s insight that the democratic system is not psychologically equipped to fight a protracted war, irrespective of how evil the foe’s designs. In The Two Vietnams pilloried the fallacious notion that Ho Chi Minh was but a righteous nationalist. To Fall, Ho was a Bolshevik. “The fact that this was not understood by naïve outsiders was certainly not his fault; his career as a Communist has been on record since 1920,” wrote Fall.

Before me lies a Newsmax column by Edward I. Koch, the former mayor of New York. He cites a statement by Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, referring to the war in Afghanistan as “unwinnable.” This echoes CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite’s description of the Vietnam War after the 1968 Têt Offensive, a statement prompting President Lyndon B. Johnson to day, “We have lost Cronkite, we have lost the Midwest.”

In his column, Mayor Koch goes on to suggest that the United States and its allies declare defeat in Afghanistan and get out. Here again, I discern echoes of the Vietnam era. Without any consideration of the disastrous geopolitical and strategic consequences a Taliban return to power in Kabul will have, Koch concludes: “We have sacrificed enough dead, wounded, and treasure in a failed cause. Enough is enough.”

Reading this and Bernard B. Fall’s warning from his grave on the very same hot summer afternoon in my home in southwestern France made my blood curdle. Surely, the Taliban and Al Qaida must have studied Gen. Giap’s analysis, which could have only led them to one conclusion: The way Western democracy has evolved since the mid-20^th century, it is driven by suicidal urges. None other than the former Mayor of New York and the RNA chairman have just confirmed this just now.

* Fall, Bernard B. The Two Vietnams. London: Pall Mall Press, 1963, 1964, 1967.

Divided by Clichés

A transatlantic tragedy: ignorance in an age of instant information

By UWE SIEMON-NETTO

As the Western world wallows in multiple crises, prejudice dominates the airwaves. Exasperated by a talk show star’s malediction on American television that it was time for the plague to afflict Europe (population: almost 500 million), our correspondent found solace in a simple Paris bar.

Phew! What a relief it was to plunk down at a small table outside a very modest Paris pub called Le Train de Vie, meaning train of life. Fourteen grueling hours in the air lay behind us. More than that, we crossed a transatlantic information gap rapidly dividing our continents.

We came from southern California where we now live pleasurably and surrounded by friends. But as lovers of the United States, we feel increasingly uneasy, more so than ever before in the more than four decades in the country. What troubles us is having to listen every day to televised invectives against our home continent, to hear slurs spoken by stars who know nothing about Europe yet opine against it venomously nonetheless.

This is what we mulled over as we comforted ourselves with fresh red wine from the Côtes du Rhône region served in half-liter carafes. Our minds wandered back to the latest apex of Europhobic hyperbole we had heard on Fox. “The problem with Europe is that there are too many Europeans,” one smart aleck quipped crudely, adding that a new plague would solve this problem. This prompted hilarity among his co-panelists but reminded us of the mindless things British bigots like to say about the French.

This was supposed to be funny. Granted I am German, and for Germans, humor is no laughing matter, according to another Anglo-Saxon inanity. But then my wife, Gillian, is an Englishwoman, and she did not get the joke either. “Imagine the international hullaballoo if a French talk show host told his audience at prime time, ‘The trouble with America is that there are too many Americans; may they be decimated by an epidemic,’” she said. We needed another carafe of wine.

At this point an inebriated Frenchman in his 60s stopped at our table. Staring distractedly above our heads, the stranger said, “I am wondering if I should have a nightcap before returning to my hotel room.” We invited him to sit down but no, he preferred to return to the bar. Bidding us farewell, he reached into a shopping bag and handed me a fistful of cherries, explaining, “They wouldn’t do me any good tonight after all the drinks I have had.” Then he staggered off.

Ah, echoes of the France of our youth! So she is not dead, thank God! Our thoughts then focused on the daily dose of venom emitted against the French by American commentators lumping all Europeans together as a moribund bunch of unreconstructed socialists. Before I continue, let me come clean: I am not a left-winger, neither is my wife.

In some respects, we are as conservative as TV hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. We affirm the sanctity of life and the institution of marriage; we prefer government to be small and defense to be strong. As Europeans, we might be forgiven for being less engrossed with the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms but surely that’s forgivable.

The ceaseless prattle on American airwaves about “European Socialism” is getting on our nerves, though. Do American radio and television commentators not know that all major EU nations have currently conservative-controlled governments? Perhaps their daily abuse is just tit-for-tat, paying Europe back for eight years of anti-American agitation in the Bush years? Probably. If so, this would be childish given the contemporary condition of the world.

We requested another carafe of Red.

It seemed strange to us that televised American bile is focused first and foremost on the French and the Germans. Until now, the British have been spared such outbursts. Still, British pundits are also given to utter “tedious snobby sneers against the United States,” to quote Alex Singleton, a leader writer of The Daily Telegraph. Then Singleton labeled President Barack Obama “an idiot… hell bent on insulting [America’s] allies.”

I have never been an Obama enthusiast but I didn’t write that; an Englishman did.

On the following evening, Gillian and I returned to Le Train de Vie. At the table next to ours a solitary man ate his dinner. He turned out to be a middle-aged French journalist equally concerned with the state of the international media. Together we lamented the fact that biased postulations are increasingly taking the place of properly researched articles, and that rank prejudice is in the process of superseding fair and balanced reporting.

We were both old enough to have learned a different kind of journalism than is often practiced now, he at a provincial newspaper in eastern France, I with the Associated Press in Frankfurt. We became journalists in an era filled with lingering memories of a fratricidal war. We thought that we had learned the principal lesson of that war: Never let stereotypical thinking govern your pen and your lips.

We were taught as young men that our opinions were irrelevant. What mattered was the need of our readers to be comprehensively informed. This required legwork on our part, and it was precisely the excitement of this legwork that had made us choose our craft in the first place. We learned foreign languages. We were trained to go to enormous lengths to trounce clichés.

In those days, all major American media outlets had posted foreign correspondents in France and Germany. These men and women were driven by the same professional ethos as we, and spoke our languages well. They knew our literature, our art, our strengths and foibles. They were wonderfully curious reporters. I am still corresponding with some of these colleagues who are now in the 80s and retired, and I know that they are just as troubled as we with the way many of today’s media foster ignorance.

It told the Frenchman about a recent acrimonious discussion with the executive editor of the new breed in the United States. He could not understand my distress over the statement by a majority of journalism students that they had chosen this career to “make this a better world.” This, I explained to the editor, was what had motivated propagandists of totalitarian systems. In free societies, journalists had the calling to research and write, just as bakers had a vocation to bake. Wanting to “make this a better world” by telling their readers what to think reflects ideological hubris.

The French reporter nodded gravely and ordered another carafe of Red.

We then lamented the evident increase of ignorance as a product of our age of instant communication. I told him about a woman with a Master of Arts degree trying to persuade me recently that a direct philosophical line led from the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Hitler, and that therefore the proximity between Weimar in Thuringia, Goethe’s place of work, and Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp, was no coincidence. She had clearly never read anything by Goethe but watched a program linking the 18th-century Enlightenment to 20th-century totalitarianism.

There exists a serious school of thought making this connection, but it is much more complex, running via the anthropocentrism of the French Revolution; the German theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Jürgen Moltmann argued that way. However, Goethe was neither an Enlightenment philosopher nor a revolutionary; he was a poet of classicism, a literary period that coincided with the French Revolution. He also told his friend Johann Peter Eckermann toward the end of his life that Christianity was the ultimate religion. Sadly, such details count little at an age of instant information dispersing ignorance in the form of packaged formulae.

My drinking partner and I found some comfort in the discovery that at least some of our readers were wiser than we. In the recent Franco-German tiff over bailing out bankrupt Greece, the Berlin correspondent of the Paris daily Libération charged German Chancellor Angela Merkel with scheming to forge a “Holy Germanic Euro Empire.” Going through the readers’ blogs of the Parisian press, though, we discovered the emergence of a different consensus: If France had followed the German example of frugality and industry since the rise of the new and reconciled Europe following World War II, we might all be better off. That’s what French readers are writing.

We left Le Train de Vie telling ourselves that the wall of clichés dividing nations and continents must not necessarily be permanent. If it has stopped separating France and Germany there is still hope, we thought, that the age of the instant media might also bear transatlantic fruit. The force that renders readers and listeners uninformed is the same that can make them wise. No, we do not need a plague to exterminate us. What we need is a wiser use of the gift of instant information.

from The Atlantic Times, July/August 2010 edition

Witness to History at Concordia Irvine

Witness to History

Twenty years ago this October, a momentous development in Europe stirred the world. Germany and the entire Continent were peacefully reunified after four decades of bitter division. The League of Faithful Masks (LFM) and Concordia University Irvine (CUI) will commemorate this anniversary with three inter-related presentations on CUI’s campus, bearing witness to history, culture and current affairs:

1. German Day at Concordia – A Celebration of Freedom on October 6. The public will experience a fascinating array of historical witnesses. They will discuss political, economic, military, artistic, religious, journalistic and personal aspects of Germany’s reunification. A brand-new documentary film will be shown; there will be superb music and a forum discussion between the presenters and the audience. Our partners in this venture include the German Consulate-General in Los Angeles, and the Wende Museum of Culver City, which specializes in the art and artifacts of the Cold War.

2. Images of Oppression and Liberation: a German Film Week on October 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7, offered by the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles. Five feature films relating to the Christian resistance against the Nazi regime, to life in East Germany and reunification will be shown.

3. Traces of Division -- Signs of Unity, a rich exhibition of East German and Reunification memorabilia from October 2-31 presented by the Wende Museum on the CUI campus.

For further information, please check lFM’s website www.faithfulmasks.org or the blogsite www.uwesiemon.blogspot.com in regular intervals.