Friday - July 25, 2008

Barack Obama makes a lot of Germans happy.  Report from the fatherland

I guess you’ve seen the news on TV or read it in paper back home.  But maybe not exactly this version or opinion.
Things really are getting scary. Maybe that should read, scarier?

From early afternoon it became evident that a religious event was taking place in Berlin. Pilgrims streamed into the Tiergarten, determined to see and hear the man they have come to believe in as their saviour.

By Andrew Gimson in Berlin
Last Updated: 3:33AM BST 25 Jul 2008

The saviour himself was nowhere to be seen: Senator Barack Obama was said to be inside the Hotel Adlon, next to the Brandenburg Gate and just round the corner from the British Embassy, and a crowd duly formed outside in the hope of catching a glimpse of him.

Not every member of this crowd was gripped by religious fervour: quite a number of the people there were tourists who had arrived purely by chance, but who realised without being told that a star must be inside the Adlon.

But the true believers, of whom there are many, actually volunteer that they are gripped by “euphoria”. Being modern Germans, they express this emotion in quite an undercooled way, but also with great seriousness. Nicolas Geiger, a politics student who had travelled with seven friends from Magdeburg to hear Mr Obama, said: “I don’t know a single person who’s against Obama in my age group. He’s young, fresh, completely different. He’s just such an impressive person, especially compared to the war criminal Bush.”

Mr Obama’s devotees streamed on foot and by bicycle towards the Victory Column, which commemorates the Prussian defeat of the French in 1870 and was moved to its present position by the Nazis, who also made it taller.

As the rays of the setting sun glinted on the golden statue of victory, Mr Obama strode out from the pillar along the raised platform leading to his podium.

It soon became clear that he and his assistants had prepared a masterly text: Berlin, and especially the fortitude of Berliners during the airlift which saved the city after the Communists blockaded it in 1948, became an example to the whole world.

Here was a moral seriousness very much to the German taste. With perfect intonation, for on his lips it sounds better than it reads, Mr Obama described how “all free people - everywhere - became citizens of Berlin”, and reminded us that “retreat would have allowed communism to march across Europe”. What an astute message, calculated to appeal as much to ferocious cold war warriors as to liberal pacifists.

For all the morality, it was hard to detect a single moment when Mr Obama exposed himself to the charge of being a wet and weedy liberal.

The fall of the Berlin Wall became a second metaphor, as Mr Obama spoke of “the walls between Christians and Muslims and Jews” and declared that “these are the walls we must tear down.” He made himself the rhetorical heir of Ronald Reagan.

Mr Obama touched too on the environment, and here the language of salvation became explicit: “This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet.” The time had come for others to “act with the same seriousness as has your nation” when it comes to environmental measures.

The audience loved it: the great orator had not disappointed the high expectations placed in him and German euphoria was no longer undercooled.

To put all this into perspective, we turned to a German intellectual who got his political education in the Left-wing student movement of the Sixties. “The Germans want to get a leader and they are not allowed to get a leader, but a black leader might be allowed. They are in a deep identity crisis and want to be absolved from all their sins. They want to be able to say, ‘Yesterday I met God and he told me the German people are wonderful people’.”

Mr Obama has made a lot of Germans very happy, while making it very difficult for the Republicans in America to denounce what he said.

http://tinyurl.com/6esqgg

Posted by peiper     on 07/25/2008 at 02:57 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats • Euro-Peons • Politics •  
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