THE FATE OF EGOMANIACS

We have by now been treated to many different manifestations of Barack Obama's egomania. There were the faux Greek columns and similar displays, there are claims such as "we are the ones we've been waiting for," there are grandiose world tours on which meaningless high-flying phrases are spouted and blood-stained hands eagerly shook. There is the apparently unshakeable conviction that certain extremely special individuals (namely He Himself) can talk reason to dictators and dominate them, there is the unquenchable hunger to take over, take over, and take over some more. And foolish people are already naming buildings and geographic landmarks for Obama, with nary a peep from the "House of Noncolor" that, perhaps, this is somewhat inappropriate with the honoree still alive and kicking. Soon, someone will start building a large statue, I am sure.

Speaking of statues of egomaniacs, here is a couple of images of a particularly cool one. I remember walking in the adjoining park in the late 1950s, staring upward at those huger-than-life Soviets, my prepubescent mind filled with wonderment.




















This monstrosity, 30 meters high with its 15-meter pedestal and 22 meters long, was unveiled in Prague, Czechoslovakia at a point overlooking the Vltava River on May Day, 1955. It consumed millions of skilled man-hours and 17 million tons of the best-quality stone. It could be seen from just about anywhere, which was the idea. The gratitude the Czechoslovak citizens were to show to Stalin for his genius and his beneficent leadership must be unbounded.

Until 1961, when the Czechoslovak Party was ordered to take the damn thing down due to de-Stalinization. Given that bureaucrats tend to follow excess with still more excess, the statue was surrounded by the secret police (no pictures, please!) and rapidly demolished. Rumor has it that the Party had ordered for the rubble reduced to such small size that no one could tell it had come from the statue, but that I cannot substantiate.

In any case, this is just a reminder that power and glory are fleeting and, despite relentless intrusion into the lives and minds of citizens and a hunger to control their thoughts, the truth can never be expunged and monuments (and those they represent) get pulled down.

I submit that there is no memory hole large enough to accommodate what Obama has already wrought, and anyone thinking of building monuments to him should bear that in mind.

EAST GERMAN SECRET POLICE BIRTHED THE BAADER-MEINHOF GANG

Two German historians accidentally found out that Stasi, the notorious East German version of the KGB and the Gestapo, kick-started massive student protests in West Germany, ultimately midwifing the birth of the Red Army Fraction, a.k.a. the Baader-Meinhof gang.

In a May 21, 2009 interview with the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, Helmut Müller-Enbergs said that he and his colleague Cornelia Jabs “nearly fell off their chairs” when they made the discovery.

Here is what happened.

In June 1967, the Shah of Iran is on a state visit to West Germany. He is to attend a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute at the Deutsche Oper in West Berlin. On June 2, 1967, student activists are out in force, protesting the Shah’s visit. During the protests, a West German policeman by the name of Karl-Heinz Kurras “happens” to shoot a 26 year-old newlywed and first-time protester, Benno Ohnesorg, in the back of the head. Ohnesorg dies, leaving behind a pregnant widow. There is outrage. Kurras is suspended and the incident investigated. The verdict is accidental killing and Kurras is released. More outrage. On that very night, members of the West German SDS (Socialist German Student Organization) assemble on the West Berlin Kurfürstendamm square and call for armed resistance against the state. “Violence s the only answer to violence,” froths a young woman named Gudrun Ensslin.

Per the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the very next day, signs reading The Police – Your Enemy and Murderer, appear throughout Frankfurt. Thousands of students spill into the streets.

Three years later, Gudrun Ensslin and a few like-minded friends found the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction), a.k.a. the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and the rest is, well, history.

Except that…

• Karl-Heinz Kurras had been a member of Stasi since 1955. He even joined the East German Communist Party, the SED, in 1964.
• Stasi, like the KGB and the Gestapo, was vitally interested in creating discord in “enemy” countries to weaken them and their systems of alliances.
• Stasi, like the KGB and the Gestapo, had routinely used “wet affairs” (murder) to accomplish their ends.
• Stasi, like the KGB and the Gestapo, was a fertile breeding ground for terrorist organizations and “protest” movements that were willing to advance the interests of their ideologies.

The documentation that Müller-Enbergs and Jabs studied to date do not prove that Karl-Heinz Kurras had killed Ohnesorg on the order of Stasi, or even that he himself was the murderer. All the documents say is that he had carried out the order, but the order is not specified.

The 82 year-old Kurras, still very much alive in Berlin and enjoying the ample fruits of the German welfare state, is predictably silent on the matter. But he may not enjoy the rest of his retirement much, since the German Organization of the Victims of Stalinism (VOS) has filed a complaint against Kurras. The VOS seeks a new trial, this time for murder, for which there is no statute of limitations under German law.

Which brings me to the question of foreign control of “protest” movements elsewhere in the world, like the amply documented (North) Vietnamese ownership of the U.S. Vietnam-era “antiwar” movement. Ditto for whoever it is who really owns and operates today’s “antiwar” and anti-Jewish movements in the U.S.

But that’s another story that’s yet to be written, and hopefully very soon.