Ungrateful Germans

Germany has supplanted France as the favorite whipping-boy of the neoconservative National Review. Latest target of Victor David Hanson is Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass, for his essay that appeared recently in the New York Times.  Evidently Grass did not express enough gratitude to the United States for Hanson’s liking:

Lost also is any sense of small gratitude. A West German intellectual
like Grass does not inform us that he was always free to migrate to
East Germany to live in socialist splendor rather than remain unhappy
in capitalist “subservience” in an American-protected West Germany — or
that some readers of the New York Times
who opposed Hitler might not enjoy lectures about their moral failings
from someone who once fought for him. Such revisionists never ask
whether they could have written so freely in the Third Reich, Tojo’s
Japan, Mussolini’s Italy, Soviet Russia, Communist Eastern Europe — or
today in such egalitarian utopias as China, Cuba, or Venezuela.

This is common among the "my country right or wrong" crowd:  criticism is unwelcome, and critics are invited to "love it or leave it."  Actually, Grass’s essay is not so much an attack on the US as it is a self-criticism of Germany for selling out the democracy it had gained after the war.  But what irks Hanson and the other neocons at the National Review is that Grass and most of his compatriots refused to support the US invasion of Iraq. This is an unforgivable sin to this crowd and they will continue with their anti-German and anti-Europe attacks for as long as they can.  It would never occur to them that it is precisely because Grass admires democratic American values that he condemns the policies of the neocons that are currently in power.  Finally, it is a gross distortion to say that Grass "fought for Hitler", just as it is wrong to accuse Joseph Ratzinger of being a Nazi because he was in the Hitlerjugend.  Both were teenagers at the time and can be excused for anything they were forced to do in the waning days of the war.

Last week I praised Hanson’s colleague at the National Review, David Frum, but this week he reverts to his true form and insults another Nobel Prize winner, Willy Brandt.

It’s unfortunately true that Germany is burdened now with the most irresponsible and provocative chancellor since Willy Brandt.

WIlly Brandt was the most charismatic leader Germany has had in the postwar era. He was not a chickenhawk like the National Review crowd;  he acted against the rise of National Socialism.  Frum and Hanson would never admit it, but Brandt did more to end the cold war than their god Ronald Reagan.  Brandt paved the wave for Gobachev; Brandt’s spontaneous kneeling at the Warsaw war memorial in 1970 forever rehabilitated the image of Germany in the world.  Willy Brandt was something the writers at the National Review could never recognize: a great democrat.