Europaische burgerkrieg anyone?

Things are very different in Europe. Few people in the UK realise that the Germans and Italians have entirely revised European history to make it seem as if the wars of the first half of the twentieth century were just a natural hiccough on the path to full European Union.

The new European interpretation is called "Europaische burgerkrieg" - stick these words in Google then look at the translated texts. Europaische burgerkrieg means "The European Civil War".

It might appear that this revisionism is just a peripheral issue but consider the article in The Independent by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto: There's magic in a crisis – and good reasons for hope amid the gloom:

"All emerged from internecine wars – in Spain's and Britain's cases from dynastic conflicts, and in that of the US from the "Revolutionary War", the power struggle among colonial elites. The European Union, similarly, emerged from a period of furious internal conflict that German historians call the Europäische Bürgerkrieg – literally, the European civil war, which ended in 1945 and directly inspired our drive for unification."(Independent 12/11/11)

Our newspapers and media are either parochial or looking out beyond Europe, perhaps it is time that they examined what is happening on our own doorstep. These revisionists have in mind a shared culture within Europe that is under tension. They daintily sidestep the origin of this culture.

I can't imagine what historical entity the stable parts of the Eurozone might represent, that these European Civil War revisionists think is being reborn. Can you? The Welsh want back a country from 700 years ago and the Scots want one back from 1700 AD but surely 1600 AD is too long ago...

Click on map to enlarge it

Spain and Britain arise separately from "Europe" so what is this Europe that is to be reborn?

Here are some links for your delectation:

Wikipedia: the European Civil War
European Civil War as a Fundamental Crisis
Inkultura Online - review of Nolte
The European Civil War

Needless to say these revisionist texts do not mention the heroic efforts by the British to preserve democracy when the whole world turned against it. The Germans don't even notice that it was ideologues who started WWII and nation states that stopped them. The British are rather seen as a fading power that acted to prevent the inevitable for a few years.

The Habsburg Empire, European Union in 1700

Use TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/ldmwo6w to link to this article.

See also:

France, the third axis power

Laying up treasure from overseas

Comments

The Falklands have always been Argentine - Las Malvinas son Argentinas

"The Falklands have always been Argentine" is taught to every Argentine child as a matter of faith. What was Argentina during the time when it "always" possessed Las Malvinas? In this article I will trace the history of Argentina in the context of its physical and political relationship with "Las Malvinas", the Falkland Islands. The Argentine claim to the Falkland Islands dates from a brief episode in 1831-32 so it is like Canada claiming the USA despite two centuries of separate development. This might sound like ancient history but Argentina has gone to war for this ancient claim so the following article is well worth reading. For a summary of the legal case see: Las Malvinas: The Legal Case Argentina traces its origins to Spanish South America when it was part of the Viceroyalty of the Rio del Plata. The Falklands lay off the Viceroyalty of Peru, controlled by the Captain General of Chile. In 1810 the Falklands were far from the geographical b...

Practical Idealism by Richard Nicolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi

Coudenhove-Kalergi was a pioneer of European integration. He was the founder and President for 49 years of the Paneuropean Union. His parents were Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and Mitsuko Aoyama, the daughter of an oil merchant, antiques-dealer, and huge landowner family in Tokyo. His "Pan-Europa" was published in 1923 and contained a membership form for the Pan-Europa movement. Coudenhove-Kalergi's movement held its first Congress in Vienna in 1926. In 1927 the French Prime Minister, Aristide Briand was elected honorary president. Personalities attending included: Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud. Figures who later became central to founding the EU, such as Konrad Adenauer became members . His basic idea was that democracy was a transitional stage that leads to rule by a new aristocracy that is largely taken from the Jewish "master race" (Kalergi's terminology). His movement was reviled by Hitler and H...

The Roots of New Labour

This article was written in 2009 but is still useful to understand the motivation behind New Labour - from the global financial crisis through the over-regulated, surveillance society to the break up of the UK into nationalities. The past lives of Labour Ministers have long been sanitised and many biographies that include their shady communist and Marxist pasts are inaccessible or removed from the net. The truth about these guys is similar to discovering that leading Tories were members of the Nazi Party. If you are a British voter and do not think that this is important then I despair for British politics. Had these people taken jobs in industry their past might be forgotten and forgiven but they continued in left wing politics and even today boast of being "Stalinist" or International Socialist (or in Blair's case, Trotskyist ). Peter Mandelson (first Secretary of State and Labour Supremo): "Mr Mandelson was born into a Labour family - his grandfather wa...

Political Thoughts - the magazine

Search This Blog