Dialog International

Will Germany Ban Scientology?

I have to confess that I'm baffled by the German government's obsession with the Scientology cult. Scientology has been in the crosshairs of German law enforcement officials for years, but know they are debating an outright ban:

"Germany paved the way yesterday for a ban on the Church of Scientology, with federal and regional ministers declaring that the US-based organisation contravened the constitution and posed a danger to democratic order. In a sharp escalation of a decade-long row, German officials asked the domestic intelligence agency to gather evidence that could be used in support of a legal move to secure a ban. "Scientology works on the basis of massive repression, like a totalitarian organisation which wants to break the will of the people, which is precisely why we have to fight it," Ralf Stegner, interior minister of Schleswig-Holstein, said after yesterday's meeting.

The German authorities are mistaken in their belief that Scientology is a "totalitarian commercial sect that seeks to crush individuality." The cult is actually a clever ponzi scheme for intellectually-challenged  Hollywood celebrities. If other non-celebrities want to give their money to Scientology rather than to Disney or Wal-Mart (two actual totalitarian commercial sects) who cares?  By banning Scientology - just as by banning the neo-Nazi NPD - the German government is only lending the organization a level of recognition and legitimacy it doesn't deserve. Besides, there are more serious things in Germany to worry about:

Mittweida, Germany - Police dispersed an unauthorized rally Saturday by 150 to 200 neo-Nazis in Mittweida, an eastern German town where authorities this year outlawed a neo-Nazi organization. Police said the rightists waved flags and chanted in the centre of town before being chased away by the police.

A local broadcaster, MDR, said the clash delayed the start of a gathering of people wearing the ancient folk costumes and playing the folk music of the Ore Mountains of Saxony.

"The Government It Deserves"

Just when you think things cannot get much worse.

Yesterday Americans woke up to this excellent piece of investigative reporting by the New York Times: CIA Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations.  The tapes purportedly showed American interrogators engaged in the waterboarding of two detainees - a practice which is illegal under the Geneva Conventions and international law. Apparently the White House was aware of the existence of these tapes, although President Bush has "no recollection" of their existence?  Who ordered their destruction?  Kevin Drum over at the Washington Monthly discusses the content of the destroyed videos:

So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and law enforcement personnel.

This comes at the end of a week where Americans learned:

1. President Bush has been speaking publicly about "World War III" and a "Nuclear Holocaust" instigated by Iran after he had been informed by his own intelligence agencies that Iran had in fact shut down the nuclear weapons program back in 2003. In other words, he was trying to lie the nation into another war based on a non-existent threat, just as he had (successfully) in 2002-2003. 
2. The American government wants to hold detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp indefinitely outside of all known laws.  We now know that many of these "terrorists" were in fact sold for bounty to the US military in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the "evidence" against them is at best circumstantial.  One detainee, having waited fruitlessly in Guantanamo for six years without any charges filed against him, slit his throat with his own finger nail.

Earlier this week I happened to be rereading the the leaflets of the White Rose group and a couple of sentences from the First Leaflet jumped out at me.  The words are attributed to Hans Scholl (pictured above):

"Nichts ist eines Kulturvolkes unwürdiger, als sich ohne Widerstand von einer verantwortungslosen und dunklen Trieben ergebenen Herrscherclique «regieren» zu lassen....Vergeßt nicht, daß ein jedes Volk diejenige Regierung verdient, die es erträgt!"

(Nothing is so unworthy of a civilized nation as allowing itself to be governed without opposition by an irresponsible clique that has yielded to base instinct...Do not forget that every people deserves the government it is willing to endure!)

Why did these words resonate so powerfully with me?  You can read all of the Leaflets of the White Rose in both German and English here.

European Fallout from NIE Report On Iran

Less than one month ago President Bush warned that a nuclear weapons program in Iran could well lead to "World War III".  Now the 16 US intelligence agencies have reported that Iran ceased its weapons program more than four years ago.  There is ample evidence that the president was aware of this changed assessment as he was ratcheting up his bellicose rhetoric.  The New York Times puts it rather succinctly in its lead editorial this morning:

"After Iraq and Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, it is hard to imagine that this administration could do any more damage to this country’s credibility. Then it does."

One of the results of this new blow to the credibility of the Bush administration is that its rationale for building missile defense sites in the Czech Republic and Poland is now pretty much undermined.  These stations were ostensibly needed to ward off a threat from Iranian nukes.  Now Malte Lehming asks in Der Tagesspiegel:

Und das US-Raketenabwehrsystem, das in Polen und Tschechien stationiert werden soll, aber die Nato entzweit und Russland erbost? Über dessen Zukunft wird wohl bald neu gestritten. (And what of the missile defense system that is supposted to be stationed in Poland and the Czech Republic, but which has divided Nato and angered Russia? There will be renewed argument about the future of these plans.)

Like many of us, Karl Grobe in the Frankfurter Rundschau is asking the question: what did the president know and when did he know it?

If they did know, then Bush's bellicose talk in October about the danger of a third world war was at the very least reckless. This would mean the plans to install missile defence bases in Poland and the Czech Republic as quickly as possible were ideologically motivated rather than rationally justifiable - whereby the ideological cocktail had two ingredients besides the professed explanation: the intention of showing the Russians who's boss once and for all, and the desire to split Europe up into the evil old states and the good new ones. Perhaps the references to Teheran were a means to this end. Regardless of whether it was the result of ignorance - which boils down to recklessness - or superior knowledge, the Bush Administration owes some explanations to its European allies - but not along the lines of those given by Bush on Tuesday that his administration is always right.

Bush does "owe some explanations" to Europe, but first he must explain his incomprehensible actions to the American people.

Onward, Christian Soldiers

On the German evangelical Web site idea.de we learn that more Americans now believe in the Devil than in Charles Darwin's theory of evolution:

"Der Teufel trifft in den USA auf größeren Glauben als der „Vater“ der Evolutionstheorie, Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Rund 62 Prozent der Erwachsenen glauben an Satan und die Hölle, aber nur 42 Prozent an die Evolution."

In now appears that American evangelical Christians have found their candidate for president: former Governor Mike Huckabee. Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister,  acknowledged before a national television audience that he doesn't believe in evolution. Last month the European Council condemned the teaching of creationism as a threat to human rights. But in America, creationism and its companion theory - intelligent design - are gaining ground, fueling Huckabee's insurgent candidacy. This week, the director of science curriculum for the State of Texas was forced to resign because she advocated the teaching of evolution over "intelligent design".  Texas has one of the largest public education systems in the US.

“Faith doesn’t just influence me. It defines me.” says Huckabee in his most recent campaign TV ad, as the words "Christian Leader" flash on the screen.  There is no acknowledgement that America is a land of many faiths, based on the constitutional separation of church and state.  Indeed, there was a telling moment in the Republican "YouTube Debate" last week when one of the questioners held up a Bible and asked: Do you believe every word of the Holy Bible"? (watch both the question and the responses here.) Not one of the candidates responded that as president it is his job to uphold the constitution - not the Bible. So a literal belief in the Bible has become a litmus test for the Republican presidential candidates.  Paradoxically, the other litmus test is a strong belief in the efficacy of torture as an interrogation technique. Funny, but I cannot find in my Bible the verse where Jesus tells the Disciples: Blessed are the torturers, for they shall inflict righteous pain on the evildoers.

Reading List 2008

According to a recent study by the National Endowment for the Arts, Americans have pretty much stopped reading books. Well, there are still a few of us book lovers left, and, thankfully, there are plenty of terrific books to read.  The Boston Globe has published its annual reading list, so it is also time for me to put together my list for the year.  Looking back at last year's list I note that I did not get to Herman Broch's masterpiece, Tod des Vergil, so that goes back on the list for this year. I did have a productive reading year, however, even without Broch: I read Wolfgang Koeppen's post-war trilogy, which was the best fiction have read in years. Last January I had the chance to meet the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford, who live just up the Maine Coast from me, and that led me to his most recent novel, The Lay of the Land - a rich work of fiction (even though his novel The Sportswriter is still my personal favorite).  In terms of non-fiction, Amos Elon's history of the Jews in Germany, The Pity of It All, was a high point for me.

So here is my list for 2008:

1) Walter Kempowski: Deutsche Chronik. I recently finished Tadellöser & Wolff which means I have only seven more novels to go. At Hella's suggestion, I have also started Letzte Grüße an autobiographical novel about the writer's (mis)adventures in America.

2) Orlando Figes: The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. As an admirer of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago and a fan of Anne Applebaum's history Gulag, I am interested in how the terror of the period became internalized by ordinary citizens. Evidently Stalin remains - after Putin - the most popular figure in Russia today.

3) Donna Cassidy: Marsden Hartley: Race, Religion, and Nation. Marsden Hartley was a modernist painter and writer, who worked and lived in Maine for much of his life.  He also had a complex relationship to Germany, absorbing both the avant garde of Expressionism as well as later völkisch impulses.

4) Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives The last major work of this brilliant but enigmatic Chilean writer.

As always, any recommendations welcome in the comments.

Spe salvi (In Hope We Are Saved)

Pope Benedict XVI released his second Enclyclical yesterday just in time for Advent, the season of hope and expectation. It is a worthy successor to Deus caritas est. The title is a quotation from the 8th chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans: Spe salvi facti sumus-- "For in this hope we were saved." The 76-page document, presented in 8 chapters, is a historical analysis of the Christian meaning of hope and the rise of secularist ideology. I have only read the english version once, but I will have to read it several times - as well as read the original German. The Encylical covers an enormous terrain of modern thought and historical teachings of the church.

Like in the first Encyclical, Benedict reveals his mastery of theology and modern philosophy by returning to Augustine, Bacon, Kant and Marx. But there are some delightful surprises as well: Benedict has studied the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and cites approvingly the Negative Dialectics of Theodor Adorno as well as the work of Max Horkheimer.  Spes salvi reaches its crescendo, however, with quotations from a letter from Hell about suffering in a concentration camp written by the Vietnamese martyr Paul Le-Bao-Tinh († 1857) before moving on to meditation on the true meaning of Grace illustrated by Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov!

Spes salvi is being hailed in the media as an attack on atheism.  And it is true that Benedict returns to his favorite theme of the interplay between reason and faith throughout modern history. He does not specifically cite Adorno and Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment - which examines the destructive path of reason from the French Revolution to Auschwitz - but he lays the blame for most of the horrors of the 20th century at the the feet of secularist ideology.

What stood out for me at my first reading was Benedict's criticism of the notion of personal salvation, which core of American evangelical thinking, and which is preached each Sunday in the thousands of megachurches:

"How could the idea have developed that Jesus' message is narrowly individualistic and aimed only at each person singly? How did we arrive at this interpretation of the 'salvation of the soul' as a flight from responsibility for the whole, and how did we come to conceive the Christian project as a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving others?"

American evangelicalism is established around the question: What can God do for me? Evangelicals are told to establish a "personal relationship" with Christ the Savior, abandoning the the greater "news" of the Gospel. Benedict reminds us that early Christian prayer grew out of communal suffering:

"Being in communion with Jesus Christ draws us into his “being for all”; it makes it our own way of being. He commits us to live for others, but only through communion with him does it become possible truly to be there for others, for the whole."

Anyway, it is doubtful that many American evangelical Christians will bother to read Spes salvi, but they are missing Benedict's tantalizing glimpse of eternity.  Can the 81-year old pontiff be thinking about his own death?

"To imagine ourselves outside the temporality that imprisons us and in some way to sense that eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality—this we can only attempt. It would be like plunging into the ocean of infinite love, a moment in which time—the before and after—no longer exists. We can only attempt to grasp the idea that such a moment is life in the full sense, a plunging ever anew into the vastness of being, in which we are simply overwhelmed with joy."

There is something for everybody in Spes salvi - even mystics.  I would like to compare Benedict's understanding of Christian hope with Juergen Moltmann's eschotology.