All over bar the wheedling etc

Well the General election's come & gone..

We've voted to keep MMP (tho what the pollies will do to it is up for grabs)..

Key's Nats (60 seats) have only just got a House majority when combined with Act (1 - pseudo-Nat John Banks) & United Future (Peter Dunne).  So when do we see 'asset sales', to whom, & how much, & who's first on the block?

However, John Key won't have a soft ride!  Winston's back in the House, with six other mates (who, hopefully, can learn to make themselves useful) & a mandate to harass the government.  That's why i voted NZ1st & i make no apology for it either.  

I knew the Government would be National-led - the polls were all borne out - so i voted for an Opposition, an effective opposition!  And that means Winston, whether you like him or hate him!  Because he's the one person who won't hesitate to charge the government head-on, & we're going to need plenty of that in the next few years.

As for the bogus charge that 'they're all unelected MPs who got 'in' via the list' - who do they think put that list in the House?  Scotch mist?  E.T?  They got there because ~7% of the voting public voted for them, that's how!  It's a block vote with the whole country as its electorate - & because it's proportional, it's a fair representation of the views of a significant fraction of the voting public.

WTF is so hard about that?  The trouble with the 'anti-minority' brigade is that they want to go back to the old, unrepresentative, 'rubber-stamp' Parliaments of old, when people really were voting for the government (of someone's choice, nearly always a minority).  The sight of a properly functioning, fairly elected Parliament is both unfamiliar & unwelcome to these throw-backs.  The idea that the Government can't just do as it pleases, but must do (or not do) as Parliament wishes, is something many of my generation & almost all of my parents' generation never ever saw from one election to the next.

Things have changed for the better with the advent of MMP.

OK OK so I'm no historian, but..

..i do wonder about S H Steinberg's dismissal of the term Thirty Years War as being a misnomer since this period was actually a succession of wars in a European rather than a purely German context, & lasted 50 years not 30, namely 1609-1659.  Well, the historians can argue if they like, but even though the conflict between the two Great Powers of the day, the Hapsburg dynasty's empire & Bourbon France & her allies, didn't cease with a sudden jolt with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, it seems that it was that treaty that sealed the fate of the so-called Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (which Voltaire snidely remarked was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire) by dismembering the dying 'body' into 230-something more or less sovereign states of varying sizes which were nonetheless German in language & culture

And i've found at least one reference to a Second Thirty Years War here, which seems a fairly broad outline of the period 1914-1945.  I can't help wondering about the origin of the term referring to the European conflicts of 1618-1648, since the 1914-1945 hostilities (both 'official' & 'unofficial') were preceded by the Moroccan Crises (1905,1911) & the First & Second Balkan Wars. 

Maybe it's just the period in which i grew up that sparked my enduring interest in Germany between the two World Wars.  Even when i was a kid at primary school, we knew the dates not only of the 'recent' World War, 1939-1945, but also its predecessor, 1914-1918.  And the battle that we were told about was not the drawn-out grimness of Gallipoli, but the slaughter of the First Battle of Passchendaele where New Zealand soldiers suffered their worst ever defeat.  I wondered why New Zealand had gone to war against Germany twice within 30-odd years, & also if there might be another monstrous war 25-30 years after my father's war, & if so what would happen then.  This almost did not bear thinking about, because we were now in the age of the Nuclear Bomb, which turned the whole strategy of war in the air upside down.  From being vulnerable to repeated levels of unacceptable losses, typically 5% or more, bomber forces had now graduated to being able to sustain a 95% loss rate & still  succeed in annihilating their targets.  The books that considered possible nuclear war & its after-effects were the likes of Neville Shute's "On The Beach", Walter M Miller Jr's "A Canticle for Leibowitz" & Michael Swanwick's "In The Drift".  Scary, too, was the phrase "Thinking the Unthinkable", referring to a cold-eyed view of a possibly 'winnable' nuclear war by Herman Kahn of the RAND Corporation.  Nonetheless, it's a phrase i approve of!!  Someone has to look the future, however bleak, squarely in the eye, but if you mention certain topics to some people, they spit the dummy & abuse you for even raising the subject.  Science & science-fiction (the real kind) writer Arthur C Clarke accused such people of suffering from failure of nerve and/or failure of imagination..


It's late now, as in stupid-o'clock on Sunday morning, & my brain seems to have stopped fizzing - i might even be able to get some sleep!  Failing that, i'll just keep reading British historian Dame C V Wedgwood's immensely readable "The Thirty Years War", the 'first' one that is..  And as she points out, the unfinished business of a fragmented Germany reverberated down to "the explosive forces of liberal nationalism in the nineteenth century and illiberal nationalism in the twentieth".

I knew I should've gone straight home..

..but i really wanted a nice relaxing sit-down, read something interesting, & then go home.  The trouble is, my brain is now bouncing around inside my skull coz it's full of caffeine & sugar!

'The Governors' Cona coffee is cheap & good, so i sat there drinking & reading until i started get talkative inside my head & had to go home before i started boring some hapless listener with whatever my current interest happened to be - in this case European history, & in particular the Thirty Years' War (ca.1618-1648).

Why have i labeled this 'Life'?  'History' makes sense, but 'Life'?

Well, yes, actually.  What happened in Germany in that period of European history had repercussions right down to the 20th century, to 2 enormously destructive World Wars, the second of which was more or less the result of the unconscionable blunders made by the victors (?) in the first.  I read of one historian who described those two wars as the Thirty-one Years War - as i recall (?) he was German & therefore directly affected by the aftermath of the Great War, as the first of them is often called.  Whether he actually lived through the precarious existence of the ill-fated Weimar Republic i don't actually know (if i could recall his name i could look him up using what 'New Scientist' magazine calls the Famous Web Search Engine, or FWSE - we all know what that is but for some reason they aren't allowed to say the name in print, not sure why!).  Nonetheless, the aftermath of WW1 was a disaster for Germany, & subsequently for the rest of the world.  As W H Auden put it:
"I and the public know
  What every schoolboy learns
  That those to whom evil is done
  Do evil in return"
And, sad to say, in Germany's case, this was true.  She was made to shoulder the sole blame for a war that was the result of an unstable European concoction of alliances, treaties (some kept from the public eye), nationalistic aspirations, colonial land-grabbing, & an arms race that was epitomized by the British political slogan "We want eight, & we won't wait!" - a reference to the advent of the Dreadnought class of heavy fighting ships that rendered their predecessors militarily obsolete because of their major reliance on very large (15-inch, i think) heavy naval guns which could out-shoot any of their smaller adversaries' weaponry.  Not only was the war guilt unfairly assigned, but the war reparations broke Germany financially - never mind the vehement criticism of the opinions of an economist who was involved in the post-war 'negotiations' at a very high level & predicted trouble ahead in his report entitled "The Economic Consequences Of The Peace" - John Maynard Keynes was not popular with certain jingoistic elements of the 'victorious' nations.  A certain Adolf Hitler had no trouble convincing a defeated & demoralized Germany that her army had been 'stabbed in the back' by the Allies, & while this had little currency in 1923 when Herr Hitler & his fellow Nazis were jailed for attempting a coup d'etat that failed, the Great Depression & the misery that followed `the Crash of 1929 had the German public grasping at the straws of restoration of German national pride &, in particular, Hitler's own take on German unity.

The result was, almost inevitably, the Second World War, from which my own father returned with what is now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - even as a small child i recall seeing him with the 'shakes' but the culture of the day did not see him as an injured war veteran - he had trouble seeing himself that way!  Only years later, with the help of his more assertive RSA comrades did he finally obtain the War Pension i feel should have been his from the day he was demobilized.  That's life, huh??


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