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| Europe |
| Der Speigel: How the German Intelligencia Perceives Bush and the US. |
| 2003-02-13 |
| Sorry kids, were going to have to deal with my high school german translation of der speigel, but its pretty interesting none-the-less. Why Bush must lead this war Weakend by failure complexes, of the fundamentalist God illusion: George Bush is preceived by the Psychocologist and theologian Eugen Drewermann to desire to lead a "better" war than its father. In the interview Der Speigel uses one of the most debated church critics to look into the psyche of the US president. Der Speigel: Mr. Drewermann, US-President George W. Bush often uses often religious images: He speaks of the "axis of evil", In German - this comes out as 'axle of the bad one', I dont think it carries the rhetorical wieght over there that it does here...of the "crusade" against the terror. After the crash of the space shuttle "Columbia" he quoted the Prophet Isiah, he frequently closes he speeches with the formula: "God protects America". Is Bush a convincing Christian? Drewermann: It the kind of rhetoric that betrays its effort to convince the public with religious conceptions of the kind of the exercise of power in particular of the monumental possibilities of a crusade against the bad. Der Speigel: What are the consequences of organizing mankind into properties of good and bad? Drewermann: Such a bipolar viewpoint of history is ideologically extraordinarily dangerous and psychologically almost blind. One avails oneself of the myths of Persian dualism for the reason of an absolute morality. Der Speigel: Do you want to equate Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush? Drewermann: Those who fight like Bush against the terrorism, gives strength to terrorism. The Americans should give an example to the world for effective disarmament, and they should the enormous sums of money, which they invest into the war, begin to the fight against the reasons of the war. The Americans reduced their expenditures for the fight on poverty in the world to 1.7 billion dollars. That is not as much as they spend in two days for the military. there it is folks, its all our fault. Der Speigel: You regard Bush obviously rather as a criminal as a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Drewermann: who is it that is wishing to avoid war?, who takes the authentication from the 'Sermon on the mount'?.Hundreds of thousands of humans who deliberately to kill, has not understood Christianity, or he has walked away from it. One cannot go over corpses, if one wants to go the way the Christ. Der Speigel: Why does Bush use religious language? Drewermann: It's to win the voices from the American Bible belt. They are the religious ZuengleinSorry, I didnt catch that one at the balance. In the meantime it is usual to present itself as a president with the aura of the "Gods choosen". Within it is the wording of the USA as "God's own country". There one lives in the illusion to possess as large nation of God for the steering of the world fate a special missionary appointment. Hey -we even put it on our money,"in god we trust", quait people aint we. I think I understand why we left europe in the first place Der Speigel: Therefore does the intolerance of the American government cause agitation in relation to the German attitude in the Iraq conflict? wowm the german government calling someone else intolerant. Call me back when they start rebuilding synagoges in berlin. Drewermann: Bush shifts the religious absolutists speech on power-politics, geostrategic and economic goals. Therefore its attitude: "If you are not for us, you are against us". In this situation, the US must have unbelievable hubris. and lots of really big grey ships with airplanes on them.Over a so chauvinististic, illusory religiously motivated speech can only serve to frighten. Der Speigel: Is this attitude of the American government to be due alone to Bush? They keep forgetting about that "voting" thing, as if he just popped up one day. Drewermann: In certain sense Bush is victim of an attitude of the mind, which with the Evangelists, which the political right and the fundamentalists go extraordinarily deep with their Christian values. Beyond that, it has surrounded itself with a fantasy from the time of the Gulf War. Vice President Cheney ascended with oil compainies from Halliburton to the top man at the pentagon, Colin Powell appears moderate, but was however in reality something else. Condoleezza Rice is not an absolutely ambitious lady and preaches anything as war. Paul Wolfowitz inflicts the world with the conception that a war will bring prosperity, democracy and human rights in Iraq. Der Speigel: If fundamentalist positions fasten with Bush, how is its psyche knitted? Drewermann: We may accept Psychoanalysis that the religious foundation depends on the worth of parents. Bush senior had already said 1991 in the first war against the Iraq, the completion of the war could be only the victory of the good. This victory of the good one cost the life in the Iraq alone more than 200,000 people and made hundred of thousands crippled. The embargo politics pressed more than one million humans into death. How can one intone the word "good" in such a cruel way? Der Speigel: Do you want to state in all seriousness, Bushs Iraq politics is a synthesis from father complex and religious fundamentalism? Drewermann: The religious component can have connected itself with the completion of its alcoholism problems. Alcoholics compensate heavy inferiority complexes - Bush applied over years as the failures of the family - by drugs and by loyalty and joviality. For George W. , he merges God and his father into the order to lead a still larger and still better war than his own father - with the assistance of the "father in the sky". Well, atleast he didnt say it was "all about the Oil" Eugen Drewermann Eugen Drewermann, 63, is a most widely read and most debated German theologian. From 1979 to 1991 he taught at the catholic-theological faculty in Paderborn Dogmatik. Then church training permission was extracted from it. One year later it was suspended by the office for priest. Drewermann, who studied Psychoananalysis, published and operates more than 70 books and a psychoanalysis practice. |
| Posted by:Frank Martin |
| #11 I always thought Freud was a fraud, his psychonalysis looking for root causes, his patients endlessly talking and never actually doing anything. Hm, sounds like the Franco-German position. |
| Posted by: Tresho 2003-02-13 23:37:30 |
| #10 Angie: Quantum physics, yes, they're great. Politics and strategy, weak. I think it has a lot to do with educational philosophy and maybe the games we play as children. Americans are educated to solve big problems (strategy). Europeans are great tacticians (small problems). Once you get away from things like science and math, it becomes hard to measure differences quantitively, so let me give you some historical examples. When the French started building the Panama Canal, they just could never grasp the scale of what they were attempting. As a result, they dug a few hundred meters of canal and quit. The Americans came in and instantly grasped once they were up against. They mobilized accordingly and succeeded. (Source: The Path Between the Seas) In the WWII, the Germans were excellent tacticians, very strong at the operational level of war but awful at strategy. You can blame a lot of that on Hitler, but I have never been able to find any documented cases of when the German General Staff presented a credible strategic alternative. My experience is that most Euros (there are always outliers) have a hard time when approaching real world business and political problems. They try to apply a "scientific," schematic approach to problems that can't be solved scientifically or schematically. The result is a pseudo-scientific hash like the Der Speigel article. If you understand this, then a lot of their behavior regarding Iraq and the WoT suddenly makes a lot of sense. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2003-02-13 19:44:37 |
| #9 I think someone forgot to remind the Germans that the Iraqis are Semites. That would clear up any misunderstanding. |
| Posted by: Penguin 2003-02-13 19:12:25 |
| #8 11A5S, I have worked with Europeans, extensively, and they've never had any trouble with logic when it came to things like quantum physics. I confess that I rarely had political discussions with them. When I was in Australia we had a German grad student. One of the Australian students made some remark in front of him about Germany munching Poland. I must have looked shocked, because the Aussie said, "Oh, that's OK, he's one of those mellow Germans." I said that all the Germans I'd worked with were mellow Germans, and it's true. So where do these other bastards come from? |
| Posted by: Angie Schultz 2003-02-13 17:40:59 |
| #7 Ran across this at UPI: In the current issue of the German newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, the Catholic theologian Eugen Drewermann did just that. Being a psychoanalyst as well, he diagnosed Bush's war plans as a symptom of a neurosis and a socio-psychological delusion rooted in the desire to outdo his father in the martial realm. As far as we know, Drewermann has never had Bush on his couch. On the other hand, we do know that the Vatican has suspended this theologian from his priestly functions, which makes one wonder why one of Europe's most important publications would use this man in its continuous quest to turn its readers against the United States. |
| Posted by: Anonymous 2003-02-13 17:32:30 |
| #6 An assessment of anyone's Christian orthodoxy by a modern German theologian is worth as much as my assessment of a Bulgarian textbook on quantum physics. Less than nothing. |
| Posted by: Christopher Johnson 2003-02-13 16:22:46 |
| #5 Angie: If you've ever worked with Euros, you'd know this is pretty typical patter. They just don't seem to follow the rules of logic as we know them. I was in grad school with a bunch and they could not dissect the simplest argument let alone create one. I never cease to be amazed that they are able to keep their countries running. The Brits are the big exception. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2003-02-13 16:10:46 |
| #4 Der Speigel is like the 'New York Times' of Germany, you can consider it to be the 'newspaper of record' for the germans. The whole issue is full of of a bunch of real shocking things, of which this article is just a sample. I hesitated putting into Fred's "Open Souce Journalism" because it was so long and I had to get a serious QWERTY bruise banging my head on the keyboard translating german. But I thought it was pretty interesting to get a view inside the heads of these folks. |
| Posted by: Frank Martin 2003-02-13 15:10:15 |
| #3 Now, I know nothing about the German media, but one of the few periodical names I do know is Der Spiegel. So this is a real, mainstream, respected German publication, right? And it comes up with this undiluted, cheapjack faux-psychological crap, with nary a blush. And the Europeans are now shocked and bewildered at the anti-Europe sentiment here. Bah. |
| Posted by: Angie Schultz 2003-02-13 15:00:43 |
| #2 "This victory of the good one cost the life in the Iraq alone more than 200,000 people and made hundred of thousands crippled. The embargo politics pressed more than one million humans into death. How can one intone the word "good" in such a cruel way? "..... As I read this, he's saying that GulfWar I was a bad thing. Brings to mind the Catholic Church rolling over for "The Leader". |
| Posted by: Dishman 2003-02-13 13:27:00 |
| #1 I forgot to add that at the end of this article is a online poll asking if the reader thought it was accurate and informative. 62% of the respondents ( about 8000 votes) said yes. further on in the article Herr Drewermann said that he didnt think the US was a democracy but a plutocracy, so we were on the same level as Saddam Hussien anyway. |
| Posted by: Frank Martin 2003-02-13 13:14:03 |