March 12 - Walkinging on the Trans-Europe "X"-Trail

Whoa! For a change the sun was trying to break thru a light layer of clouds and it wasn’t snowing or raining, so we dusted off Plan A from the previous day and decided to follow the trans-Europe “X” trail from Reinbek eastward. The Plan worked out well—I always like it when a plan comes together—and we started off into the forest near us about 9 a.m.

The folks who have designed the “X” route have really taken great pains to go thru the forests and parks wherever possible. The upside of that routing is that it is quiet and relaxing walking with frequent views of woods, farms, and fields. Altho it was Still Winter, we had nice views of fallow fields, ponds, old barns, horse farms, and thatched houses. The woods themselves seemed to be mostly fir and spruce with some deciduous trees mixed in, but I wasn’t sure about the exact mix—at this time of year the evergreens stood out and we almost could not see the deciduous trees because they had no leaves.

The downside of routing “X” through parks and forests is that the trail is mostly on natural surfaces with a fair number of muddy spots and occasional problems with tangled roots or large stones that could throw an unwary bicycle rider. We were walking and didn’t have any real problem getting thru, but I think some kind of durable bike with good suspension like a cross-country model would be advisable if you were trying to ride “X” all the way down thru Germany. The trail is really well marked all along, however, and we had a great time strolling along under the gradually clearing skies.

It took us a little over an hour and a half to walk the 6 kilometers to Aumuehle, where we simply hopped on a train going west to get back to Reinbek. We also walked back from the train station in order to pick up more skim milk at the Mini Mall, so all together we walked about 2 hours in the morning. For lunch we picked up a package of 2 small frozen pizzas at Aldi’s and popped them in the convection oven. While eating the pizza and some carrot salad Monika made, we listened to the radio and I heard an absolutely hilarious song by Udo Juergens entitled, “At 66 Life is Just Beginning!” The basic idea is a guy retires at 66, serenades his girlfriend by playing a guitar under her balcony, buys a motorcycle and riding leathers, and makes plans to travel to San Francisco to become a flower child. It was the most upbeat song about aging I’ve heard, and that was nice since I’m headed in that direction myself! At the Mini Mall I saw a Stern magazine with the headline title shouting, “How America Lied to the World” (about the war in Iraq) and somewhat reluctantly I bought it. Stern is a popular magazine like the old U.S. “Look “or “Life” magazines, and they devoted a full 18 pages of this issue. The coverage chronologically detailed how the Bush administration decided to go to war with Iraq within the first month of taking office and subsequently manipulated the intelligence reports and flat out lied to people to achieve that goal. The Stern article relied on leaked memos, reports of meetings, direct testimony of two ex-CIA intelligence analysts and other documented sources. The net result was that Vice-President Cheney was essentially insisting on intelligence reports about Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” that would justify war. The reports were re-written so that they would support the “truth” as the administration wanted it and any contrary information was ignored or suppressed. That really is very much like “1984” when you look at it closely.

But according to the Stern article the strong-arm tactics didn’t stop there. Apparently under-secretary Wolfowitz tried to get dirt on UN weapons inspector Blix and failed, but did manage to get UN representatives that opposed the U.S. war to be recalled and replaced by many 3rd world countries. Dirtiest of all was fingering the wife of Ambassador Wilson, who exposed some Bush’s lies in the State of the Union address, as a CIA agent, which could jolly well have gotten her killed. How low is it to endanger someone’s wife or family to get political revenge? Those “go after the family” tactics I would associate with agencies like the Gestapo, Stasi, KGB and the usual dreary roll call of secret police for authoritarian regimes. How close are we to that?

All in all, it sounded like a very dirty business using any fair or foul means to achieve the end result of war. The article concluded that a core band of neo-conservatives in the administration wanted to have the U.S. act unilaterally as the dominating super power of the world. Apparently the feeling of this core group was that the U.S. government has the right to essentially do anything to any country in the world that we wanted to in order to further a neo-conservative agenda. Besides being morally bankrupt, this resurgent global imperialism may come at a very high price. In my admittedly limited reading of history, foreign governments imposed on Arabic cultures have always ultimately failed. I also feared that the simple monetary costs of Pax Americana would ultimately weaken the U.S. For example, the absolutely huge current trade deficit and devaluation of the dollar against other world currencies strongly indicated to me that our country was really getting weaker, not stronger, at least economically. At the beginning of the Iraq war last year (Wanderung 2) during our visit to Germany, we could exchange about $0.85 U.S. dollar for 1 Euro. After one year of war and the related huge deficit spending for defense, that exchange ratio changed so much that it now took us about $1.25 U.S. to buy 1 Euro! That was an absolutely huge devaluation of the dollar versus Euro (about a 40% decrease in value) in just one year! Have the neo-conservative instigators of this war planned for huge monetary devaluations of the dollar and consequent disruptions in the U.S. economy?

I guess the take home lesson is that a sufficiently ruthless administration can march a democracy to war if they can completely control the flow of information to the other branches of government and have a sufficiently docile or cooperative national media. The key players must also be willing to do any type of lie or distortion of that information to whip up war hysteria and suppress opposition. Of course the congressional Democrats, who could have provided opposition, rolled over and died rather than try to be “Loyal Opposition” as in the British Parliamentary system, but they were also fed a consistent drumbeat of misinformation. One thing that sticks in my craw is that the Bush has been billed as a “compassionate conservative”, but I never heard him officially express any sympathy or regret for the innocent victims of the war. I have also never even heard of any official count or estimate from the U.S. government of the total number of innocent civilians killed and wounded, but I heard one unofficial estimate of 5,600 and another of 10,000. Surely wouldn’t it be appropriate for our President to at least express regret at the death of innocent civilians and children? The only emotion I have ever seen from Bush is a smug self-satisfaction about the “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. If we destroy the infrastructure of country and remove its government based on misinformation, perhaps at least a statement of “Oops, our bad” is in order? So will the U.S. vote for four more years of the Bush administration in November? Only time will tell, but I had forebodings that this war that had started so dirty would ultimately end dirty.

Of course, as long as the docile and conservative U.S. media avoid reporting any of the unpleasant facts about the war, the majority of the population may continue to support it. I wonder if I will ever see the coffins of our war dead coming home, the military funerals for all the fallen soldiers, or any of the costs to the Iraqi people depicted on U.S. TV. So far, the depth of coverage on national U.S. news seemed about as tepid and bloodless as I would expect the reporting the results of a video game to be. The good guys are doing X and the bad guys are doing Y, and a couple of the good guys were killed, and that was about the extent of it. But that was definitely not true of the German press and TV where, if anything, the anti-war bias motivated them to distinctly focus on the hellish aspects of war.

After reading the Stern article carefully, we both thought that it seemed fairly done and was quite plausible, but even if it was not true the problem we now faced as a country was that we had lost the basic trust of the rest of the world. Stern is a pretty middle-of-the-road magazine politically, so if they were stating the case this baldly and giving the issue this much coverage, it must really be perceived this way by a large percentage or majority of the German people. What will happen the next time we see a danger and want world cooperation on taking action, for instance if North Korea really does have nuclear weapons? The other thing that offended me was that America as a country was getting tarred with the result of actions of the Bush administration. I would have felt considerably better to see a headline like “How the Bush Administration Lied to the World” rather than how “America” lied to the world, but that’s the way it was labeled in Germany.