BLOODY NONSENSE

Mein Gott! America is the new Germany (Matthew Parris, 06/21/03, Times of London)

Germans are America's big ethnic secret. No people and no culture has contributed more to what the United States is and is becoming. In the nation's ethnic tangle, no root runs deeper than German America. As a scattered community only fitfully conscious of its own existence, none has more successfully pursued wealth, power and intellectual influence. And as a philosophical force in US politics - a whole political mindset - none has greater potency. Germany as a European state may have lost her way, the German language may struggle to keep its world grip, but the German spirit is alive and well and living in - and through - America: Bismarck's last laugh on modern history.

Yet from new Labour to the Tory Right, the British Establishment has fallen in love with the reincarnation of our former European enemy, even as our Europeanism sours. Across much of conservative Britain, an embrace with America is welcomed as a healthy, English-speaking alternative to the sinister advance of the Franco-German axis.

Why? It is understandable that the British do not feel towards America the visceral distrust that continental Europe arouses. Americans speak English. Their invasions have been peaceful. We remember the Mayflower, the Founding Fathers, and the familiar English surnames of almost all the Presidents until Roosevelt. We remember, too, that the United States did (after a slight hiccup) support us against Germany in both world wars, and we take vicarious pride in seeing another great English-speaking country - once ours - stride the globe: imperialism by proxy. We count the Americans as our cousins. These world-beaters are our kith and kin, are they not?

No, they are not. America's cousins are the Germans. This is true literally - in blood lineage - but also the personalities of the two nations. Modern America has become more Germanic than it is British. The New England aristocracies are pushed aside, Mittelamerika rides high, yet few notice and still fewer discuss the Teutonic phase the country is now entering. A common language - English - overlays deep cracks in the collective American psyche, blurring the outline of a vast community so submerged that its members have all but lost consciousness of what they have in common: an outlook.

One wonders where he thinks the Brits got their blood lineage if not from the Germanic tribes that raped their way across the country for centuries? Posted by Orrin Judd at June 20, 2003 8:35 PM