How Things Always End, And Start

Several people have been in touch about my post yesterday in which I pointed out the role of what had then been very recent Nazi officers in the creation of the EU, of NATO, and of the Federal Republic of Germany. I have no idea why anyone would have found any of this remotely surprising.

After the First World War, the Kaiser himself may have gone into exile, but Field Marshall von Hindenburg was elected President twice, beginning as soon as the electorate was given the opportunity to vote for him. He had stood only with the written permission of his exiled monarch. 

After the Second World War, full denazification would have caused German society to have collapsed. Quite the reverse occurred, with West Germany, NATO and the EU all founded in no small part by former, meaning recent, Nazi officers. 

Over the Wall, one of the East German Bloc Parties, complete with reserved seats in the Volkskammer, was the NDPD. That was specifically for former Nazi Party members and supporters, although it was often observed that there were in fact more former Nazi Party members in the Communist Party than the entire membership of the NDPD. In 1968, long after East Germany professed to have eradicated all trace of Nazism, the new Constitution still felt the need to commit it to doing so. 

No one in West Germany even pretended, not really. The fairly recent obituaries of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl have been as frank as they themselves always were. And then there was Austria. 

But speaking of East Germany, when the Soviet Bloc collapsed, then who do you think carried on running many things at national level, and almost everything at regional or local level? Who was qualified to do so? Attempts to do these things differently, such as the debaathification of Iraq, have been unmitigated disasters. 

Therefore, the “Taliban” are coming back into government, thereby rendering the entire war in Afghanistan completely and utterly pointless, because this is how these things always end. Yes, always. And because this is how other things always start. Yes, always.