The Londoner

The 2006 World Cup in Germany seemed like a fairy tale come true for the country. Suddenly, years of troubling history seemed to lift amidst euphoria over the cosmopolitan twist fate had brought to the country. But this year, amid fresh debates over xenophobia, many are left wondering if the ugly German is back. How splendid we were in 2006. The world liked us, even loved us, because we were so good at exuberantly letting our hair down. The Germans danced to celebrate the football World Cup they were hosting, and almost everyone was pleased to join the party. Sixty years after World War II and the Holocaust, the nation of perpetrators seemed to have come out from under its depression, and the world seemed prepared to take these Germans into its heart. Now we seem ugly again. When the Greeks or the Spaniards protest against the supposed dictate of the Germans in euro policy, some of their posters depict ...

Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem Born in Solingen, Germany, Adolf Eichmann was the son of a businessman and industrialist, Karl Adolf Eichmann. In 1914.   Eichmann joined the Austrian branch of the NSDAP (member number 889 895) and of the SS, enlisting on 1 April 1932, as an SS-Anwärter. He was accepted as a full SS member that November, appointed an SS-Mann, and assigned the SS number 45326. For the next year, Eichmann was a member of the Allgemeine-SS and served in a mustering formation operating from Salzburg. In September 1934 Eichmann landed a position in Heydrich's SD, the powerful SS security service. There he started out as a filing clerk cataloguing information about Freemasons. Predictably, the Nazis believed that the Masons were assisting the Jews in their attempts to gain world domination. Eichmann's job was to compile information on prominent Freemasons in Germany. However he was soon assigned to the Jewish section, which w...

Although Berlin was split into four sectors in 1945, the Soviets were determined to see a unified city under their control. Their tactics for undermining the other occupying powers ranged from seductive to brutal, and a desperate blockade backfired into a 40-year divide. The first edition of the Deutsche Volkszeitung , which appeared on newsstands in the devastated city of Berlin on June 13, 1945, brought some intriguing news. The newspaper contained the first postwar appeal by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Germany . It read: "The path of forcing the Soviet system on Germany would be wrong." The Communist Party of Germany (KPD), which had advocated a "Soviet Germany" until 1933, was now calling for the establishment of "a parliamentary democratic republic with all democratic freedoms and rights for the people." Of course, most Berliners gave little thought to the future structure of the nation as they wandered hun...

ON DECEMBER 24th 1860 the government of South Carolina issued a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina.” The proclamation stated that the “ends for which [America’s] government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them.” Six southern states followed suit in the ensuing six weeks. On March 11th 1861 representatives from the seven states ratified the constitution of the Confederate states of America, and a month and a day later troops from the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumter, a United States sea fort off the South Carolina coast. Thus began America’s civil war. On November 7th 2012—the day after Barack Obama was re-elected—a petition appeared on the “We the People” White House website, which is a means for citizens to engage in their first-amendment right to “petition the Government for a redress of grievances”. It asked the federal government to allow ...

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government… for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence. — Murray N. Rothbard, The Logic of Action (1997) The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often referred to as the time of the "robber barons." It is a staple of history books to attach this derogatory phrase to such figures as John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the great nineteenth-century railroad operators — Grenville Dodge, Leland Stanford, Henry Villard, James J. Hill, and others. To most historians writing on this period, these entrepreneurs committed thinly veiled acts of larceny to enrich themselves at the expense of their customers. Once again we see the...