Merkel's Battle Of Kursk

The way the mind slips around and mixes things up is a curious thing. Perhaps I should take more water with it. There I was watching the BBC TV documentary on Bletchley Park out of interest and up on the screen comes information about the Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943.

Battles of the past do not come bigger than this one when in 1943 the Soviet’s turned the tide against The Third Reich although there might have been some battles of ancient times where relatively the numbers could have been comparable.

Meanwhile the discussions in Brussels had reached a similar crunch point as the bureaucrats and the bankers battled for the hearts and minds of politicians. The question of who won will not be known for a little time but most of us are already aware of who will be the losers.

In the summer of 1943 the Third Reich had major forces on its Eastern Front having taken control of the states to the east of Russia. The Greek campaign had meant a major military commitment in that territory.

It had lost the North African war and this meant it had to make up its mind between whether Italy or Greece was most at risk. Europe was substantially under its control, those countries that were not had to pay close heed to what The Third Reich wanted.

But from the Battle of Kursk onward the Third Reich was in retreat. By the end of 1944 the Allies were poised to conquer Germany and reduce it to dependency status in thrall to states who had the resources to dictate to it what its political structure would be and how it would be organised.

Moving on to 2011 and the Battle of Brussels in which issues arising from Greece, Italy, Eastern Europe and the rest have come together to bring about the end of an EU dominated by German money and French treachery as a world force.

So who now will be calling The Great Game? Brazil, Russia, India and China it appears may be bankrolling the bail outs with added help from North Africa and the Middle East.

Brussels 2011 may be our financial equivalent of 1943 Kursk and again it is Italy, Greece that are the liabilities.

How long will it be before the BRICS occupying forces and their associates are camped out in the centres of Europe more or less telling us all what we can do and what we cannot?

In London, this is less of a problem, they are already here.

Calamity Cameron

While Westminster descends into bad farce, Europe is busy establishing The Fourth Reich (and not the EUSSR however interesting that concept might be) and just about all the major policy areas in UK government are turning into dross where was Cameron?

He was doing a Blair Brown Tribute act. Off he goes for a quick photo-opportunity in Afghanistan promising the lads they will be home before Christmas, although which one is open to debate. Then we are visiting other top people in other places who no doubt would be happier watching the beach volley ball on TV.

In his company are the same sort of friends and helpers that have been with other Prime Ministers recently. I understand there was Vodaphone, lately beneficiaries of a “sweetheart” off the cuff tax deal with HMRC. Also there is the Diamond geezer from Barclaycapital.

This is an organisation which specialises in interesting tax arrangements for the wealthy and other things. What ii does do is to take all the income it gets and fiddles with it to enable some very complicated trading and the rest which make all the very many books of its untold number of subsidiaries look good.

In South Africa this means ensuring that those with lots of money will pay little tax. As this is a country which needs major resources for public services this leads to tax short falls and problems of provision. So Cameron commits us to sending dollops of our tax money to help them.

In the meantime the very same firm is arranging for many of our rich also to avoid tax. As we have a problem with our debts and taxes this means that the poorer people of the UK have to pay more.

The logic of this may be clear to Cameron and Diamond, it means they and their friends all do very nicely but it is bad news for all those in either the UK or South Africa who are feeling not just the pinch but the punch.

Unluckily, the horrors of the Euro crisis could put a stop to all and every little scheme all these politicians are dreaming up. We really do not know what is happening next. But where are Cameron and Clegg. We know where Clegg is, it is on his own little Libdem Fantasy European Island.

This is a crisis that cannot be covered with clever words or carefully staged posing. It is where it all gets real and desperately serious and Cameron needs to display the courage and intellect of a real leader and statesman. I fear the boy is not up to it and never will be. So what is he?

Shakespeare, as ever, has the right words, Coriolanus, Act v Scene VI, “Thou boy of tears.”

Quote:

Aufidius:

Ay, Marcius, Caius Marcius: dost thou think
I'll grace thee with that robbery, thy stol'n name
Coriolanus in Corioli?
You lords and heads o' the state, perfidiously
He has betray'd your business, and given up,
For certain drops of salt, your city Rome,
I say 'your city,' to his wife and mother;
Breaking his oath and resolution like
A twist of rotten silk, never admitting
Counsel o' the war, but at his nurse's tears
He whined and roar'd away your victory,
That pages blush'd at him and men of heart
Look'd wondering each at other.

Coriolanus:

Hear’st thou Mars?

Aufidius:

Name not the god, thou boy of tears!

Unquote.

If Cameron gets it wrong Mars the God of War could be back again.

Ventimiglia - The Numbers Game

Looking at the news item filmed at a railway station on the Franco-Italian border of the refugees from Libya seeking entry to France the station name Ventimiglia came into view. It is a long while since we were there.

It was a day trip across the Italian border to take a look and coming down the road into the town we stopped at a viewpoint. It was much later that I discovered it had been the point at which Claude Monet had painted his view of the place.

When Monet was born it was not a border town it was well within the Kingdom of Piedmont which had also embraced Sardinia during the many and various wars of earlier centuries.

Piedmont was forced to give up the territories of Nice and Savoy to France at the time of the Reunification of Italy in 1859-1861 as a consequence of one of Emperor Louis Napoleon’s grubbier deals, essentially “I help you control Italy you give me lands without conquest”.

In 1940 Benito Mussolini made the catastrophic decision to go to war in support of Hitler on 10th June. Had he kept his wits about him declared for World Peace and sought out help to broker a peace deal, notably with Joseph Kennedy Senior, USA Ambassador to Britain who had a good many Italian voters in his home base in Massachusetts, the world might be a different place.

Who knows, could Italy have been able to force the return of Nice and Savoy? After the war, Italy shorn of its Empire and key trading links had to start all over again. One arrangement made by the winners was to stitch together Cyrenaica and Tripolitania into a new place called Libya. Now the bills are coming in.

On that brief visit we made to Ventimiglia Italy was going through one of its occasional economic and currency crises. We went into some shops and all the noughts strained my limited powers of mental arithmetic, luckily the children were with us. Worse was that there was no small change to be had nor small value notes.

Currency exchange had been intricate the year before when we went along some of Wellington’s lines of march in The Peninsula. In both Spain and Portugal just after the death of Franco and the Fall of Salazar there was a lot of negotiation to be done. With the pound sterling rapidly falling in real value in the UK just what a cost was took some working out.

But I had an American Express Card that soothed a number of nerves and even the banks were happy to have me use it. Even although I was British the notion that dollars might be involved gave them a degree of confidence.

The Euro, of course, was supposed to end all that coupled with the integration of sensible policies and wise financial management of governments supported by banks who had a wider range of instruments to enable market fluidity and being international in scope could check and control any burgeoning crisis.

The theory was nice but the practice fell prey to all the old human weaknesses. Now regimes are beginning to collapse or at least change radically. All those migrant workers in many places want to go somewhere else and are joined by many of the locals who are being bombed, displaced or subject to ethnic or religious prejudices.

In Ventimiglia the Italians are trying to pass on to France large numbers, mainly young unemployed men, who have left Libya and who neither want to or are willing to go back to wherever they started from. Italy itself is poised for a major crisis. Had not so many French, German and other banks taken its debt it may well have defaulted.

If Italy goes the way of Portugal, can the Euro survive?