On the 9th of November 1918, the German monarchy was overthrown and the Weimar Republic was founded, the first German democracy. Two days after this, democratic representatives authorized the armistice/capitulation that ended the 1st World War.

In the night of the 9th/10th November 1938, the Nazis burned down more than 1400 Jewish prayer rooms, synagogues etc. in the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass).

In the evening hours of the 9th of November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. East Germans were suddenly free, dancing with their West German counterparts and starting to dismantle the Wall. There was no way this could have ended in anything but an official re-unification, but the bureaucratic process took until October 3rd 1990, which is now the German National Holiday, even though it is much less remarkable.

It is a pity that all three events share the same date, because I would have loved to celebrate the two democratic revolutions that happened on the 9th of November; they were vital to German history. Instead, the 9th of November is almost exclusively associated with the Kristallnacht. I’m not saying that it isn’t important to remember of course.

For the linguistically-inclined, here’s a famous song called “Kristallnaach” (Kristallnacht) by BAP, a German band singing in the dialect of Cologne. I shall give a translation of this dialect into Hochdeutsch and into English. Listen here.

Listen to the song.

This song was written in 1982, so I was amazed to find that it’s still up-to-date, for example also referencing the gays, or the problem of too much greed.

The Arab spring and the London riots are the products of a generation who has been underestimated and underrepresented by politicians. In Germany, people are still giving voting a try. The Green party has traditionally been the rebel, anti-establishment party in the German political landscape. And indeed the Greens gained a lot this year, also because of Fukushima, of course (though the pressured CDU has now passed a law sealing the fate of nuclear power plants across Germany, taking away the Greens’ biggest raison d’être). The Greens are also increasingly considered part of the establishment, as they have been part of the governing coalition and made unpopular decisions. Some accuse them of being ready to “make a pact with the devil”.

So it is time for a new party to represent the rebellious new generation, as well as to take on a topic that the established parties have either ignored or fought against: the internet. It’s already affecting our lives immensely (okay maybe not the average MP’s life); there are many people spending more time online than offline, and these, who also tend to be informed above-average about issues of interest, didn’t have any representation so far.

In comes the Pirate Party. Originally a Swedish idea. Maybe the name wasn’t a smart choice (though a polled 60% of German internet users have at some point pirated stuff), but it makes for a fun theme and gets the point across. Apart from their obvious interest in net neutrality, reducing copyright terms, paving the way for read-write culture, and protecting privacy online, the pirates’ party program and campaign posters also called for:

• re-instating citizens’ offline privacy by revoking some of the post-9/11 laws, for example the naked scanners, the collection of biometric data or the blanket permissions for eavesdropping / violating privacy of correspondence
• more direct democracy, e. g. by introducing referendums; also allowing foreign residents and younger people to vote in local elections
• less lobbyism; publicising all of the MPs ties to corporations as well as any deals for publicly-financed projects
• free and unconditional access to education (keep in mind that universities are already free in Germany)
• free public transport (with the reasoning that ticket machines & controllers cost a lot of money and are bad for the environment)
• granting every citizen a basic income without conditions, enough for survival. This would replace social money and it can supposedly be financed by abolishing the gigantic nosy bureaucratic apparatus that is presently determining who is poor enough to get social money / who still has savings they are required to use up first / who is working illegally while receiving social money and things like that.

A month ago, the Pirate Party was predicted not to receive 5% of votes in the Berlin state election – a crucial hurdle, because parties with less than 5% do not get representation in Germany. Now, they actually won 8.9%. Does that look like a viral movement to you? Many polled voters said that they voted for the Pirate Party because of social issues. In times when the Social Democratic Party looks just as ready to destroy the social net as the CDU, and the Linke remains an outcast for their ties to Communism, people want an alternative party that stands up for the small guys rather than just their corporate friends. The Pirate Party was also elected by many simply to protest against all the established parties; it’s a rare chance to vote a non-established party and actually have your vote count (because of the 5% hurdle, votes for other non-established parties are essentially disregarded). This, and the Pirates’ excellent online work, lead to a lot of people braving the rain in order to vote for the first time.

As for me, I’m looking forward to a bit more transparency in politics. The first thing the Pirate Party did was create a blog about their work in parliament. I’m also with them on a lot of issues. I find the Basic Income idea fascinating. I hate the security theater at airports, especially in the US. I think more democracy is important, as politicians are willfully ignoring the polls and pushing through legislation that is rejected by the absolute majority of the electorate.

The German Pirate Party’s program is available online in German and Esperanto.

]]> http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2011/09/21/the-pirates-are-taking-over/feed/ 4 http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2011/04/26/a-case-for-commie-health-care/ http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2011/04/26/a-case-for-commie-health-care/#comments Tue, 26 Apr 2011 08:45:02 +0000 Judith http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/?p=193 “From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.” I’m the first to point out the flaws of this basic tenet of Communism – I certainly want to be paid more if I can do a job better than the next guy, or if I’m ready to work longer hours. However, in the case of health care, the spirit of Communism is the way to go. There are several issues…

Firstly, health insurance companies try to make money. I’m not blaming them for it; it’s what companies are supposed to do. But in this case, them making money is at direct odds with them providing as much care as you need. To make more money, they have to cut the costs, that is, to try to give you as little care as possible. And that may endanger lives. Ideally, the system would be set up in such a way that the more responsibly they care for you, the more profit they make, but that’s difficult to set up.

Secondly, the health care market is one of the least transparent markets ever – you can only tell the quality of the product (and warn others off bad purchases) several years after you’ve bought it. In more transparent markets, capitalism makes for natural checks on companies. For example, if someone sells moldy vegetables at a market, he is punished by not getting customers. If a delivery service sells yucky food, it will eventually lose business through bad reviews. This prevents excesses – but in an nontransparent market such as health care, and with it being very difficult to change companies to boot, these natural checks cannot function adequately.

Thirdly, you can’t afford health care when you most need it. Everybody needs more health care services as they get old and their bodies don’t function as well as they used to anymore. Yet nobody I know is expecting to have the most cash on hand as a retiree – most retirees are happy if they can maintain their previous standard of living while not making money anymore. Another thing is that the most expensive illnesses are the ones that also keep you away from work for a long time, cancer for example. If you are so unfortunate to get cancer in a purely capitalist system, you not only lose your source of income but also suddenly have much higher expenses. Again – not blaming companies, it’s basic business logic to charge the one who is 30% likely to cost you a lot more than the one who is 1% likely to cost you a lot, or to try to prevent the 30% guy from buying your insurance at all. Just the resulting picture isn’t pretty in this case. The solution is to have people pay the most while they are young and healthy and earning well and don’t need much health care, and then provide lots of health care at low or zero cost when people are old or sick and not earning money anymore. From each according to his means, to each according to his needs. This is the Communist idea behind European health care systems.

In Germany for example, the price of public health insurance is a percentage of your income. It increases and decreases with your income rather than with your health status, so that it should remain affordable at all times (to make up for it being compulsory). You can keep the same plan even when changing jobs. And when you’re unemployed or otherwise unable to afford it, the government takes over payments to your existing health insurance plan until you’re earning money again.

]]> http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2011/04/26/a-case-for-commie-health-care/feed/ 0 http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2009/10/10/capitalism-socialism-and-democracy/ http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2009/10/10/capitalism-socialism-and-democracy/#comments Sat, 10 Oct 2009 16:51:17 +0000 Judith http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/?p=72 I am back in Germany now, back on regular internet, so it’s time for a post. Today I would like to comment on the movie “Capitalism: A Love Story” by Michael Moore, which I watched the last night before leaving Atlanta.

Informative, biased

The movie left me with mixed feelings. Without doubt it was good to learn more about what happened to America since the beginning of the crisis in 2008, because I missed out on quite a bit of the news. The stories of the door & window factory, of the movement to move back into cleared houses, the various protests, all those either did not make the news in Germany or flew under the radar.

It’s not a secret that Michael Moore’s „documentary“ movies are supposed to do more than just inform people though. And that is where the problem starts. The movie “Sicko” proposed a clear alternative to the current American health care system: the European one. Without going into the details and pros and cons of either having the government run all health care as in some countries or just creating a public-run health insurance company to compete with the commercial ones as in others, Moore’s film set out to prove that the current American health care system needs reform and painted a glowing-but-not-incorrect picture of how things run in Western Europe.

What is your aim?

„Capitalism: A Love Story“ however does not have such an easy solution for a better America. There are many different solutions or ingredients proposed:

• some time before the 2nd world war (exact year unknown) when the USA had a 90% tax rate for the super-wealthy, along with universal health care, a good pension system and similar achievements that have since been lost
• the German / French / Italian / Japanese systems
• relying on politicians to combat this, and pressuring them if necessary
• demonstrations
• sit-down strikes
• squatting in houses
• winning over local law enforcement or sent-in law enforcement
• overthrowing the company management / the crooks at Wall Street and the corrupt politicians

The last one, especially in combination with Moore’s call to give government the right to seize assets „for the common good“ and the choice of L’Internationale (classic Communist rally song) in a watered-down translation for an ending music, made me shiver. It is not clear if Moore advocates Socialism in the sense of Communism or just Socialism in the sense of the Social Democratic parties of Europe, but if it’s not what he meant, he should have done more to distance himself from Communism.

Weak points

Also, his example of the company run by majority vote does not convince me. Even if the blue-collar workers have the same understanding of product management, marketing etc., not putting a spike into the wheels, there is still the matter of what happens if somebody needs to be hired, promoted or fired. This would almost certainly turn into a popularity contest – when did the best [singer / dancer / cook / businessman / ...] ever win a reality show by popular vote?

The example of the company where everybody, including the manager, earns the same salary, is less preposterous but also wouldn’t fly with me, because if somebody went to university, spending a lot more time and money on education before being able to start making money, it is natural that he should earn a higher wage, to make up for that expense. Anything else would mean that the surest way to get rich is to drop out of high school and start working as soon as possible.

How it works over here

Obviously I am biased, growing up and living in Germany, but I believe that German-style or French-style (or possibly Japanese-style) Social Democracy is the way to go. That is a capitalist democracy where everybody is still paid according to the amount of work he does, entrepreneurship is rewarded and companies are expected to pursue profit and nothing else, but the government keeps a check on them to prevent excesses. Excesses such laying off workers with barely a notice, withhelding wages, preventing them from forming unions, using coercion and threats, allowing banks to raise mortgage downpayments by 200% and the like. By the way, if families lost their home because of a foul play that should not have been possible, I’m all for letting them re-take it without ANY compensation to the banks. However, if they used the money to buy a new car and now can’t afford the normal downpayments, that’s their fault.

Another part of the government’s job according to Social Democracy is to ensure everybody, regardless of sex, age, opinions, education, ability or even willingness to work, will have health care, the chance to further their education and enough money to pay for rent and food and other basic needs (but he won’t have money to spare for anything beyond that if it’s his own fault he doesn’t have a job). It would be unbecoming of a first world nation to let anybody starve, no matter the reason he’s in that predicament. Germans pay tax rates that are significantly higher than what Americans pay, but it is with the understanding that this is all they need to do to guarantee a safety net for anybody who might fall on hard times, including foreigners who are living and working here. Germans are very reluctant to donate to local NPOs because of this understanding. You are much more likely to receive donations if you collect money for a literacy project in Africa than if you were to collect money for a literacy project in Germany.

Of course people are happy to take advantage of the safety net themselves [to the max, even if they wouldn't need it,] if they ever lose their job or fall ill – or for their education, since all education, including universities [in almost all parts of Germany] are free. If you studied at an American university, it is likely you have amassed tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, of student debt because of the outrageous tuition fees. I estimate it would take me many years to pay the equivalent amount of money in taxes, and even then it would be in tiny everyday rates rather than one giant sum looming over me like Damocles’ sword. I’d say the system is already working for me.

Harnessing the energy

The safety net, along with the idea of the government as a supervisor and regulator of business, are what allow us to harness the energy that is capitalism and take advantage of it without falling prey to it. In my opinion, the root of America’s current problems is that people were expecting businesses and individuals to diverge from the profit motive, to give up the idea of making the largest possible profit in favour of morality. Most individuals are probably ready to do that, some to a greater extend than others, but there are some crooks who won’t. Companies are a lot less likely to do that, and the larger they are, the worse (though in the USA they tend to show more altruism than in Germany, probably because of the public’s exspectations). If you make an immoral but profit-raising decision at a large company, such as those health care industry workers looking for reasons to deny people the care they need in „Sicko“, or laying off lots of workers while your company is earning record-breaking amounts of money, you can often hide your shame in anonymity and quite possibly expect a raise in salary or promotion. It’s how the system works; all the incentives point that way. The profit motive will be second to none.

Moore, in this movie, appears to suggest that we should discard this motive as evil and base our economy on something else (A politbuero deciding what to produce? Coercion?). As far as I know, all substitutes have failed to provide even a small share of the mutual prosperity we can achieve through capitalism. It’s just a matter of figuring out the best way of preventing the pursuit of profit from crossing the boundaries of what is moral and just. Germany hasn’t found the perfect way yet either, as scandals can attest, but at this point in time it’s weathering the crisis better than the US, both from an economic and a human point of view.

]]> http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2009/10/10/capitalism-socialism-and-democracy/feed/ 4 http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2009/07/31/do-all-journalists-speak-esperanto-now/ http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2009/07/31/do-all-journalists-speak-esperanto-now/#comments Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:35:40 +0000 Judith http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/?p=11 You might think so, seeing just how much media attention Esperanto has been getting this end of July 2009.

The most detailed coverage comes from Germany’s number-one public TV station ARD, which aired this report on the Esperanto World Youth Congress, with both the reporter and the news host speaking very good Esperanto.

Also very unexpected is this BBC news article about Esperanto with a special focus on its role in reconciliation between Jews and Arabs.

Then, Deutsche Welle published two favourable articles on Esperanto within a single week: Esperantists keep the dream alive, prompted by the Esperanto World Congress now taking place in Poland, and The future of Esperanto looks bright according to our readers, a collection of sent-in testimonials.

Also prompted by the Esperanto World Congress, the British Times Online titled Conference proves that Esperanto can be the language of love. Of course since the conference is taking place in Poland, Polskie Radio also reports on it and the European Jewish Press also reports. Even Chinese Xinhua news agency tried to report about the congress, but mixed up the articles.

EDIT: Another reader informed me that the Taipei Times also had a bilingual article related to the Esperanto World Congress at the beginning of July. Read it here.

EDIT: It seems I missed a lot of nice articles because they were in the countries’ national languages, reaching more readers this way. A brief listing, for those who can read these languages:
Chinese: The missing Xinhua article, in Chinese
French: Radio France Internationale, Libération, several regional papers also wrote about this
Korean: Korean TV station YTN
Lithuanian: Bernardinai
Polish: Lots, search Gazeta.pl for Esperanto for a start.
Portugese: Veja, Acoriano Oriental
Turkish: Salom

UPDATE: The Austrian newspaper Der Standard just published an by the Kuwait Times, by China Daily and by Dawn.com. What’s amazing is that these articles are not copycats, they each seem to have done their own research and their own interviews.

Finally, for reasons still unknown to me, one of the top stories in the Birmingham Mail is about two Esperanto speakers, one from Birmingham, getting married
next year. Would they have been written about if they had been brought together by a shared love of beer?

Esperanto speakers, mark the time. Could it be that journalists are the first to know that Esperanto is hot?

Non-Esperanto speakers, are you curious to see what Esperanto is like now? Try this free lecture, this site with lots of answers or free comprehensive online courses.

]]> http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2009/07/31/do-all-journalists-speak-esperanto-now/feed/ 17 http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2009/07/29/who-i-am/ http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/2009/07/29/who-i-am/#comments Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:58:04 +0000 Judith http://www.learnlangs.com/blog/?p=3 Let me introduce myself here in this first post.

My name is Judith Meyer, I’m a 25-year-old German girl living in Berlin with my American boyfriend, Chuck Smith. I originally come from Kamp-Lintfort, a small town near Düsseldorf, but I’ve been living in Berlin since March 2008 and I absolutely love this city!

I have a huge interest in languages, programming, politics, history, philosophy and methods of learning and teaching. My university major is French studies, with minors in computational linguistics (wish I could take that as a major!) and management. I just need to write my thesis to complete my degree, but it’s taking longer than expected because I work so much on the side. I tutor people in German, Latin and Esperanto over the internet, occasionally also French or English, and I work as the project manager of GermanPod101.com, also writing and recording most lessons. When I need a mental challenge, I like to program in Ruby on Rails or play the ancient Asian game of Go.

Read more about my starting point in each of the categories!

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