A special dose of World Cup soccer fever - bet you didn't know half of these...

1. The 2010 FIFA World Cup will be taking place in South Africa. This will be the first time in history that an African country hosts the competition.
2. A record 206 countries entered qualification for the 2010 World Cup.
3. The balls used in World Cup Soccer are traditionally made by Adidas.
4. The 2006 World Cup Soccer games was the unveiling of a new style of ball. The Adidas Teamgeist ball for the 2006 World Cup Soccer games was a fourteen panel ball instead of the normal thirty two.
5. It is interesting to note that the first multi-colored ball was used in the World Cup Soccer finals in 1998.
6. World Cup soccer is the most widely viewed sporting event in the world, with over one billion people watching every four years.
7. The Romans played a game named 'harpastum' which can be said to be the origin of soccer game of the modern era.
8. In the early days of the game, the referees used to wave a handkerchief to control the players. The whistles were introduced in the game in the year 1878.
9. The red-yellow card system made its world cup debut at the 1970 event.
10. Uruguay went on to win the first ever Soccer World Cup in 1930.
11. Jules Rimet, the president of Fifa at the time wanted an international football tournament outside of the Olympics.
12.Uruguay, having won consecutive Olympic titles was chosen as the host of the first World Cup tournament.
13.Because Uruguay is an out-of-the-way destination, only four European teams took part in the inaugural tournament: Belgium, France, Romania and Yugoslavia.
14.The first-ever World Cup goal was scored by Lucien Laurent for France against Mexico.
15.Not many South American teams were keen to travel to Europe for the World Cups in 1934 and 1938 because of the distance involved. Brazil was the only South American country to play in both tournaments.
16.There were no World Cups in 1942 and 1946 because the world had a bit of an argument.
17.Bafana Bafana shouldn’t be too worried. Scotland has been knocked out in the first round in 8 consecutive World Cups for which they qualified (1954, 1958, 1974, 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990 and 1998).
18.The official count for the highest attendance at a World Cup game was at the final in 1950, hosted by Brazil. In Rio de Janiero, 199 854 people attended the game.
19.Mexico has hosted two world cups, the most recent of which was in 1986. This was because Colombia, the chosen hosts for that tournament, were unable to host it for economic reasons.
20.Brazil is the only country to have played in every World Cup.
21.Brazil has won the World Cup a record five times.
22.The first Women’s World Cup was held in China in 1991.
23.The World Cup trophy is made of solid 18 carat gold and weighs more than 6 kilograms.
24.West Germany is one of the tournament’s most successful teams with three wins in six World Cup finals (excluding Germany’s appearance in the 2002 final).
25.Italy is the second most successful World Cup team with four wins (1934, 1938, 1982, and 2006).
26.The host nation has won the World Cup six times: Italy in 1934, West Germany in 1974, Argentina in 1978, Uruguay in 1930, France in 1998 and England in 1966.
27.The Netherlands, Czechoslovakia and Hungary are the most successful teams to have never won the tournament - they all made two finals.
28.Argentina and Uruguay have each won the World Cup twice.
29.Sweden, Chile, South Korea and Mexico have all put in their best World Cup performances when hosting the tournament (good news for Bafana?)
30.A FIFA Fair Play award is given out at the end of the tournament for the team who was booked the least.
31.Lothar Matthaus (Germany) and Antonio Carbajal (Mexico) have both played in a record five World Cup tournaments.
32.Matthaus has also played the most World Cup matches: 25.
33.Pele is the most successful player of all time, having won three World Cup medals.
34.Ronaldo from Brazil (not Cristiano) has scored the most goals in World Cups - 15.
35.Brazil has scoffed the most World Cup goals with 201.
36.The youngest player to feature in the World Cup is Normal Whiteside from Northern Ireland. He was 17 years and 41 days old when he participated in the 1982 tournament.
37.South Africa is the 50th most successful World Cup nation (out of 75) with 1 win and 3 draws from 6 games.
38.El Salvador is the least successful with 6 losses from 6. Others who have never won a game are Iraq, Slovenia, Togo, Canada, Indonesia, UAE, China, New Zealand, Greece, Haiti, and Zaire (DRC).
39.The most successful team outside the perennial success of the European and South American teams is Mexico who have played 45 games at World Cup Finals, won 11, drawn 12 and lost 22.
40.The most successful Africa team at World Cups has been Cameroon.
41.Cameroon and Senegal are also the only African team to have progressed to the quarter finals.
42.The infrastructure revamp in South Africa has cost around R80 billion.
43.South Africa was invited to play the opening fixture in the France 1998 World Cup against the hosts, but lost 3-0.
44.Argentina knocked England out of the 1986 World Cup, courtesy of the goal scored by Diego Maradonna… off of his hand. The goal is known as the Hand of God.
45.Argentina went on to win the 1986 World Cup.
46.John Terry, England captain for the qualifiers has been stripped of the captaincy because he can’t keep his todger in his pants. Particularly when his team’s mates’ ex-girlfriends are around.
47.Wayne Bridge, the England left back, will not be coming to the World Cup tournament because John Terry picked his ex girlfriend.
48.Franz Beckenbauer won the World Cup as a player and a manager with West Germany.
49.The Netherlands have been one of the World Cup’s great underachievers, even when they boasted the greatest striker in the world in the late eighties and early nineties: Marco van Basten.
50.No European team has ever won a World Cup held outside Europe.
51.Bora Milutinovic coached teams in five consecutive World Cups, but they were all different: China, Nigeria, Costa Rica, Mexico and the USA.
52.Switzerland is the only team to have not conceded a goal, but not won the tournament.
53.One of Africa’s greatest players, Roger Milla of Cameroon, is the oldest player to have participated in a World Cup: he was 42 years old and 39 days in the 1994 tournament.
54.Hungary has scored the most goals in one game, beating El Salvador 10-1 in 1982.
55.The 2010 World Cup will be the first time that no country has debuted in the World Cup Finals, although Slovakia and Serbia did it under the Yugoslavia banner previously.
56.So far in World Cup history, there have been 708 games containing 2063 goals.
57.Bafana Bafana manager, Carlos Alberto Parreira knows how to win World Cups. He did so with Brazil in 1994.
58.Two World Cup finals have been decided on penalties: Brazil beat Italy in 1994 after Roberto Baggio sent his kick sailing over the goals, and Italy beat France in the last World Cup.
59.Zinedine Zidane, one of the greatest soccer players ever, is remembered for his last ever act on a football field: head butting Marco Materazzi in the chest which led to a red card.
60.The first scoreless World Cup match was in 1958 between Brazil and England.
61. The first match decided on a penalty shootout was the semi final between France and West Germany in the 1982 tournament.
62.Mexico’s 22 World Cup losses are the most by any team.
63.Italy played 5 matches in the 1990 tournament without conceding a goal. This is a record.
64.West Germany kept the same coach for four consecutive tournaments. Helmut Schoen was their coach in 1966, 1970, 1974 and 1978.
65.The most goals scored in one match are 12, when Austria beat Switzerland 7-5 in the 1954 World Cup.
66.The most bad-tempered World Cup fixture was between the Netherlands and Portugal at the 2006 World Cup with each side getting 2 red cards.
67.Geoff Hurst has scored the only hat trick (3 goals) in the deciding game of the tournament, and he did it in 1966 when the English went on to beat West Germany 4-2 in extra time.
68. Hungary holds the record for the most goals in one tournament with 27 in 1954.
69. South Africa was eliminated from the 2002 World Cup on goals only. Bafana and Paraguay finished level on points and goal difference, but the South American team had scored 6 goals to our 5.
70. The fastest sending off in the World Cup was Uruguay’s Jose Baptista who lasted a full 56 seconds in 1986 against Scotland.
71.The fastest goal ever scored in World Cup soccer was eleven seconds and the player was Hakan Sukur from Turkey in 2002.
72.It is interesting to note that a World Cup Soccer milestone goal was reached at the 2006 World Cup soccer games. Swedish player Marcus Allback scored the 2 000th goal in World Cup soccer history in a game against England.
73. Numbers were first used on players’ shirts at the 1938 tournament.
74. Miroslav Klose holds the record for the most headed goals in a tournament with 5 in 2006.
75. The only European players to win more than one World Cup are Giuseppe Meazza & Giovanni Ferrari who won World Cups with Italy in 1934 and 1938.
76.Two sets of brothers have won World Cups. Fritz and Otmar Walter of West Germany in 1954, and Jack and Bobby Charlton for England in 1966.
77.The Netherland's Ernie Brandts is the only player to score a goal and an own goal in a World Cup match.
78.Mario Zagalo of Brazil boasts three World Cup trophies. Twice as a player (1958 and 1962) and once as a manager (1970). 70. The longest surname of any player who has ever been at the World Cup belongs to Lefter Kucukandonyadis of Turkey in 1954.
79.Two trophies have represented victory during the World Cup: the Jules Rimet Trophy from 1930 to 1970, and the FIFA World Cup Trophy from 1974 to the present day.
80.The Jules Rimet Trophy, originally named Victory, but later renamed in honour of former FIFA president Jules Rimet, was made of gold plated sterling silver and lapis lazuli and depicted Nike, the Greek goddess of victory. It stood 35 centimetres (14 in) high and weighed 3.8 kilograms (8.4 lb).
81.On 20 March 1966, four months before the 1966 FIFA World Cup in England, the trophy was stolen during a public exhibition at Westminster Central Hall. The trophy was found just seven days later wrapped in newspaper at the bottom of a suburban garden hedge in Upper Norwood, South London.
82.As a security measure, The Football Association secretly manufactured a replica of the trophy for use in post-match celebrations. The replica was also used on subsequent occasions until 1970. The replica was sold at an auction in 1997 for £254,500, when it was purchased by FIFA.
83.The Jules Rimet Trophy was stolen in 1983 and never recovered. Four men were eventually tried and convicted in absentia for the crime.
84.The replacement trophy, the FIFA World Cup Trophy, was first used in 1974. Made of 18 carat gold with a malachite base, it depicts two human figures holding up the Earth. The current holder of the trophy is Italy, winner of the 2006 World Cup.
85.Fifty-three submissions were received from sculptors in seven countries to produce its replacement.
86.Italian artist Silvio Gazzaniga was awarded the commission. The trophy stands 36.5 centimetres (14.4 inches) tall and is made of 5 kg (11 lb) of 18 carat (75%) solid gold with a base (13 centimetres [5.1 inches] in diameter) containing two layers of malachite. Produced by Bertoni, Milano, it weighs 6.175 kg (13.6 lb) in total, depicts two human figures holding up the Earth.
87.It was first presented at the 1974 FIFA World Cup, to West German captain Franz Beckenbauer.
88.The trophy has the visible engravement "FIFA World Cup" in outpouring letters at its base. The name of the country whose national team wins each tournament is engraved in the bottom side of the trophy, and therefore is not visible when the trophy is standing upright.
89. FIFA and the Coca-Cola Company took the real solid-gold trophy to 86 countries during a 225-day journey. The ceremonial start of the tour was held on 21st September 2009, as FIFA President Joseph S. Blatter and Coca-Cola Chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent accompanied the trophy on the first steps of its journey.
90.The winning team gets to keep an identical (but gold-plated) replica of the Cup. The trophy cost approximately $50,000 to make, but today its value is estimated to over $10 million USD.
91.On 8 June 1998 Joseph S. Blatter (Switzerland) was elected as the successor to Dr João Havelange (Brazil) as the eighth FIFA President.
92.FIFA President Joseph S Blatter was the driving force behind a partnership with SOS Children's Villages that started in 1994. This organisation maintains more than 130 villages for children all over the world and it benefits from FIFA's financial and material support.
93.Head of SA LOC, Danny Jordaan served as the president or vice-president of various soccer boards from 1983 to 1992. In 1997, he was elected as the Chief Executive Officer of the South African Football Association (SAFA). He headed South Africa's unsuccessful 2006 FIFA World Cup bid but also the 2010 FIFA World Cup bid, this time successfully.
94.It has been estimated that the 2010 World Cup will create some 129 000 jobs.
95.It will also contribute around R21-billion to the country's gross domestic product and another R7.2-billion in government taxes, with the 350 000 visitors spending a some R9.8-billion in the country.
96.If you are attending the FIFA World Cup 2010 in South Africa, it is very important that you know what a vuvuzela is. It's the noise-making trumpet of South African football fans, and it's come to symbolise the sport in the country.
97.The ancestor of the vuvuzela is said to be the kudu horn - ixilongo in isiXhosa, mhalamhala in Tshivenda - blown to summon African villagers to meetings.
98.On the day it was announced that South Africa would host the 2010 Fifa World Cup some 20 000 vuvuzelas were sold by enterprising street vendors.
99.The world football governing body, FIFA, wanted to ban the use of vuvuzelas during the World Cup 2010 because of concerns that hooligans could use the instrument as a weapon. However the South African Football Association (SAFA) made a presentation that vuvuzelas were essential for an authentic South African football experience, and FIFA decided in July 2008 to drop the ban.
100. Some 3-million tickets have been made available for the 2010 World Cup's 64 matches. One third, or a million, will be allocated to South African football fans, another million to international visitors, and the third million to sponsors, teams and the "Fifa family"

Travel24

La Repubblica in Rome quoted the Russian Chief of Staff General Nikolay Makarov that the US missile shield scheduled for installation in East Europe is blocking the signing by Presidents Obama and Medvedev of a new START agreement (strategic arms reduction treaty) between the USA and Russia.

(Rome) What is the significance today of Central Europe which still retains residues of the era when it was known by its former German designation, Mitteleuropa? Just who are the peoples and nations of the great swath of Central Europe that in the West was called “East Europe” during the Cold War, the cradle of much of our common culture, but also the part of Europe nearer Russia where the US war machine supports antiRussian governments and where pressures continue to install what remains of Reagan’s Star Wars fantasies in the form of spatial antimissile shields?

Since history does sometimes repeat itself, I propose taking a new look at this part of the Old World, in a sense a world in itself, where today one hears loud and clear multiple echoes of the past and one witnesses historical repetitions, as the USA puts the whole area in its sights. This is the part of Europe where less than a century ago the USA and its allies intervened to encircle revolutionary Russia, thwart the Revolution and circumscribe the very idea of Socialism that Russia dared propose to the world. Yesterday it was economic embargoes and military intervention. Today American missile shields, military bases and antiRussian regimes again threaten Russia. It is the same old story: occupation of Central Europe, as if it were a vacuum, a nullity, an empty space deprived of its own historicocultural time and place. The ignorance of history is indeed a dangerous lacuna in international politics.

After Germany’s defeat in World War II and the forty years later collapse of Socialist East Europe, West Europeans were surprised to learn that the culture and significance of the Old World area between Germany and Russia had survived. Like a Phoenix the area once called Mitteleuropa because it was a largely German culturaleconomic zone of influence—despite all its particularisms—was reborn, bringing with it the ghosts of former ethnicities but also the character of a people for whom culture is fundamental. The European cultural idea. After travel in that large part of Europe during the Cold War, I came to like the romantic sound of the German translation of Central Europe to describe that Sovietdominated part of Europe which the West insisted on labeling “East Europe” to differentiate it from “democratic West Europe”. I have used here the terms Mitteleuropa and Central Europe interchangeably.

PRIOR TO WORLD WAR I and the breakup of the AustroHungarian Monarchy, “Mitteleuropa” was the area’s most descriptive designation. Parts of Central Europe today are well on their way to becoming American Protectorates and again an antiRussian buffer zone. For despite the wishes of many Central Europeans themselves and America’s apparent ignorance of history to the contrary, old Mitteleuropa is again present, in many respects still what it always was.

Geographically there exists a big and a little Mitteleuropa. Its confines are imprecise and subjective. In its broadest sense, Mitteleuropa comprises the sweep of lands from the Baltic Sea to a little south of the Alps and from Germany, Austria and Italy in the West to Russia in the East and the Black Sea, Greece and Turkey in the southeast. Under AustroHungarian domination Mitteleuropa included also Germany and reached as far east as western Byelorussia, Ukraine (especially Galicia), Lithuania and in the South to northeast Italy, Slovenia and Croatia and in the Southeast to Romania and Serbia. Under Russian domination it included all the Communist Peoples’ Republics which for the West was “East Europe.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the economic collapse of USSR, the old name, Mitteleuropa, reappeared, especially in reference to a more restricted Mitteleuropa consisting of Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, western Romania, Slovenia, Croatia and Austria.

The word, Mitteleuropa, as well as the term and concept, were German inventions. The word’s meaning may be interpreted politically, culturally, historically and geographically. Though Germany too was part of that geographical area corresponding to contemporary Central Europe, today Mitteleuropa and its ideological concepts are at the same time near to and distant from Germany and Berlin. After the geopolitical watershed of 1989, old Mitteleuropa, also geographically at the doors of Trieste, Munich and Vienna, magically reemerged—good, bad and ugly—from the Socialist experience, merging more and more with the West, entering not only trade agreements but also joining NATO and the European Union, and above all military accords with the USA with antiRussian overtones. Some West Europeans now wonder just what kind of Mitteleuropa it is that is joining the European Union.

Over a decade ago I did a newspaper reportage on Mitteleuropa. I started my tour from Trieste at the southern gates of Central Europe. Trieste, the frontier city where novelist Italo Svevo and the poet Umberto Sava used to write in the famous Caffé San Marco, a tradition continued today by writerjournalist Claudio Magris. As in the 1800s, the atmosphere of that Mitteleuropa café is again marked by gypsy violins and Viennese waltzes, poetry readings and Sachertorte, fin de siècle lamps, chess players, and Italian, German and Slavic languages, underlining a cultural unity that has survived time and events in Central Europe.

In his monumental book, Danube, the Germanist Magris depicts Napoleon’s victory over the Austrians at Ulm as the victory of modern Europe over former HapsburgDanubian Europe, the latter a world that died with World War I. According to Magris’ interpretation, Napoleon’s triumph was the victory of the unification process over the old Europe of separate nations, of the totalizer over the particular. The dialectical process continued with the rise of unifying Communism in East Europe, and then its fall and the concomitant reawakening of the particulars of Old Europe. Magris notes that we are witnessing the revenge of variegated Mitteleuropa: in his opinion, a positive phenomenon when it means freedom from tyrannies of various sorts; dangerous however when it means the return to the old hates and tensions of particularism. Antiquity can be inserted positively into the process of the construction of the modern, or, it can be merely an instrument of defense and rejection of any change at all. At Magris’ Stammtisch in the Old World café, nostalgia for the good old times is one thing, reality another. The central part of Europe that wants to return to the world scene and manifests traditions of liberalism, the defense of the individual and its great historical cultural traditions has nothing to do with nostalgia for Hapsburg times.

But why the word, Mitteleuropa today? What does it mean? For Magris, Germany is the point. For centuries now Germany has always been the point in continental Europe. Although the German word itself is little used today, one continues to speculate about Mitteleuropa. Magris emphasizes the former concepts of German Kleindeutsch—a small Germany based on Prussia—and Grossdeutsch—a big Germany based on expansion toward Vienna and the East which in a limited way is again the case today. The German word, Mitteleuropa (Middle Europe), was born in the 19th century to indicate German economic and political supremacy—and also racial superiority in its most decadent formulation—recalling Edward Said’s similar theses regarding fundamental Western attitudes regarding the Orient in his book, Orientalism.

When the concept of Mitteleuropa revived in the 1960s, people in the West began guessing at what the word implied for the nonGerman world of East Europe: though born as a German idea, the German word nonetheless today refers to a nonGerman world. Yet, many common aspects survive throughout Mitteleuropa: architecture, common cultural traditions in Vienna, Budapest, Prague and Krakow, ideas concerning analytical philosophy, ideological systems to explain the world, pessimism about history, irony, sensitivity for marginal things. The café tradition of hardworking people who like a drink on Sunday: from the Caffé San Marco to the Slavia in Prague, the Café Central in Vienna, the HungariaNew York Café in Budapest, the old Picador in Warsaw. Vienna today is symbolic of the former Mitteleuropa: again a kind of melting pot of peoples of former Mitteleuropa: Poles and Ruthenians, Ukrainians and Romanians, Hungarians and Transylvanians, Roma gypsies and Eastern Jews, and where in the traditional New Year’s Concert always sounds the famous Radetsky March by Johann Strauss Sr. of 1840. An area of the honesty of “my word is my bond,” a love of literature and art. The idea of “to be rather than to seem.” Which made of those peoples also politically gullible peoples. Much of it Central Europe loves German culture and is still in Germany’s area of economic influence. But it is a world that in theory prefers to maintain a distance from Berlin. The reality is that the greater immediate problem for Europe of the East comes from the western shores of the Atlantic, from an America that prefers to see old Mitteleuropa, right up to the borders of Russia, as its sphere of influence simply because it won the Cold War.

I read a news dispatch from Berlin about Mitteleuropa by an Italian journalist, a romantic attempt to recreate the kind of united Europe that was divided by Yalta after WWII. The most modern idea of Mitteleuropa on the part of East Europeans themselves in effect demands a new role for that other Europe, the Europe East of Germany and West of Russia which seems to westerners dark and mysterious even if it is no longer immune to American foreign policy. Though some of the individual countries have joined the European Union, their aim and goal is a Europe not only of the EU or under the hegemony of big nations like France and Germany. They also stand in defense of the particularities of the forgotten Europe in the center of the continent, in countries such as Slovenia and Czech Republic that Kundera still calls Bohemia. Today, twenty years after Danube, that other Europe is in fact attaining a parity it has never had—and that, despite clumsy, abrasive US interventions, space shields and military installations—precisely within the European Union. Or perhaps another kind of unity will emerge in which states will be less important and ethnic groups and cultures stronger. Old ideas, of course. But Central Europe’s search is for a specific role on the continent of Europe so as not to be swallowed up by the neoliberal, capitalistic European Union. Perhaps a kind of union of the peoples of the Danube, of peoples that can again perhaps recognize Vienna as its capital. Vienna, so as not to return to the German fold. Yet, nationalism thrives everywhere. As one Slovene friend told me: first a Slovene, second a European.

The Germanist Magris cautions that one should not forget the tensions and hates of the former AustroHungarian Empire with which many of its own peoples could not identify. Despite claims of rightwing intellectuals like Kundera, the past of Mitteleuropa was by no means progressive in comparison to Communist East Europe. Moreover the victory of the West over Communism in East Europe should be evaluated carefully. For perhaps the last word has not yet been spoken. Most definitely the question of Socialism is not dead in the East. Not everyone is convinced of the superiority of capitalism. Many Europeans in general are not. The Catholic Church and its popes are not. Bulgarian farmers are not. Hungarian workers are not. There can still be some surprises. One has long hoped that some kind of Mitteleuropean mentality could be the basis for regional cooperation. I believe the only variety would have to be socialistic. For it is in their DNA. Its more universal, humanistic politicocultural heritage—despite the old particularisms—is in the long run simply too great for capitalistic individualism. The socialist ideals of liberty, equality and brotherhood once overcame individualism and can again. The problem for many Central Europeans was that Socialism in practice came to them though the Soviet filter, so that many came to believe that real Socialism developed more in Sweden than in Mitteleuropa. Yet, to know those peoples a bit where the spirit of brotherhood and equality survive is to recognize that real Socialism is at home here. And that it may return. American military bases or space shields notwithstanding.

Recent history shows that one of the most urgent problems facing former MitteleuropaCentral Europe is the threat of resurgent nationalisms. The end of Communism opened the gates to nationalistic totalitarianism. Modern Central European nations must defend themselves against reactionary nationalism, against which the European Union is supposed to be a shield … though in practice it is an increasingly modest one. Since 2006 Poland has been in the throes of that struggle. A couple years ago a Warsaw friend wrote me that Poland was already then a police state. Meanwhile the peoples in Central Europe want what the West has. And they want it fast. That desire however does not justify rabid nationalism and savage capitalism. Nor does it exclude Socialism; after all Marx too considered wellbeing the basis for Socialism. In my work in Mitteleuropa I found that though many people rejected the Soviet model, they did not—and still do not—reject Socialism. Nonetheless, considering the threats of US interventionism, Socialism in one country does not seem possible. In Mitteleuropa, it would necessarily have to be a simultaneous development, a bloc movement, in several countries at once.

An old CommunistSocialist acquaintance, Jiri Pelikan, former Czech Communist leader and militant in the “Prague Spring” under Alexander Dubcek, believed a new kind of internationalism was required. A new social contract between governments and the governed. I would add especially today if only to avoid corporatemilitary regimes as in the contemporary USA. It was an irony of history for many Czechs that the Central European country with the most deeply rooted Western heritage became the prime ideological outpost of Moscow and was cut off from West Europe: the country of “Socialism with a democratic face” the most Soviet loyal. Czechoslovakia, like WWI Germany, was ripe for Socialism. Yet afflicted by contradictions and tensions, betrayed by the West by the 1938 Munich Pact and handed over to Nazi Germany, though still the center of Europe between East and West and torn between past and present, Czechs suffered from a national schizophrenia. Disappointed Czechs drinking record quantities of their famous beer, strangers in their own city, convinced of their inability to change either people or events, living in a Kafkaesque world escaping into alcohol. I remember the words of a Czech student leader: “West Europeans who no longer understand us are far away but Russians too are far far away from us. Russians are romantic people, while we Czechs are very practical.” That is Mitteleuropa speaking.

Once in the famous literary café of Prague, Slavia, I noted in block letters the following:

MISTRUST OF THE WEST

FASCINATION WITH SOCIALISM

MISTRUST OF SOVIET ACHIEVEMENTS

LURE OF THE WEST

In the last century everything happened so fast in Central Europe—World War I, NazismFascism, WWII, Communism and now capitalism—that people there today, though beginning to get acclimated to their new postCold War condition, are still drunk with “freedom,” as evident in Ukraine. One should hope they do not throw overboard their special cultural awareness in favor of the promised material wellbeing of savage capitalism. It is easy to criticize the dangers of comfort and ease of the “chewing gum society” of the West; yet East Europeans very much want the chewing gum. The Polish Pope, Karol Wojtyla, returned to that subject at the end of his life: “Nazism,” he said in his controversial affirmation, “was the absolute evil, and Communism the necessary evil,” with the emphasis on “necessary.” His words were interpreted to mean that Socialism is necessary to combat unlimited and uncontrolled Capitalism.

What were the bloody wars in exYugoslavia about but the ghost of the nationalism that for nearly half a century seemed overcome in Socialist East Europe? Magris reflects that struggle in his assessment of the conflict between the world of the Rhine (Germany and the West) and the world of the Danube (Mitteleuropa), between unitary German culture and heterogeneous, multinational Danubian culture. Former Mitteleuropa was above all the story of the meeting of German, Jewish and many small cultures, using German as the common language. Its culture is more than Pilsner beer and chamber music trios. The difference today is that the Kafkas write in Czech or Slovak or Hungarian or Polish, not in German. And one prefers to speak of Zusammenschluss instead of Anschluss.

Despite his love for and dedication to the concept, Magris is largely pessimistic about Mitteleuropa. He was then concerned about the eventual role of Germany. Today I am certain he worries more about the USA. He worries about countries like Romania with weak economies and strong nationalism. The realities of Hungarians against Romanians, Slovaks against Czechs, Croats against Serbs are troubling phenomena that recall the worst of the past. Damned Bulgarians, charged its neighbors, damned Romanians, said the Hungarians as the two nations fought over Transylvania, damned Hungarians, said the Romanians and built fences between the two Eastern nations while Hungary was tearing down the fences between it and West Europe, damned Croatsdamned Serbs, the two brothers swore as they went to war one against the other. Battles of words and not only. Ethnic minorities and religious minorities as Orthodox Serbs slaughtered Moslem Kosovars who long struggled in Yugoslavia for independence. And of more recent vintage, damned Americans, who bombed Belgrade and supported the independence movement in Kosovo in order to erect there one of America’s major military bases.

Fortunately those many diverse peoples, though they cannot change overnight, have long and powerful cultural legacies to fall back on. Moreover, the rules of the European Union, as negative as they are economically, socially and politically, in the long run can help prevent them from attacking each other and reassure them about latent expansionistic aspirations of Germany that today seem to have vanished in history. The chief threat to Central Europe today comes from the West, across the Atlantic. The threat to make of them American colonies.

The concept of Mitteleuropa is also an emotional response to a cultural history that is universal. Writers from east of Germany have long influenced world culture. The work and voices of some of them still play roles in European culture today: the Polish Nobel poet, Czeslaw Milosz; Joseph Roth, the Galician Jew assimilated in the AustroHungarian Empire who wrote in German, the great arbiter of East European Jewry for the West (the novel, Radetsky March and the The Legend of the Holy Drinker); Franz Kafka, who in his back and forth between Vienna and Prague depicted the heart of Mitteleuropa; Franz Werfel, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Georg Lukács. When Poland was still Communist I had the good fortune of interviewing in Warsaw the writers Andrzei Kusniewicz and Julian Stryjkowski, when they were both over eighty, survivors of a generation of Central European intellectuals who hardly knew nationality. For although technically AustroHungarian, Mitteleuropa was a Babel of separatism, its writers, the first cultural Europeanists, depicted a cosmopolitan allEuropean culture. Kusniewicz suggested that to appreciate that former unity you only had to look at “the architecture of nearly identical Sackbahnhöfe (End Train Stations) from Galicia to Trieste to grasp its unity.” Both writers, representative of many others, spent their artistic lives fighting Fascism and describing their multilingual culture of speaking and reading in Polish, Russian, Yiddish, German, English and French.

YUGOSLAVIA AND MITTELEUROPA

PostWWII East Europe, though in the throes of revolution and counterrevolution (the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague uprising of 1967), social upheavals, ideological purges and the promises and hopes for Socialism, was an exciting historical moment. Already after WWI there had been much enthusiasm for the idea of southern Slav unity and the idea of a Yugoslav (southern Slav) state. Yugoslavia, bordering with Magris’ Trieste, was long a key to the East European conundrum because it broke away from Moscow control and sought another path to Socialism. Only a few hours from Trieste beckoned names like Ljubljana, Zagreb and Beograd, capitals of Yugoslav republicsstates held together by the power of the nationalistic Yugoslav Communist League of Marshal Tito and Milovan Djilas. (Djilas later dissented from the party line over internal issues, wrote a damning book, The New Class, was arrested and later lived in internal exile in his apartment in Belgrade where I had the good fortune of interviewing him several times. His book, Conversations With Stalin, provide a rich background in MarxismLeninism in practice and his views of why it ultimately failed.)

In those early years of Socialism in practice great debates and polemics over MarxistLeninist internationalism and nationalism shook the Communist world. Yet Tito’s Yugoslavia was very social: comradery, solidarity and expressions of the passions and pathos of the human condition. While various uprisings in Socialist East Europe were put down and the Cold War sharpened, Yugoslavia appeared to be one unified country. In the early days of Yugoslav Socialism, there were few signs of international conflicts and oppressions of minorities. Few signs of what was to happen a generation later when the diverse peoples of different religions but all speaking the same language slaughtered each other. Though in original Leninist theory, also the Yugoslav state was supposed to ultimately “wither away”, neither Tito nor Djilas intended the state’s demise. Therefore Yugoslavia split from Moscow. Yugoslavia’s problem was that neither did Serbia or Croatia or Slovenia or Bosnia or Montenegro or Macedonia intend withering away within the Yugoslav Federation. In the 1980s, at the time things fell apart in the land of the southern Slavs, Djilas told me it would be a bloody struggle: “Just wait till it breaks out in Bosnia,” he said, “blood will flow in rivers.” The unity the Southern Slavs dreamed of in the early 20th century had come full circle and collapsed in a paroxysm of madness in the 1990s.

After the Yugoslav union split up and each republic set out alone and even a certain normality began to develop, American bombers flying from aircraft carrier Italy returned in the 1990s to destroy the old SerbYugoslav capital, Belgrade, just as had German bombers in WWII. Allegedly to put a stop to the bloody internecine in the land of the Southern Slavs, the USA in reality aimed at a foothold there –and eventually got it in Kosovo, part of Serbia.

THE THREAT

In 2008, Warsaw and Washington struck a deal on deploying ten US longrange interceptor missiles in Poland as part of a global airdefence system which was heavily pushed by the US administration of George W. Bush. Now Obama has launched a review of the controversial system which Washington claims is intended to block potential Iranian attacks, a system fiercely opposed by Russia. The antimissile system, meant to be ready by 2013, would also include a radar base in the Czech Republic, Poland’s southern neighbour.

Moscow is enraged by what it sees (with ample justification) as the latest US foray into its sphere of influence and has threatened to train nuclear warheads on Poland and the Czech Republic, both of which left the Communist bloc in 1989 and joined NATO 10 years later. Obama’s review of the antimissile system sparked concerns in Warsaw and Prague that after sticking out their necks for Washington, they would be left to take the flak from Moscow amid a thawing of ties between the two giants. Though President Obama has apparently eliminated Reagan’s technologically weak Star Wars systems, he has supported the Bush plan for the installation of antimissile shields in Poland and Czech Republic, perhaps also updated radar sites in addition to major US military bases already in Bulgaria in the southeast corner of old Mitteleuropa.

Such talk regularly raises alarm in Moscow which charges the US with accelerating rearmament. Logically Moscow asks, antimissile shields against whose missiles? The Iranian threat, America answers. A system to protect Europe. That is indeed bullshit. Though America considers as an alternative the installation of the shield in Turkey, the question of US threats to and fears of Russia, Communist or not, remains.

Many American military men agreed with some WWII Germans that the United States had fought the wrong World War II. German generals and even Admiral Karl Donitz, Hitler’s successor for a few days, hoped up that the Allies would allow them to surrender to the West and then fight the real war in the East together. The generals were ready. Like Napoleon and Hitler, General Patton too dreamed of a triumphal march straight to Moscow. Because of general fatigue and nuclear fears Allied troops couldn’t march east at war’s end but for subsequent decades many Nazi policies visavis the USSR were to be followed to the letter by the United States. Former Nazis and their collaborators in Central Europe, including countless war criminals, became America’s allies. America’s embrace of such unsavory characters only made plain the nation’s leadership’s willingness to ally with the devil if necessary to protect its class interests.

After the collapse of the USSR and the end of Cold War, the whole world changed. But not US ruling class attitudes toward Russia. The fear of Russia remains, a fear communicated to the masses via the always compliant corporate media. Why, one wonders? Is the Russian bear on the warpath? Is Russia pressing against West Europe and establishing military bases all over the world? Is Russia a dangerous Fascist dictatorship? Or is today’s Russian capitalism only sham to cover up what is in reality masked Communism? Perhaps Socialism still lives in Russia?

I found some telling statistics of the year 2009 compiled by Russia’s Gallup Poll, the Levada Center. Only 29% of Russians consider the country better off now than in the Soviet era, while 60% regret the end of the Soviet Union and think it could have been saved. A whopping 51% want more state intervention than today and 63% think the state should provide public services and guarantee a decent standard of living. And as for a dictatorship in Russia, President Medvedv enjoys a popularity rating of 74%, Putin 79%, both elected democratically. Those are terrifying statistics to diedinthewool capitalists. Hardly surprising then that in this context American conservatives worry that the passage of a law establishing an absurdly limited National Health Service smacks of—horror of all horrors!—“SOCIALISM.” The “containment” of Russia, and its possible bad example, is therefore once again, necessary. Mitteleuropa is where these paranoias will inevitably play themselves out.

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http://www.bestcyrano.org/?p=4815 North Carolina native Special Editor GAITHER STEWART is Cyrano’s Journal Online and The Greanville Post’s European correspondent. He’s based in Rome, but he’s currently planning a long stay in Buenos Aires sometime in 2010.