Thoughts on Germany on its Latest Election

It kind of snuck up on me, but after months of talk, the German federal elections are here, and they look to herald a certain amount of chaos, rather than a clear successor to current chancellor Angela Merkel. As I checked the results a moment ago, the Social Democrats (SPD) had gathered the largest share of votes, though at just under 26% of the total they're not exactly commanding a mandate. The Christian Democrats (CDU) are at second with 24.1% and the Greens are in third place with 14.6%.

One of the things that's helped Germany weather the chaos of the past few years has been the sense of stability that came from Merkel's long reign and the grand coalitions between CDU and SPD that were formed. It's hard to see that sense of stability continuing, if everybody starts fighting about who's going to be the next chancellor, and I'm feeling a bit pessimistic at the prospect of the far-right AfD making further inroads amid the chaos.

We can debate the effectiveness of Merkel in these past sixteen years that she's been in charge (and in fact, I did debate it with my mom this morning), but it's undeniable that from outside Germany she became the face of the country that other chancellors before her, or other heads of state in other countries, haven't really managed to do. I may be able to name all the post-war German chancellors from Konrad Adenauer on down, but I'd be hard-pressed to name an SPD leader in these past few years, beyond Gerhard Schröder, whom she defeated to become chancellor, and Olaf Scholz, who seems likely to take her place now.

Now, I won't say I spend a lot of time following German politics, or even current events. I've even fallen out of the habit of checking the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Süddeutsche Zeitung a couple of times a week (blame the fact that my current job requires a bit more focus than my previous one). I used to watch Deutsche Welle's 15-minute news roundup every Sunday morning, to keep my German up, but they stopped doing it.

I do, however, like the idea of a nice, stable society out there, one that I'm familiar with and that I wouldn't mind living in again. The last few years have been a bit tough for me on that front, since the US has been a basket case, the UK has been worse thanks to Brexit, and Italy has set the template for the chaos of both since it elected Silvio Berlusconi in the 1990s. Germany wasn't always the economic powerhouse of Europe - when I lived there unemployment was over 10% and you could see a palpable difference between East and West - but it was nice to know that it was still well run and pleasant.

I'm sure it will continue to be, but it suffers, as ever, from its placement at the heart of Europe. It still has unruly neighbors to its east, in the form of Russia and the various right-wing populist governments of Hungary, Poland, Turkey and so forth. It also faces a fractious and xenophobic Britain, and an increasingly ungovernable US, while also playing bad fiscal cop to the rest of the EU.

An English relative once asked me whether my heart lay in the US, Britain or Italy, and I answered that it lay in Germany. This may have been overblown, but I don't think it's completely wrong. When I used to read the roundups from the European soccer leagues on the Guardian, I always used to imagine the feeling of being there on a Sunday night after the games had ended, a feeling I never got from reading the Italian roundup (even though I've spent a larger part of my life in Italy).

When I moved to Britain after my year in Germany, I was a little shocked at how little anyone in Britain seemed to know about Germany, though I remembered the WWII references from Euro 96, so it shouldn't have been too surprising. I suppose in that way I became a bit of a hipster (for lack of a better term) in my cheerleading for the place - it's pleasing that, in the two decades since I left, the rest of the world has caught on to what a cool place it is.

It also seems to have gotten better since I left. The government made moves to naturalize many of the foreigners who'd been living and working there for decades, and the high streets appear to have become more cosmopolitan (I remember being so excited when a sushi place finally opened in my town). Germany even started to export prestige dramas, like Deutschland 83, so it seemed that the world was finally taking notice.

So with these elections heralding a big change for the country, I'm hoping that it can continue to be prosperous, stable and tolerant, and that it can continue to set a good example (in at least a few ways) for the rest of Europe and for the US. I'm also hoping that I get to go back soon, since my last visit was in 2012 - I've always regretted not seeing more of the country, and I'd like to rectify that error.

Why was the 1918 flu forgotten?

Like everyone else in the world since March 2020, I've become conspicuously well-informed about the previous big pandemic, the 1918 flu. I've seen (and probably shared) memes on social media about people being told to wear masks back then, or how cases surged, then dipped, then surged again over the two years that the pandemic raged across the world.

Now, that preceding paragraph needs to be rendered in a special sarcasm font, because I'm totally not well-informed about the 1918 flu, though I have indeed seen more information about it in the last 18 months or so, than I had in the preceding 40 or so years of my life. But what's spurring me to write this blog today is the fact that just the other day I was reading a book about the history of Canada, published in 2006, and it makes not a single mention of the pandemic.

I even checked the notes and index, and there's nothing about 1918 flu, Spanish flu, or pandemics in the entire book. This despite a big section on the First World War, in which Canada played a prominent role, and another on the aftermath of the war (though in fairness, that section isn't so big, because the author skips over much of the 1920s).

I've been hyper-aware of this gap in history since the coronavirus pandemic began, particularly in how books from around that period have ignored it. In fact, I think the first instance where I heard of the 1918 flu was in a series of books of alternate history by Harry Turtledove, which explore the long-term consequences of the South winning the Civil War.

When preparing to write this blog, I found this post on History.com, which suggests that this collective act of forgetting came about because people made a conscious effort to forget it. So distraught was everyone at the ferocity of the illness, that doctors made a point of not writing about it; on top of that, the world was recovering from the Great War, and America was racked by political and racial violence.

The problem is, this explanation is still unsatisfying. I get that the books I typically read wouldn't necessarily make a big deal of the 1918 flu, especially because they might have been aimed at kids or written ten years later. But given how many people it affected, it's hard to imagine everyone taking the collective decision to never speak of it again, and then abiding by that decision for the next hundred years.

For one thing, I've learned in the last 18 months that there have been other forgotten pandemics since 1918. Apparently there was one in the 1950s in Britain, for example, which I only heard about in the context of this one. I suppose it makes sense that if a disease is raging only in one or two areas, or if it's over fairly quickly, then you wouldn't hear of it again.

At the same time, I'm well aware of the polio epidemic that raged throughout the Western world in the early decades of the 20th century. That was only beaten in the 1950s, when the Salk vaccine came out, but presumably the long decades in which polio was a danger to people meant it was harder to ignore.

In this context, I can't help thinking of another forgotten event, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, which I'd never heard of before the HBO Watchmen show came out a couple of years ago. In that case, the forgetting is probably easier to explain, because it happened quickly (over two days) and in just one place, though of course there were other such incidents over the course of the 20th century. And, perhaps a bit distastefully, it was easy for the rest of America to forget given who was massacred in Tulsa - what would a reader of the New York Times have cared for a Black community in Tulsa being burned to the ground?

I think that, on top of people wanting to ignore these kinds of events, the reason we've forgotten them is that it was so hard to get information out back then. One point in that History.com article that I found interesting was that the papers covering the 1918 flu didn't really talk about the human impact of it - contrast that with now, when we see people on Facebook and Twitter who have caught the coronavirus, or died of it. We're all constantly talking about it, and doing so in a way that's leaving a more-or-less permanent record - something that didn't necessarily exist 100 years ago.

Still, given how unknown these events are, it makes you wonder what else we've collectively forgotten - and whether that forgetting is setting us up to repeat whatever's happened.

Au Revoir Afghanistan

Odd historical synchronicity (or maybe not) that the US withdraws from Afghanistan just in time for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11. There's been a lot of ink spilled about what this all means, but the thing that's stuck with me the most has been the piece in Vox about the "death of liberal interventionism".

I didn't manage to read the whole thing (I try to keep my morning sweep of the news short), but one point that stood out was that, with the US riding high after the end of the Cold War and the successful intervention in Kosovo, we thought we had the moral high ground locked up... but there was nothing preventing us from doing "nation-building" were there wasn't such a clear danger of crimes against humanity. This is exactly what we ended up with after 9/11 and the rush to war in Iraq.

There are arguments for and against interventionism, but I lean toward the side that says we, as the world's superpower (at least back then), should put a stop to the most egregious crimes. I was suspicious of the motive to going to war in Iraq, even though I agreed with the idea that the world was better off without Saddam Hussein in charge of an army. I just didn't believe the arguments put forward in support of the Iraq War.

The rest is history. We quickly lost more soldiers in Iraq than the number of victims who died on 9/11, sank a crap-ton of money there to create ISIS, and lost a huge chunk of our international standing. Afghanistan wasn't as flashy a disaster, but it lasted longer and we end our involvement there with the Taliban back in charge, ready to roll back whatever notional gains we made in these two decades.

I'm not unmoved by the arguments that the US presence in Afghanistan bolstered women's education and participation in society, though. In fact, that's at the heart of what I'm talking about here. The liberal interventionism of the 1990s, as I remember it, was never only about projecting power, even if those being bombed by us at the time might remember things differently. The neocon nation-building projects of the following century, however, were absolutely about projecting power and scaring unfriendly regimes into not messing with us.

What the argument about intervention misses, and presumably that article in Vox, is that we've also become very bad at soft power. Not just since 9/11, but since Vietnam (or probably earlier, like Korea). These last twenty years of attritional warfare have sapped our ability and resolve to find non-military solutions to global problems, but it seems we never had much resolve for that approach... only now we don't even pretend to care.

One of my biggest complaints about the Obama years is that his administration oversaw US pullbacks from regions where we've been a presence for years. It may seem strange when I've just mentioned soft power, but several countries in Southeast Asia have seen cause to regret the withdrawal of US naval forces from their regions, because now China's throwing around its weight and claiming their territorial waters. US forces being there seem to have kept things calm, but now it's unlikely that the US can go back to keeping the peace there without a confrontation with China.

Africa is another example, more appropriate to talking about soft power. China is investing heavily in the continent, bankrolling infrastructure so that it can collect raw materials to feed its factories and markets. The US, on the other hand, is nowhere to be seen: I'm not saying we should be exploiting Africa's resources, but because it has little of what we want, we don't have any interest in engaging with the place. Meanwhile, China lets Africa's despotisms do what they want.

I don't see anyone in US politics who looks willing to engage with the rest of the world, and that frustrates me. Bernie Sanders, for all that I agreed with him on a lot of his platform, just seemed unengaged with the world - which may seem okay if you think that American power is exclusively a bad thing. But I do still believe that America has a positive role to play in world affairs, if it would just get itself together to do so, and if it could actually do so sensitively.

I keep coming back to initiatives like the Marshall Plan or the rebuilding of Japan. Both of those came with negatives, like the fact that the eastern half of Europe languished under the Soviets for fifty years, or that South Korea was a US-backed dictatorship until the 1970s, but Western Europe and Japan are stable, prosperous societies that grew with the help of the US. They may seem lost in the current multipolar era, but Japan essentially created the technological world we now live in, and Europe is a huge exporter of culture (including my beloved football).

This is all relevant for Afghanistan. When the US toppled the Taliban, it claimed it wanted to create a stable, open society like Afghanistan apparently had until the 1970s. If it had actually tried to help the country, rather than spending all its money on destroying Iraq and arrogantly presuming that the Afghans would be eager to turn into Americans, then the cultural gains that women, liberals and LGBTQ people have made there in the last two decades wouldn't be threatened now.

Tips for Writers: LinkedIn Learning

One of the perks of working for a large company like my previous employer, State Farm, is that there are a lot of resources available to employees. These ranged from discounts on stores via its Perks at Work program, to learning resources like Degreed and Linkedin Learning (formerly Lynda.com). The content on Degreed is mostly client-generated and client-collected, meaning that State Farm itself was putting together courses on subjects it deemed important, and cribbing from across the web to populate them.

But my big discovery was that LinkedIn Learning also contains a bunch of courses on creative stuff, which is why I was glad to find that my new employer also gives us access to it. There are a number of creative subjects on LinkedIn Learning, like photography, but the area I want to focus on is creative writing, because there's a fair amount of content on the platform that writers will find useful.

The first thing to say, though, is that you're probably better off accessing LinkedIn Learning through your employer's subscription, if they have it. It costs $29.99 per month for a monthly subscription, or $19.99/month if you take out an annual subscription, so it can be costly; if your employer doesn't offer LinkedIn Learning, you can find a number of the same courses on Udemy starting at around $15 per course. By the way, I found an article comparing the two, which claims LinkedIn offers a la carte courses, but I couldn't find anything on its pricing page other than its monthly prices, so that's potentially a strike in Udemy's favor.

The other point about LinkedIn is that it's better for fiction writers than screenwriters. I was able to find just one course related to screenwriting, but I stopped using it after a couple of days, because the teacher seems to have only one credit to his name, which I'd never heard about before. The fiction writing courses are run by actual authors (e.g. Jessica Brody) or writers who have made a career of focusing on the way stories work (e.g. Lisa Cron). I may never have heard of Jessica Brody before LinkedIn, but a quick google search reveals that she's published over 20 books - so at least she knows the industry and is a working writer.

Some of it can also be very basic. The first writing course I watched was Foundations of Fiction, which features a lot of explanations of types of point-of-view, exercises on writing types of characters, and so forth. But that proviso should only put you off if you're already a bestselling writer - those, like me, who are getting their writing careers off the ground can probably always stand to go over the basics again, every once in a while.

(It's also interesting how easy it is to not learn the basics if you're entirely self-taught, in any subject. At least a basic course will frequently explain these points in a systematic manner)

Jessica Brody also has courses that are aimed at the business side of writing, like how to sell your novel to a major publisher, and developing ideas that sell. I haven't gotten to those courses yet, but I am going through one on productivity hacks for writers, which is full of good tips even if your writing time consists of just an hour a night before bed.

One other course that I've bookmarked to watch at some point is on using Scrivener. I bought it a few years ago, and while my prose stories are still all in Word, I always consider it would be good to learn how to use it to full effect (I've also written screenplays in it).

Beyond the writing courses, there are some good courses on time management and productivity, which have some useful tips and approaches that can transfer over to writers. I'm also partial to the Desk Yogi series on movements you can do to mitigate the effects of sitting at your desk all day - like time management, these are relevant for writers and non-writers alike.

Overall, there's a good amount of creative writing content on LinkedIn Learning, enough that if you have a few minutes free at the end of your workday, you should be able to learn some useful tips or approaches to writing. It's also good to keep your mind thinking about writing, even outside of your normal writing time (though I don't think you should spend all your work time fooling around on LinkedIn Learning).

LinkedIn Learning may not have the brand-name appeal of MasterClass, but if your employer offers it for free it's a good resource, and I highly recommend it.