Anne Appelbaum explains in "The Worst of the Madness":

"Murder became ordinary during wartime, wrote Milosz.... young boys from law-abiding, middle-class families became hardened criminals, thugs for whom "the killing of a man presents no great moral problem." Theft became ordinary too, as did falsehood and fabrication. People learned to sleep through sounds that would once have roused the whole neighborhood: the rattle of machine-gun fire, the cries of men in agony, the cursing of the policeman dragging the neighbors away.

For all of these reasons, Milosz explained, "the man of the East cannot take Americans [or other Westerners] seriously." Because they hadn't undergone such experiences, they couldn't seem to fathom what they meant, and couldn't seem to imagine how they had happened either. "Their resultant lack of imagination," he concluded, "is appalling."1

But Milosz's bitter analysis did not go far enough. Almost sixty years after the poet wrote those words, it is no longer enough to say that we Westerners lack imagination. Timothy Snyder, a Yale historian whose past work has ranged from Habsburg Vienna to Stalinist Kiev, takes the point one step further. In Bloodlands, a brave and original history of mass killing in the twentieth century, he argues that we still lack any real knowledge of what happened in the eastern half of Europe in the twentieth century. And he is right.... Snyder's ambition is to persuade the West - and the rest of the world - to see the war in a broader perspective.... The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder's "bloodlands," which others have called "borderlands," run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia (see map on page 10). This is the region that experienced not one but two - and sometimes three - wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction."

All that, and north to Finland, too. The Bloodlands are where the great wars started, and in those wars their name was earned. They are what so many fought for, and failed to fight for, and beyond the effect of those choices on us, lies their own story. Of war, and soldiers. Heroes, and villains. And remembrance.

Their stories, too, must be part of our remembrance. Lest we forget.

UPDATE: See also Canada's National Post today, as Father De Souza makes a similar point in "Karol Wojtyla's War."

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1) Swiss Gov't comes to accommodations with various Islamist groups for internal security reasons - do what you want here, but no attacks;

2) Islamist groups use Swiss facilities with increasing visibility;

3) Non-Islamist Muslim population grows;

4) Non-Muslim Swiss population (who are, like the French, stunningly racist by nature) is PO'ed at the government actions and at the increasing visibility of both the Islamist and benign Muslim populations and performs a gratuitous act of foot-stomping. Or, as Otter put it, "a really futile and stupid gesture..."

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"Switzerland's referendum vote to ban minarets is needlessly xenophobic but it does not infringe the religious liberty of Swiss Muslims. Minarets remain emblematic of mosques in the Muslim heartlands but there is no theological reason why houses of worship in the West have to incorporate such towers.... European mosques should stop mindlessly mimicking Eastern design and create prayer halls that blend into the landscape.

Muslims who have settled in Switzerland (and elsewhere in Europe) should not confuse culture with creed.... They should practice a Swiss Islam that is rooted in the society in which they live.... When European Muslims unthinkingly endorse this warped [Wahabbi] theology by desiring medieval Sharia, defending honour killings, stoning to death, forced marriages, Muslim exceptionalism and a separatist society, they only invoke fear and exacerbate anti-Muslim sentiment. When Europe's Muslims extol such un-Koranic doctrines as the niqab (face veil), they exclude themselves from the mainstream.

Only when Muslim immigrants and converts in Europe reject the twisted ideology of a fundamentalist male clergy will the chief causes of anti-Muslim prejudice in Europe recede."

The Swiss Muslim community, whose reaction has been measured and restrained, would do well to take his advice, because this vote is not the end.

The minaret vote was about 57-58% for, and the organizations behind the referendum campaign are targeting burqas and forced marriages next. Which will resonate widely, and is good political tactics by the the Swiss People's Party.

The latter initiative may also upset any Jewish Hassidic communities in Switzerland, but really, after reading some of the stories within the Jewish community about that, I have zero sympathy. Cardinal principle: people must not be disposable as property, under any framework - it will always be abused. Tough new laws around forced marriages are a nearly surefire winner in Switzerland, and even attempting to oppose that proposal will raise a lot of eyebrows and concern levels.

Incidentally, a referendum to ban Swiss arms exports, held at the same time, went down in flames, with 68% against.

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"The root cause of Spain's trouble is that it joined monetary union before its economy was ready. EMU halved Spanish interest rates almost overnight. Real rates were minus 2pc for much of this decade. Combined private and corporate debt reached 230pc of GDP, funded by French and German savings. The credit boom masked a steady decline in productivity over the last decade. Spain's unit labour costs have risen by about 30pc compared to Germany. The Bank of Spain made heroic efforts to counter the effects of the bubble by forcing banks to put aside extra reserves, known as dynamic provisioning, but the sheer scale of the problem has washed over the defences. Spain no longer has the escape valve of devaluation to claw back market share. It cannot resort to emergency monetary stimulus - as Switzerland, Britain, the US, and Japan are doing to prevent the onset of debt deflation. Prices are already falling at a rate of 1.2pc."

Ow. Sorry to see it happen to Spain. Not at all sorry to see it happen to Zapatero and his cronies. Meanwhile, in Ireland, they're taking a different approach to their banking crisis. Is it better? Not sure, but I'll throw it out there...

Ireland's approach to their bank bailout recently got coverage from Bloomberg and The American.

The basic concept is that toxic mortgages will be bought from banks outright. Not at the banks' own valuation, but not at the bottom mark-to-market rate either. Last week, Irish Finance Minister Brian Lenihan announced that a special agency would buy EUR 77 billion ($113 billion, bank valuation) of assets from 5 lenders at about 70% of the assets' carrying value based on independent valuations of legacy loans, paying about EUR 54 billions. Mark to market value if banks tried to sell them on the market is estimated at around EUR 47 billion. So the banks take a 30% penalty to their books, which is sharp but not bankrupting, and the government owns the assets. The transaction is paid for with government-backed bonds, and banks who wish/need to do so can pledge the bonds to the European Central Bank in return for cash.

There are some attractive features to that, and it does acknowledge the lessons of recent Latin American and Japanese crises, which is that allowing toxic debt to sit on financial institutions' books impairs capital markets, can strangle recoveries, and has led to "lost decades."

Now, here's the catch in the room. If property values over the next 10 years rise from their current spot by a total of 10% or so, or just under 1% per year on average, the plan breaks even. If they don't, or in fact continue to fall due to a widespread foreclosure/ ghost town new-builds glut and/or over-valuation in the market, then the Irish government is about to take a big bath. Bloomberg's David Reilly:

"Recapitalizations that make creditors and shareholders share in the pain, such as debt-for-equity swaps, should be an option. Ireland, like other countries, has to get over the notion that creditors are a sacred group who must be spared at all costs. At the very least, the government shouldn't ask taxpayers to wager so much on the hope that things will stop getting worse."

I pretty much agree with that. But creditors aren't the only group who can't be sacred cows. Which is why I generally agree with the broad thrust of this New Republic piece, which looks at the issue of senior bankers' compensation and treatment in these situations through a useful lens:

What happens to people like this in other bankruptcy-type proceedings? And the answer is, they don't do nearly as well on a personal level as the bankers have.

But then, they probably don't give as much, in personal financial contributions, to the people who are running the bankruptcy and setting terms. It's good to be the government.

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If you want to peek into the abyss of hyperinflation, there are certainly South American examples like Argentina and Brazil. But the definitive economic cases are European - Germany, Austria, and Hungary during the 1920s, when people took wheelbarrows of bank notes to buy a loaf of bread. Staring down the daily devolutions in those examples is instructive.

"When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Collapse" is now available online, for free, which a lot less than Amazon will charge. It's an interesting book, for a lot of reasons.

Instead of dry economics, it offers snapshots of daily life as inflation destroys peoples' savings, and then their daily lives, and finally their livelihood. The accounts include significant excerpts from British Foreign Office records and reports, with a few appearances by Ernest Hemmingway (who wrote for the Toronto Daily Star!).

If nothing else, reading it will help make some of the events in the 1930s make a lot more sense. Madness, it was - but not madness without antecedent.

The other thing that makes it interesting is the very quality that makes it so thriller-like. Every time you think it can't get worse, every time you think that the effects should finally be obvious, the widely-respected "smart people" in charge plunge in deeper, and make things worse. All without serious examination by mainstream opinion, no matter how low things go. After a while, it's like a firestorm, unstoppable by any internal force, and spent only when it runs out of fuel (i.e. willing and coerced creditors). As the book's final pages note:

"Much as it may have been recognised that stability would have to be arranged some day, and that the greater the delay the harder it would be, there never seemed to be a good time to invite trouble of that order.... The conflicting objectives of avoiding unemployment and avoiding insolvency ceased at last to conflict when Germany had both.... The take-off point in the inflationary progress, after which the advent of hyperinflation was but a matter of time, the point indeed when it became self-generating and politically irreducible except for short periods.... lay on the falling curve of political possibility, with which was closely linked the degree of political power and courage that the government, sorely pressed as it was, was able to muster.

What really broke Germany was the constant taking of the soft political option in respect of money. The take-off point therefore was not a financial but a moral one; and the political excuse was despicable, for no imaginable political circumstances could have been more unsuited to the imposition of a new financial order than those pertaining in November 1923, when inflation was no longer an option. The Rentenmark was itself hardly more than an expedient then, and could scarcely have been introduced successfully had not the mark lost its entire meaning. Stability came only when the abyss had been plumbed, when the credible mark could fall no more, when everything that four years of financial cowardice, wrong-headedness and mismanagement had been fashioned to avoid had in fact taken place, when the inconceivable had ineluct-ably arrived."

Weimar Germany is the most extreme example. Understand that I'm not saying we're headed for hyperinflation (though I am willing to predict 15%+ interest rates by the end of Obama's first term), or that Weimar's fate shall be ours. History depends on a lot of specifics, and does not repeat itself. But it does rhyme some, and so watching how things devolved in Germany et. al., and the effects on daily life, are instructive. Instructive in America, and also instructive in Europe as their demographic bubble and debt bubble become mutually reinforcing over the next 2 decades.

Some of my take-aways:

• Never believe that "people couldn't be that stupid" with respect to anything humans do. The answer is always "yes, they can." So, what are you gonna do about it?

• Never believe that anything must eventually become obvious to everyone if they get bad enough, or even to most people. Oddly, larger, seismic things can be less clearly grasped than smaller things. In the case of Germany and Austria, the only limits they ever reached were external.

• Democracy, by itself, is not proof against any of this. Nor is dictatorship. Germany's example from 1919-1924 illustrates both.

• If you're looking for positive signs on the way down, there are always things you can point to. But the larger trend remains, as long as its underpinnings do.

• High inflation gathers supporters and friends in high places, and they cut across traditional interest lines. It isn't always who you'd think.

• The ability of hostile foreign creditors to make things significantly worse should never be underestimated. A creditor who wants to weaken you for strategic reasons (for Germany, France's Poincare), absolutely will. Even if it costs him to do so.

• One error that makes the others so much easier to commit is believing that total money supply and inflation are disconnected phenomena. Which is why I understand the arguments being made, but am not sanguine about this background page from the NY Fed.

None of these bullet points can convey the impact of reading the actual story, and watching it unfold on page after page. Read it yourself, and decide what you take away...

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Q Thank you, Mr. President. In the context of all the multilateral activity that's been going on this week -- the G20, here at NATO -- and your evident enthusiasm for multilateral frameworks, to work through multilateral frameworks, could I ask you whether you subscribe, as many of your predecessors have, to the school of American exceptionalism that sees America as uniquely qualified to lead the world, or do you have a slightly different philosophy? And if so, would you be able to elaborate on it?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism. I'm enormously proud of my country and its role and history in the world. If you think about the site of this summit and what it means, I don't think America should be embarrassed to see evidence of the sacrifices of our troops, the enormous amount of resources that were put into Europe postwar, and our leadership in crafting an Alliance that ultimately led to the unification of Europe. We should take great pride in that.

And if you think of our current situation, the United States remains the largest economy in the world. We have unmatched military capability. And I think that we have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional.

Now, the fact that I am very proud of my country and I think that we've got a whole lot to offer the world does not lessen my interest in recognizing the value and wonderful qualities of other countries, or recognizing that we're not always going to be right, or that other people may have good ideas, or that in order for us to work collectively, all parties have to compromise and that includes us.

And so I see no contradiction between believing that America has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity and recognizing that that leadership is incumbent, depends on, our ability to create partnerships because we create partnerships because we can't solve these problems alone.

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