Do let’s be beastly to cheating Germans
THEY crushed Greece to save their dream of Europe, gave f alse hope to migrants and war refugees, then poisoned our air for profit by fiddling the emissions data of their diesel cars.
Yes, the Germans are i n the doghouse again.
Noel Coward wrote a song on this theme during World War II, when their unpopularity was at its peak. Don’t Let’s Be Beastly To The Germans, first performed in 1943, pretended to sympathise with them: ‘We must be kind And with an open mind We must endeavour to find a way To let the Germans know That when the war is over They are not the ones who’ll
have to pay.’ Some members of the public were outraged, taking the lyrics at face value and thinking them too pro-German. The song was banned by the BBC, but Winston Churchill enjoyed it, asking Coward to sing it no fewer than seven times at a private party. Coward’s ditty ends on a prophetic note: ‘Let’s be free with them And share the BBC with them We mustn’t prevent them basking in the sun Let’s soften their defeat again And build their blasted fleet again But don’t let’s be beastly to the Hun.’ Cursing the Germans was meant to have disappeared along with our generations who fought them in two world wars. Now i t’s back with a vengeance.
Some say their determination to preserve the European Union, whatever the cost, is based not on notions of international brotherhood but of national interest.
The euro serves prudent Germany DENYING he has split from model Donna Air, 36, James Middleton, the 28-yearold brother of our future Queen Consort, is said to be busily spending his autumn raising £1.5m to ‘expand and diversify’ his marshmallow company, which has recently hit hard times. Expanding and diversifying a struggling marshmallow business cannot be easy. How commendable that the attractive Ms Air has stuck by James. Clearly, she is no flibbertigibbet. well as a nation of savers, as well as an industrious exporter of cars and white goods. But they should have known that feckless Greece, where tax avoidance is endemic, wouldn’t remain solvent trapped in the euro.
Many think Chancellor Angela Merkel’s openness to migrants — prior to the closed-door panic that followed — also had a hidden motive: their ageing population demographic. They needed clever, educated young f oreigners to keep their great industrial turbine turning. (During the war, they solved this problem by enslaving workers from countries they’d invaded.)
BUT how, in t o day’ s media world of 24/7 TV coverage, do you filter out useful migrants from ones who’ll become a burden on the state? The crisis over fiddled emissions figures in VW cars inevitably puts other German marques such as Audi, Mercedes and BMW under suspicion. And, since car-making is an international enterprise, can we be sure that the computer trickery used to minimise VW emissions under test isn’t copied by other manufacturers?
Who’d have thought that Germany, the supposed heart of beneficial capitalism, would incubate the scandal that cast suspicion on private enterprise of all kinds?
The advertising slogan of VW’s premium brand, Audi — ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ ( Advancement through technology) — was supposed to capitalise on the German reputation for technical expertise. Now i t takes on a sinister new meaning. The catchphrase for the U.S. market, ‘Truth in Engineering’, seems like a bad joke now.
The potential cost of compensating hundreds of thousands of customers is the stuff of industrial nightmares. Will it be a refund of the entire purchase price of each car? And, if such trickery exists in car-making, can we be confident it isn’t happening in every other industry over safety standards of all kinds?
Post-war Germany, the poster child of positive capitalism, joins international banking in casting doubt on a system of trade from which most of mankind has prospered.
So, with apologies to the Master:
Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans When all is said and done We shouldn’t blame the Hun Aren’t we all keen on besting Any official system of testing?