Bomb tests for security
Whenever in Bali, I buy The Jakarta Post to see what is happening in the world. In these days of France's atomic tests I found my own opinion reflected in your paper of Aug. 7, 1995, under the headline France's "great power" argument cuts no ice abroad.
France is a nation Germany never can be friends with, unless one partner submits to the other. And this Germany is going to do at the moment in order to stabilize the friendship. But can you imagine a true friendship between two unequal partners? One who has got atomic bombs and the other which lacks them? Only a poor man can consider a rich man his friend, but does the rich think so, too? I don't believe so.
In the course of European history, France and Germany were strong enemies to each other. France wanted to destroy Germany down to its bones at any time. Remember World War I, which ended in the Versailles Treaty. France wanted to extinguish Germany by demanding 132 milliard Goldmarks to be paid within 30 years. Fortunately, this exploitation was stopped by the world economic crises in the 1930s and the Lausanne conference two years later.
According to the Young Plan, Germany's now moderate payment should have lasted until 1988, if Hitler hadn't stopped it forever. And today France is going to get its Versailles payment from Germany without any war, because the Bonn government wants this unequal friendship by sacrificing its unique power, the DM. Everybody considers this as a stupid idea, but what can the German people do but applaud?
France's foreign minister said in The Jakarta Post: "We have been invaded three times by Prussia and Germany and we want to have security now. He had given this interview to an Australian paper. Had he said this to any other paper in Europe, everybody would have laughed, because France, concealing its "Napoleonic arrogance", only wants to hide its true purpose, as I believe, to force Germany in the long run, to help France's poor economy by erasing the DM. In case Germany refuses to acknowledge the French hegemony in Europe, it will use the instantaneously tested bombs, I'm sure.
FRIEDHELM SCHWITTEK
Postfach, Germany