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| Angela Merkel |
Here is the status of the European M, M and M triangle.
Britain's M, Prime Minister Theresa May, is under pressure for completely botching Brexit and may be forced out of office.
France's M, President Emmanuel Macron, is literally facing riots in the streets with protesters demanding he resign. His approval rating is at 23%.
Germany's M, Chancellor Angela Merkel, in October, did not seek re-election as head of her party the Christian Democratic Union and said that she will not seek re-election as German chancellor in 2021 election. (If she lasts that long).
This is the sad group from which Harvard has chosen its 2019 commencement speaker.
The university has chosen Merkel to deliver her political obituary at Harvard’s 368th Commencement ceremony.
She will be the principal speaker in the ceremony’s Afternoon Program, which will take place in Cambridge on campus at Harvard Yard at the Tercentenary Theatre on Thursday, May 30, 2019.
Havard is apparently proud of their selection.
“Angela Merkel is one of the most widely admired and broadly influential statespeople of our time,” said Harvard President Larry Bacow.
And the university put this out:
The Harvard produced clip above curiously suggests that out of nowhere Merkel entered politics--as a volunteer no less! It misses a bit.
A biography of Merkel, Das erste Leben der Angela M., by Günther Lachmann and Ralf Georg Reuthk quotes Gunter Walther, a former colleague of hers at the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, as saying she had been secretary for "Agitation and Propaganda" in the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) youth organization at the institute.
The book reports:
Merkel has said in the past that her FDJ role at the academy was more that of a cultural secretary and that her duties included buying theater tickets and organizing book readings.
But former German Transport Minister Günther Krause -- an eastern German politician who worked with her in the final months of the GDR and as a fellow minister in the government ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl in the early 1990s -- contradicts her in the book and says she propagated Marxism-Leninism.
"With Agitation and Propaganda you're responsible for brainwashing in the sense of Marxism," he said. "That was her task and that wasn't cultural work. Agitation and Propaganda, that was the group that was meant to fill people's brains with everything you were supposed to believe in the GDR, with all the ideological tricks. And what annoys me about this woman is simply the fact that she doesn't admit to a closeness to the system in the GDR. From a scientific standpoint she wasn't indispensable at the Academy of Sciences. But she was useful as a pastor's daughter in terms of Marxism-Leninism. And she's denying that. But it's the truth."...
The book says she and her father and brother Marcus discussed political developments with other people on September 1989. For them, the biography says, German unification was still inconceivable at that point "not just because it wouldn't have fitted into the bipolar world but because they strictly rejected the Western system of society."
It quotes Merkel as having said at the time: "If we reform the GDR, it won't be in terms of the Federal Republic."
Merkel's political ascent after that is well documented. She joined the opposition political movement Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening) in December 1989, became deputy spokeswoman of the democratically elected transitional East German government after the May 1990 election and joined the staunchly conservative Christian Democratic Union party in 1990s -- a surprising move given her apparent previous political leanings.
The chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl spotted her potential and made her family affairs minister in his cabinet after the November 1990 German election."Only Angela Merkel herself can answer how much of her old life is still in her," Focus magazine wrote.
That is unless you are Harvard which misleads about the entire "old life" as though it never happened.
Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of 
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