Liberation day

Looking for something cheerful to write about amid the welter of crashing currencies and street rioting, I decided to search for May 9 national festivals around the world - and found two of them. Today is Europe Day - the 60th anniversary of the day when, in a bombed and ruined post-WWII Europe, French Prime Minister Robert Schuman proposed the Coal and Steel Community which would later become the European Union.

It's also the anniversary of the liberation of Jersey and Guernsey. These small islands, part of Britain but geographically much closer to France and nowadays known mainly as low-tax offshore banking centers, were the only portions of the British Isles to be occupied by the Germans during World War 2.

So the theme of war and Europe seem to be inescapable today: even though fewer than 10% of the population are old enough to remember images like these, they're burned into our collective memory, and kept alive by movies and media - not to mention the education system. The Nazi period remains a favorite part of the school curriculum in England and many other European countries, and if one goes back a bit further, the entire history of Europe is one of war, man-made famine and brutal subjugation - virtually everyone has oppressed or been oppressed by their neighbors at some point.

So now we're supposed to lie down and love each other, because a bunch of politicians, or worse still, bankers tell us so? Many political parties across the continent, including majority parties in some countries (notably the UK) operate on the principle that international co-operation should be strictly limited to the pursuit of national self-interest, and that euro-idealism is half-baked, misguided and doomed to fail.

Yet beyond the pragmatism of the European venture - many countries inhabiting the same small continent need to co-operate to survive - there's the simple fact that the European races are fundamentally the same race. Almost all European languages are descended from the same origin - which in turn is also linked to the infamous "swastika" symbol.

The term "swastika"simply denotes a lucky or auspicious object in ancient Sanskrit - the closest relative to the proto-Indo-European language from which modern French, German, English, Russian etc. ultimately derive. The German National Socialists adopted this ancient symbol of harmony (rotating it "forwards") to represent the bogus Aryan/Nordic super-race from which they believed themselves to be descended.

And the idea that the Nazi period represents some kind of unique German propensity to trample over their peace-loving neighbors is equally bogus. As another German, Schiller, observed - whose words, set to music by a fellow-countryman, are the official anthem of the European Union - "Alle Menschen werden Brueder" (all people become brothers). And brothers are notorious for fighting one another.

The presence of the swastika symbol on innumerable statues of the Buddha throughout Asia reminds us that all divisions and categories of people are illusions and causes of suffering. European history, if it proves nothing else, is eloquent witness to that noble truth.