Text b. No battle looming over Arctic oil: Putin (abc News, Sep. 24, 2010)

By Rachael Brown

Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has hosed down talk of an impending battle over the Arctic's mineral wealth.

One quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves is thought to lie beneath the Arctic ice.

The shrinking polar ice cap, making the territory more accessible, is fuelling a scramble by neighbouring countries for a slice of its underground minerals.

Russia, Norway, Canada, Denmark and the United States have all laid claims to territory in the region.

Mr Putin has told an international conference in Moscow he is confident the region's resources could be used in a spirit of partnership.

Mr Putin has told the conference there have been a lot of predictions about a looming battle, but he says none of these frightening scenarios have real foundation.

He says any territorial disputes will be resolved under international law.

The prime minister's speech was much anticipated given Russia's claim to control more than 1 million square kilometres beyond its current territorial waters, all the way to the North Pole.

The conference in Moscow is looking at international cooperation, but the 300 delegates are also likely to push their country's own claim to the Arctic's riches.

Text c. Putin Calls for 'Trust' in Developing a Thawing Arctic (The New York Times, September 23, 2010) By lauren morello of ClimateWire

MOSCOW -- "Mutual trust" will be the key to developing the vast resources of the Arctic and protecting its fragile ecosystems, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said today.

"In the final analysis, the future of the Arctic will be resolved by our willingness to look together for responses to joint challenges," Putin told attendees at an international Arctic conference hosted by the Russian Geographical Society.

Putin's speech came days after Russia settled a 40-year dispute with Norway over the two countries' shared boundary in the Barents Sea. But the emphasis on cooperation didn't stop the prime minister and other top Kremlin officials from defending their plans to move aggressively to expand Russia's Arctic footprint.

In recent months, Russia has announced plans for a massive cleanup of military and industrial sites in its Arctic territory, floating nuclear plants designed to power future Arctic development and an expedition that will deploy a floating research station to the far north next month.

"Here our citizens live and work," Alexander Bedritsky, Putin's top climate change adviser, said Wednesday. "Russia's Arctic sector is inhabited by 1.5 percent of the country's population, but it accounts for 11 percent of its GDP and 22 percent of its exports."

Bedritsky also said that he is confident that the United Nations will approve Russia's bid to extend its continental shelf and expand its share of the resource-rich Arctic seabed.

Undersea ridge still under three-nation dispute

A major contested area is the Lomonosov Ridge, a massive underwater mountain range in the Arctic Ocean that Canada, Denmark and Russia are seeking. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea allows member nations to submit claims to extend their maritime boundaries beyond a 200-mile exclusive economic zone. The requisite is that a country show that its continental shelf extends beyond that point.

Putin said today he has "no doubt" that remaining disputes over boundaries between Arctic nations can be resolved.

Michael Byers, a professor of international law at the University of British Columbia, said the Lomonosov Ridge fight will eventually boil down to science.

"Under Article 76 of UNCLOS, the issue of the extended continental shelf is not something resolved by power or politics," he said. "You cannot change the shape or the sediments of the seabed. Those are scientific facts."

Interest in the Arctic has grown in recent years as the effects of climate change have become more apparent there. Scientists say ongoing warming is poised to bring Arctic summers free of sea ice by the 2030s, opening long-sought shipping routes, tourism and energy exploration.

The far northern region has warmed twice as fast as the global average, and its once-sturdy cap of sea ice has thinned and shrunk dramatically over the last several years.

Conferees from more than 15 nations

"Nowhere else on Earth are we seeing such dramatic changes in the surface of the Earth as we are seeing in the Arctic Ocean," said Olav Orheim, senior adviser to the Research Council of Norway and one of more than 300 scientists, government officials and businesspeople from more than 15 countries who attended the Arctic conference in Moscow this week.

The U.S. government sent its senior Arctic official, Julie Gourley of the State Department.

Experts here largely dismissed the idea that the ongoing Arctic thaw could spark global conflicts.

"The Arctic is changing," said Steven Bigras, executive director of the Canadian Polar Commission. "This whole region was once seen as inaccessible, harsh, but today it's changing in another direction. It's seen as a region of economic opportunities, a place to invest in."

Realizing those hopes will require Arctic nations to seek cooperation, not confrontation, he said, calling the recent Russia-Norway agreement a positive sign.

Meanwhile, polar explorer Artur Chilingarov, who made headlines in 2007 when he led a Russian expedition that planted a flag on a contested portion of the Arctic seafloor, sounded a note of conciliation.

"Not long ago, the Arctic was a platform for confrontation of two world systems, but today the situation is changing. The Arctic states are a very good example of cooperation and neighborly relations," Chilingarov said. "Our country is also striving to collaborate in the Arctic."

Lauren Morello's travel expenses were paid for by the Russian Geographical Society. The group had no say in the content of this article.

Exercise 6. Compare separate interpretations by the media of the same event (texts A and B) and point out the similarities and differences among them. Develop an understanding of how coverage of an event by the media can vary depending on the type of media and its source.

Text A. 20 years on, Germans reflect on reunification (AP, October 1, 2010)

By KIRSTEN GRIESHABER

BERLIN — Angela Merkel, the leader of Europe's richest country, still hoards food.

That's how much power Cold War-era habits still hold over Germans like Merkel who grew up in the communist east, a full two decades after reunification.

The chancellor still does her laundry with an East German liquid detergent, prepares East Germans' favorite Soljanka soup (made with sausages and pickle juice) — and can't fight the urge to stockpile goods she sees at the supermarket.

"Sometimes I can't stop myself from buying things just because I see them — even when I don't really need them," the 56-year-old Merkel told magazine SuperIllu ahead of celebrations Sunday of the 20th anniversary of unification.

"This inclination to hoard is deeply ingrained in me, because in the past, in times of scarcity, you took what you could get," Merkel said, referring to former times under communism when people would stand in line for hours to buy a few bananas or oranges.

Germany was divided into communist East Germany and capitalist West Germany following the defeat of the Nazis in World War II. The eastern German Democratic Republic formally joined the western Federal Republic of Germany on Oct. 3, 1990, after months of peaceful protests had brought down the ailing communist system in the East.

The reunited country has emerged as the economic powerhouse of Europe and a leader on the world stage. But while boundaries have blurred over time, many "Ossis" and "Wessis" — the nicknames for those born and raised in the east and west — still seem to stick to old mindsets and keep to themselves.

The two increasingly live side-by-side in German cities, but it's still relatively rare for social circles to cross the east-west divide.

Despite all the efforts to adjust the standard of living in both parts of the country, many inequalities remain and East Germans are still underrepresented in many parts of society.

While Merkel is from the East, there are no Ossis in her Cabinet. Not a single football club from the East plays in the national Bundesliga league, and few former East Germans have made it to the higher ranks of big companies or the Army.

"It is probably going to take another two or three generations until we all will say again 'We are one people,'" said Doreen Kinzel, a 39-year-old East German who moved to the West right after the fall of the Berlin Wall and now works in event management in Berlin.

"Nonetheless, we should not constantly talk about all the things that separate us — in the end we're all Germans."

Merkel called the unification a "stroke of luck" and said the ongoing reconstruction of East Germany — largely at the expense of the former West Germany — has been a success.

"After the reunification there was a certain sense of foreignness, because daily life in the former East German states was completely turned inside out — everything from the shops to the bureaucracy to the working world," Merkel said.

"I think it has been a tremendous feat on the part of East Germans since 1990, to adapt to everything changing."

Despite the difficulties in overcoming four decades of separation and opposing political systems, Germans are slowly coming to feel as one again.

In a poll conducted by Forsa Institute on Wednesday, 48 percent of Germans said easterners and westerners see themselves as one people again. Seven years ago, only 31 percent believed this. Still, 47 percent said that what divides them is still more significant than what unites them today.

Germans from both sides of the former Iron Curtain were united in an explosion of national pride when they hosted the soccer World Cup in 2006. And during this summer's World Cup, fluttering German flags were ubiquitous from Dresden in the East to Duesseldorf in the West.

Among the biggest problems that plague the former East now are unemployment and a constant decline in population — with many heading to the west to search for jobs.

Despite the better than expected economic upswing, unemployment in the former East German states stands at 11 percent compared with 6.2 percent in the former West.

Almost 1.1 million people — mostly women and young people — have moved from east to west since reunification, leaving behind an aging, childless population and stretches of empty neighborhoods that look like eerie ghost towns.

However, eastern unemployment has declined dramatically since the 18.7 percent registered in 2005.

The federal government has invested billions of euros into the five former eastern states — Brandenburg, Mecklenberg-Western Pomerania, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia — and West German and East German taxpayers alike have been contributing through so-called solidarity taxes that flow to the East.

First levied in 1991, the tax has generated euro187 billion ($254 billion) that has gone to improve roads, schools, utilities and other essentials in the former East. The 5.5 percent tax on everybody's income is scheduled to run through 2019.

Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who oversaw reunification in 1990, acknowledged in the Bild daily on Friday that it was taking a long time to create "inner unity" among the country's people.

"Of course, the entire (unification) process is much slower than we first thought it would be, but it is all only a matter of time," he said.

Text B. Germany still paying a price for unity (The Globe and Mail, October 1, 2010)

By Carl Mortished

The euro was the price Germany paid its EU partners for reuniting the former communist east with the capitalist west. Rumours of a scabrous deal between Paris and Bonn over reunification have simmered over two decades and now Spiegel, the German magazine, has unearthed classified documents held by Germany;'s foreign ministry which detail chapter and verse of the fraught negotiations between President Francois Mitterand and Helmut Kohl, then Germany's Chancellor, following the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

Fed up with being the tail wagged by Germany and its powerful Deutschemark, France was terrified by the spectre of a resurgent Germany, expanding eastwards as the dominos of the Warsaw Pact tumbled. The French President apparently warned Germany that it risked finding itself back in 1913 and thew a temper tantrum when Chancellor Kohl announced his plans for a German confederation, fearing the rise of a new superpower. Germany was made to understand that France would veto the admission of the GDR into the European Union unless Germany agreed to shackle its economy to France by a single currency. "Germany can only hope for reunification if it is part of a strong community," said Mr. Mitterand.

This is more than entertaining history, because the recent troubles of Greece, Ireland and Spain are exposing the weakness of the euro project - the lack of fiscal management, the huge imbalances between Germany's export-driven industrial economy and the fragile economies of the peripheral states. We now know that this monetary project was anathema to Germany and, more importantly, that it was a political bribe to secure France's agreement to the accession of the GDR into the union.

It is perhaps no accident that this story has been unearthed today at a time when Germans are looking back with nostalgia at the DMark. When the pow-wow in Brussels over fiscal straitjackets for member states becomes heated in the coming months and Paris makes its customary protests, we can expect the subject of the Franco-German deal in 1990 to surface in private conversations in ministries.

The final irony is that reunification was a huge financial headache for Germany. The decision to allow East Germans to convert their worthless currency directly into DMarks left the Federal Republic with a colossal bill. The price for uniting the GDR economy with the West was painful to bear, even among brothers, and Germany may have cause to reflect further on the cost of union as the European Commission urges member states forward.

For Germans, a strong currency is non-negotiable but Britons have a more relaxed attitude to trading. Gary Jenkins, head of credit strategy at Evolution Securities thinks the British government should take bold steps to reduce the deficit even to the point of hawking sterling's good name to the highest bidder. In an article in Euroweek, he proposes selling advertising space on banknotes to commercial organizations. It's a nice idea, the Coca-Cola dollar and the Sony Yen. But do we really want the BP pound?

Exercise 7. Compare separate interpretations by the media of the same event (texts A and B) and point out the similarities and differences among them. Develop an understanding of how coverage of an event by the media can vary depending on the type of media and its source.

Text A. Why red is not brown in the Baltics (The Gardian, Dovid Katz, September 30, 2010)

Unhappily, Timothy Snyder's historical reassessment of the Nazi-Soviet pact coincides with Baltic ultra-nationalist agendas.

Paneriai forest, 8km outside of Vilnius, Lithuania, where the extermination of 100,000 people took place between 1941 and 1944 during the second world war; 70,000 of those killed were Jewish. The Nazis attempted to conceal traces of the massacre as they retreated before the Red Army. Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian

That a truly great historian of our times can, on very rare occasions, stumble into a meticulously laid trap is no more than to say that we are human and fallible. Or that water is wet. There are many points of view among historians, as there should be, about Hitler and Stalin and the comparative study of their evil works. Analogously, there are competing narratives about myriad aspects of the second world war – not least, the forever intriguing negative counterfactual of "What if it hadn't happened?" concerning the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of August 1939, and, Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941.

But a master historian, and Timothy Snyder is one of the best, always includes, almost as if by a higher inspired intuition, the key to unlock the very trap he may on a rare occasion be failing to avoid. In this case, it is the perspicacious line:

"Entering the lands that they had conceded to Stalin in 1939, the Germans used NKVD crimes as a propaganda justification for the bloody massacres of Jews in summer 1941, in which Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Poles and others took part."

What I have learned as a researcher of Yiddish who has lived in Lithuania for 11 years is that the obsession with finding some excuse – preferably that excuse – for massive local participation in the Holocaust is very much alive today among the elite classes of politicians, academics (especially historians) and media people throughout the region. And make no mistake, in the Baltics we are talking not just about "collaboration" with the Nazis, but "participation" in the frightening sense of thousands of volunteer killers being on hand to gleefully do most of the Nazis' killing, in effect of their own neighbours, in the three Baltic states and some other regions. At the same time, one must not for a moment forget the incredible courage of those Balts who did the right thing and saved a neighbour, notwithstanding the danger of imminent death to themselves and their loved ones.

After Baltic independence from the collapsing Soviet Union two decades ago, bold truth-tellers emerged to confront even the darkest spots of their nations' history. And which of our nations does not have dark spots? In the case of these long-suffering and newly independent states, it naturally took remarkable courage and a deeper love of country (and all the peoples of one's country) to tackle such painful matters head on.

But then, something went wrong. The three Baltic states in the late 1990s set up state-sponsored commissions to study Nazi and Soviet crimes, but not in an open and democratic spirit. This was a project of ultra-nationalist revisionism with an active political agenda that meant much more to the politicians than this or that historical volume produced for minute readerships. That political agenda was in short, to rewrite the history of the second world war and the Holocaust by state diktat, into a model of "double genocide". Holocaust denial was, in fact, never an option in a region with hundreds of mass graves. Instead, a new and more worrying "Holocaust obfuscation" movement took off, with a lot of government support in the region. It tries to reduce all evil to equal evil, in effect to confuse the issue in order to write the inconvenient genocide that is the Holocaust out of history as a distinct category.

The steps taken are eerily Orwellian in a well-planned sequence (but not, let it be stressed, a conspiracy: all of it was very public to anyone interested enough to follow events here in the Baltic region). The notion "genocide" was redefined by legislation to include deportation, imprisonment, loss of freedom and much more. This, then, made it possible (in local terms – necessary) to argue that, with the new definition in play, Nazi and Soviet crimes were obviously "equal". The "slight inconvenience" of the Holocaust then fades away naturally into the new grand paradigm of double genocide in which everybody was killing everybody, in the ultimate postmodernist mush.

Not to mention that the (understandably) Russia-fearing countries that were under Soviet yoke for so long are also not "uninterested" in a big new stick with which they hope to beat Russia down in western eyes to the status of a genocidal equivalent-to-the-Nazis regime. In other words, the policy is being driven not only by ultra-nationalism ("We have a perfect history"), antisemitism ("the Jews were basically communists and got what they deserve"), and anti-Russianism ("they are the same as Hitler"), but by a perceived set of current geopolitical concerns that should not (whether right or wrong) be converting history into a one-opinion discipline with the foregone conclusions being dictated by the state's apparatchiks.

Here in Lithuania, the powers-that-be have carried all this to absurdity. From 2006 onward, prosecutors, who had the most abysmal record of pursuing Nazi war criminals deported by the United States after extensive legal proceedings, somehow managed to find the energy to pursue Jewish survivors of the ghettos who fled into the forests to join the anti-Nazi resistance. There were no British or American troops in these parts, and yes, the Soviets were the only hope for the tiny number of escapees of the Nazi death machine during the years 1941-45 when the United States, Great Britain and the USSR led the allied coalition against Hitler. None of these Holocaust survivors was charged with anything specific – because there is nothing to charge them with. These were rather campaigns to change history, part of an expensive, extensive effort, slowly but surely, to change the narrative of history to suit the local ultra-nationalists.

It all reached a low point in May 2008, when police came looking for two women survivors in their late 80s, and prosecutors went on to tell the press that they could not be found. To this day, these kangaroo investigations have not been dropped, and there has still been no apology to the two women.

But that is not the half of it. In June of 2010, the Lithuanian parliament passed and the president shamefully signed into law a bill that would impose up to two years' imprisonment for anyone who might deny or underestimate Nazi or Soviet genocide. In other words, if a historian will say "Soviet crimes in Lithuania were horrific but they do not rise to genocide; there was only one genocide here, that perpetrated by the Nazis and their partners," he or she is potentially liable to prosecution. Now, Timothy Snyder would be the last to want colleagues of other opinions to have to pay for their ideas with jail time. (Ironically, just such things operated in the Soviet Union – and this is one of the examples of democracy deteriorating to something that is Soviet in form, nationalist in content, and conveniently western in its well-spun presentation to naive foreigners.) It is doubtful whether any historians will, in fact, be charged, tried or imprisoned. What the law has accomplished, however, is to silence nearly everyone into acquiescence to the state-imposed version of history. A very sad state of affairs in a European Union and Nato country.

But this is not a localised Lithuanian, or even a Baltic issue alone. It is part of a new far-right mood sweeping big swaths of the "new accession" states in the eastern regions of the European Union, a phenomenon elucidated by Paul Hockenos in Newsweek last October ("Europe's Central Disappointment"). In fact, the Lithuanian "jailtime-for-disagreeing-with-the-government-about-history law", though in the works for over a year, was only enacted right after the new rightwing government in Hungary enacted a similar law (the Hungarian statute imposes a maximum sentence of three years in jail).

But the rightwing-motivated revision of history (to downplay Hitler's role and play up Stalin's in order to wipe out the eastern stain of Holocaust participation) is no longer even just an east European game. Using newfound clout in the European Union, the nationalist camp has come up with a plan to get all of the European Union to accept their "double genocide" model. It started in a serious way with a conference in Tallinn, Estonia, in January 2008, ominously called "United Europe, United History", which promulgated the nonsense that the continent's unity depends on everybody accepting the same revised history of World War II and the Holocaust (in effect, Double Genocide), or else.

In June of that year, a much larger event produced the "Prague Declaration", which insists all of Europe agree that Nazism and Communism are a "common legacy" and that a Nuremberg tribunal-grade tool be used to assess communism. The revisionists want all Europe to enact a single commemoration day for victims of Nazi and Soviet crimes. Indeed, this would make the focal point of the second world war history the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, by law rather as a matter of opinion, and of necessity relegate Holocaust commemoration day rapidly to oblivion. Back to Soviet-style mind control, the declaration even demands an "overhaul of European history textbooks" to reflect the revised red-equals-brown history. For shame.

Now Professor Snyder is absolutely right to call for a much-increased attention to the lands occupied by the Nazis after their June 1941 invasion of the western Soviet Union, where a million Jewish civilians were murdered, with massive local help, by the end of 1941 in "the Holocaust by bullets". But where he is unfortunately aligned with the current political trends into the far-out is in the acrobatics of trying to make Soviet evils of 1940-41 "somewhat equal" to that. They are not equal.

The Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and Ukrainians are still thankfully with us in 2010, as great nations with deservedly inspirational futures, precisely because there was no genocide. There were horrible crimes, but not genocide. East European Jewry is not there anymore, beyond a tiny and vanishing remnant, because there was genocide. Moreover, as Snyder must know, a Nazi victory in the east, with all that was being planned for the various "inferior races of the east" would not have left these nations ready for independence in 1991.

Lithuania's one Liberal MEP in the European parliament, philosopher Leonidas Donskis, an incalculable credit to his country and all Europe, has exposed the "Inflation of Genocide" as a semantic and philosophic lynchpin of the series of errors and deceptions underway. I then proposed this definition:

"Genocide is the mass murder of as many people as possible on the basis of born national, ethnic, racial or religious identity as such; with intent to eliminate the targeted group entirely and internationally; without allowing the victims any option to change views, beliefs or allegiances to save themselves; and with large-scale accomplished fulfilment of the goal. Genocide leaves in its wake an extinct or nearly extinct group within the territory under the control of the perpetrators."

Returning to the actual history of the second world war, Snyder, turning to the important point of local collective memory, happens to be in concord with the Baltic ultra-nationalists who want the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, rather than the genocide of the Holocaust, to be the psychologically central sin of the century; to be sure, the master historian and the local nationalist hijackers of history are coming to it with altogether different tools and motives. But what I can testify, after many years of talking to Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarusians, Poles, as well as Jews, is that, believe it or not, there is a common memory of the war here having started in 1941 – while the events of 1939 continue to be recalled as a nearly bloodless changeover of regimes that was either despised or cherished depending on one's ethnicity (as politically incorrect as that may sound).

And finally, it is not possible to ignore Snyder's certainty that "Jews could not help but see the return of Soviet power as a liberation. Soviet policy was not especially friendly to Jews, but it was obviously better than a Holocaust." The liberating power was, in short order, to become an oppressive power, as has happened not once but many times in history. But in 1944, the USSR did liberate these lands from Nazi dominion, and they did bring freedom to the tiny remaining remnant of the targeted-for-extinction races. From the day the Holocaust started here, in June 1941, the Soviets were often the only hope of escape for members of a doomed race, whether by fleeing eastward before Nazi control was firmly established in the first week after 22 June that year, or, by evading the ghettos to link up with the Soviet supported anti-Nazi partisans in the forests.

Genocide is different from the other crimes of the era, and for this reason, the Holocaust was unique, not just for Jews but for all peoples of good will who want to prevent other genocides in the future. It is, moreover, frankly possible and even constructive for the surviving majority, restored to deserved independence and membership in the greatest unions of democratic states in history, to show non-ethnocentric understanding about the genocide of a minority that had contributed mightily to their country for some six centuries beforehand.

It is strange how things have moved so far down the track, with a massively financed effort by east European governments to cleanse their Holocaust records with a bag of sophisticated artifices, to the point out that even great scholars can sometimes fail to see something very simple: those who liberated Auschwitz (or for that matter, the lands of eastern Europe) are just not the same as those who committed the genocide here. Period.