Jacob Christensen

I’m off to bed so for today I will just note that the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt is a smoker (who’d have thunk?) and that espresso is more healthy than ordinary filter-brewed coffee.

Oh, well: Here is a quote from the master of the sardonic one-liners:

Giovanni diLorenzo: Würden Sie jungen Menschen wenigstens heute dazu raten, gar nicht erst damit anzufangen?

Helmut Schmidt: Ich würde niemandem unerbetene Ratschläge geben.

Right. Well. Yes.

The blogger bobvis lists the ten biggest mistakes in US history (why do I get this feeling that he is a political conservative?) and The Times takes up the lead with a British perspective (equally conservative).

How would a Ten Worst Mistakes of Danish Political History list look like? My definition of a mistake is something like “an avoidable misjudgement by a Danish monarch or government which led to a loss of national political power”.

In my opinion the Napoleonic Wars fiasco and the blunders by successive Danish governments in handling the Schleswig-Holstein issue in the 1860s definitively belong on the list, but what else?

I’ll probably invite a lot of flak by not including 1940, as Denmark IMNSHO had no likely allies during the 1930. The German occupation and the cooperation/collaboration policies during WW2 was a national embarrassment, not a mistake.