Not unreasonable at all. I used to wonder how any nation could let a dictatorial scum achieve power. Now I know.
Good, but he’s still a fucker. Honestly, the guy has to end that article with: "A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House. "
Really, what planet are these people on. He just got done arguing, politely, that every one of the Republicans in governance right now are pieces of shit, but somehow the Dems are still the deplorable ones? Way to undercut your whole argument. “Vote against the Republicans, but don’t forget that the Democrats are the awful ones.”
Ok, so I’m supposed to vote for who now?
Trump claimed that one-quarter of all murders committed in the United States since 9/11 were committed by the 3% of Americans who are undocumented.
Why only a quarter ? Why not half, why not all, why not 110% ? Go big lie or go home, asshole !
Yeah, Germany actually spent a hell of a lot of effort in processing ‘where the hell did we go wrong?’ post-WWII. There’s even a word for it: Vergangenheitsbewaltigung/ (coming to terms with the past)
Yes, things are getting pretty bad in Trumpland when you see people like Will admitting that the truth about the Republicans is worse than the lies about the Democrats.
I want to know what Trump’s alibi was when these murders occurred. I’m just saying he seems awfully eager to point the finger at somebody else.
Yup. I remember Angela Merkel even tossed aside a small German flag that was being waved by a member of her cabinet when she got elected - because even *that *little bit of patriotic/nationalistic display is too close for comfort for her generation. It is simply Not Done.
But the pendulum is swinging the other way around these days, from what I’m given to understand (disclaimer : my last trip to Germany was in 1995 - well, later than that if you count metal concerts, but it’s not like we talked politics in the mosh pit :)). The German GenXers and millenials tend to be of the opinion that they weren’t involved in any of that and that they should be able to do what people of the UK or France do - wave flags around, have military parades, use their army, etc… - without having to deal with stigma, shame, slippery-slopeness or the tut-tutting from baby boomers. And with that comes also a rise of neo-nazis, because evidently they’re super trendy everywhere these days…
He does pal around with the Zodiac Killer.
And have a ceremony for their families.
Not for her generation - for her. If her policies and politics are any indication of her motivations, she believes that national states need to be entangled in a web of international treaties and organizations to counter any nationalist movements and steer their development toward a supranational entity.
She also doesn’t think primarily in terms of nationalities but humanity. Which is a laudable position for any human being but not without pitfalls for an elected representative of a country.
And in what way could people be involved in “any of that” who were born decades after the events, possibly with parents coming from another country?
We all should be aware of the past to avoid repeating previous mistakes and we cannot cherry-pick our origins: the good, the bad, it has all created the culture that we have absorbed while growing up. When I was a child, a sweet lady living next door guided my tiny fingers through Bach on her piano; on it stood a row of photos of family and friends gone in just twelve years. I learned about them later. As I learned about our own losses: family I’d never meet because they were killed by other people following orders.
Yet, how could I possibly blame their children or children’s children for their deeds?
Original sin is a sinful idea. A stupid idea. Unjust and prone to reiterate prejudices that poison our relations.
And it can get quite grotesque; a colleague once told me - grinning - that he was called a nazi when he talked German during a holiday in England.
His parents came from Vietnam during the 1970s.
As was already mentioned: yes!
Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It happened, it’s still happening. Though I’d have preferred a more radical approach when it counted the most, in the two decades after the war.
And there would have been more if Kurt Schumacher had been the first West-German Chancellor and not Konrad Adenauer. But in 1949 the Cold War had already started, the Americans and the French very much favoured the accommodating Adenauer to the unruly KZ-survivor; and Schumacher’s health was failing him.
And while the West-German people still made Schumacher’s socialist party the largest in the new Bundestag, they gave the American-friendly (others said subservient) conservative parties a majority of seats.
As a result, West-Germany recovered rapidly economically and institutionally from its fall from grace but the culture suffered.
The 1950s were a decade of “looking away” from the things that had been done. It needed the rebellion of the younger generation at the end of the 1960s to tackle “unter den Talaren - Muff von tausend Jahren”.
Since then, Vergangenheitsbewältigung was something done as much by the people as by their institutions.
At the end of the 1980s the West-German society showed signs of a relaxed patriotism that had some major roots in its willingness to accept its past and its responsibilities without the need to feel guilty all the time.
The Wiedervereinigung with the socialist-dictatorial Eastern part of Germany hampered this development far more than was apparent; the question “What is German?” once again became hard to answer for many Germans. And, imo, it’s a failure of our political and cultural institutions that they didn’t encourage an answer but shun from it - which has strenghtened a stupid nationalism among those who are fearful of the future.
I don’t think Germans should be held accountable for what *Zee *Germans once did for all eternity - as you say, that is wrong and silly.
OTOH, I’m really but really wary of any and all patriotism, nationalism, nation states even ; and I reckon that, warranted or not, Germany’s cultural or educational hypervigilance towards any warning signs of such is/was a good thing ; and in a perfect world all nations would behave as such. Your nation’s shit, my nation’s shit, we’ve all done horrible things in the name of “my country’s just better than yours, Because” throughout history (and ignored all the ways My Country is just like every other) , when are we finally going to toss all these stupid fucking flags aside in disgust ?
And as a result, I’m kind of disheartened that the new guys, rather than seeing *Vergangenheitsbewältigung *and its socio-cultural consequences as a generally good thing (nevermind the causes), would rather toss it aside and strive to become just like everyone else out there. In my mind, that’s regressing. We shouldn’t be asking ourselves “what is German ?” (or French, or unAmerican, whatever) but rather “what’s the most decent, humane thing ?” and go from there.
Wintertime, thank you for taking the time to write such an informative post.
Finally! A headline that does not equivocate.
Trump is a baldfaced liar
YES YES YES
Let us, all news media, and all who speak of thump abandon euphemisms and call him what he is.
Scrabble must be an entirely different experience in German.
For one thing, it’s called Buchstabenlegenwettbewerbsspiel. 
I appreciate your humanistic approach. But like Angela, you seem to pay little heed to a unique feature invented and expressed within the real and ideal boundaries of the nation state: democracy.
The EU is built not as a democracy but as a bureaucracy whose policy is influenced not majorly by its people but by shifting alliances among governments.
Those governments are largely democratic at present - but Hungary shows us that this is not a given.
As long as we haven’t figured out how to make supranational entities democratic, I’m very much against the abolition of the nation state; even the weakening of its democratic institutions in favour of international agreements could prove to be a slippery slope toward a more authoritarian rule since the major influences on such treaties and organisations are not the people but wealth and power.
The German Federal Constitutional Court, for example, has made clear repeatedly that it is the ultimate authority when it comes to the constitutional legality of any international rule in its effect on the German people, because it is tasked by those people to uphold their constitution, and no other authority can claim the same. [I’m paraphrasing, of course]
I fully agree and extent this to the political sphere: the people that I chose to represent my interests should have more say in wording the rules that operate the society I live in than anyone else.
And since we are discussing the nation state with regard to German experience, let me point out one experience that was a major influence on our thinking: the Thirty Years’ War*, a war that resulted in the loss of about 1/3 of the population in Germany (of the 18,000,000 million that lived there in 1618, 6,000,000 were killed by war, famine and disease).
Which led to a worldview that was, for quite some time, characterized as typically German:
Es ist alles eitel
Du siehst, wohin du siehst, nur Eitelkeit auf Erden.
Was dieser heute baut, reißt jener morgen ein;
Wo jetzund Städte stehn, wird eine Wiese sein,
Auf der ein Schäferskind wird spielen mit den Herden;
Was jetzund prächtig blüht, soll bald zertreten werden;
Was jetzt so pocht und trotzt, ist morgen Asch und Bein;
Nichts ist, das ewig sei, kein Erz, kein Marmorstein.
Jetzt lacht das Glück uns an, bald donnern die Beschwerden.
Der hohen Taten Ruhm muß wie ein Traum vergehn.
Soll denn das Spiel der Zeit, der leichte Mensch, bestehn?
Ach, was ist alles dies, was wir für köstlich achten,
Als schlechte Nichtigkeit, als Schatten, Staub und Wind,
Als eine Wiesenblum, die man nicht wiederfind’t!
Noch will, was ewig ist, kein einig Mensch betrachten.
The Vanity of This World
Look anywhere you will, the Earth is empty show.
What someone builds today, another soon tears down;
Where now a city stands will be a grassy mound,
A place that only shepherds grazing their flocks will know.
What blooms so fair at daybreak, by noon is trampled low;
What bravely struts and strives soon turns to ash and bone;
No substance lasts forever, no brass, no polished stone.
One moment fortune smiles, the next brings bitter woe.
Tales of our mighty deeds like dreams must fade away.
How then should Man—Time’s plaything—ever hope to stay?
Oh think, what are those objects we prize beyond compare,
Mere shadows, dust, and wind—all worthless, false and vain;
Field flowers glimpsed in passing and never seen again!
For that which is immortal, no man seems to care.
During a time when the other European nations began to shape their identity one of the oldest nations was devastated and split apart in hundreds of pieces.
The catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War was (among other reasons, of course) a result of a far too weak national idea; and the experience changed the German perspective and led to an idealization of unity and a distrust in the merit of diversity of political opinion in our political theory and beyond [and you can hear the bastard version of this belief in Hitler’s bellowed words].
This distrust might have been the feather that tipped the scale during the 1848 revolution that came so very, very close to a federal nation created by its people and not, decades later, by Prussian military might.
What would Europe be like if Germany had started its democratic maturation a hundred years earlier?
I realize that I have hijacked this thread, and I apologize for it.
Tränen Des Vaterlandes (Tears of the Fatherland) [Poem by Andreas Gryphius]
Wir sind doch nunmehr ganz, ja mehr denn ganz verheeret!
Der frecher Völker Schar, die rasende Posaun,
Das vom Blut fette Schwert, die donnernde Karthaun
Hat aller Schweiß und Fleiß und Vorrat aufgezehret.
Die Türme stehn in Glut, die Kirch ist umgekehret,
Das Rathaus liegt im Graus, die Starken sind zerhaun,
Die Jungfraun sind geschänd’t, und wo wir hin nur schaun,
Ist Feuer, Pest und Tod, der Herz und Geist durchfähret.
Hier durch die Schanz und Stadt rinnt allzeit frisches Blut.
Dreimal sind’s schon sechs Jahr, als unsrer Ströme Flut,
Von Leichen fast verstopft, sich langsam fortgedrungen.
Doch schweig’ ich noch von dem, was ärger als der Tod,
Was grimmer denn die Pest und Glut und Hungersnot:
Daß auch der Seelen Schatz so vielen abgezwungen.
You’re welcome.
In the same vein is Arthur Guiterman’s “On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness”:
The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.
The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is ferric oxide, known as rust.
The grizzly bear whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.
Great Caesar’s bust is on my shelf,
And I don’t feel so well myself.
Though it ends in irony, not in pain. That levity is nowhere to be found in Gryphius’ work. Heine is a different matter - you might enjoy him.
Thanks for making me aware of that poem; I like it.
And you point totals have exponents.
It’s about goddamn time!