I didn’t mean to imply that there was an evocative connection, only the SS coincidence. Here is a summary of the new rule: Hitler himself couldn’t have done it better.
My favorite:
Emo Philips on Germans
My sister married a German. He complained he couldn’t get a good bagel back home. I said, “Well, whose fault is that?”
However, in the UK the old (1980s I think) far right group Combat 18 took that name due to the 18 = Adolf Hitler reference.
ETA:
Turns out they are from the 1990s and are still active.
Occasionally I hear someone casually referring to an ultimate goal as “the final solution”
Last year I was in a meeting with my boss and he was speaking of the mid-term design and final design of our system and he said to everyone “And for the final solution we will be doing XYZ”
I brought it up later on and he did a double take, suddenly facing the baggage that those three words carry.
As a ham radio operator in my teen years this is what I always thought of when I heard 88.
It was part of the list of number codes that hams use between each other; by far the most common would be 73, the traditional sign-off signal, “Best regards” / “Take it easy” / “Later on dude”
Now, B&H means only one thing to me: the best place to buy photo gear. Never knew that it could have political meaning.
Until otherwise demonstrated, I would assume someone with 88 in their username to be a neo-nazi sympathizer. You say you’re not, so fine. I’d think the same of anyone who has a username like Hairy Harold and signed posts HH, and I’d have similar assumptions for anyone who was sneaking 14 into their sig or name.
Avoiding this sort of username codeword is why I went with ‘Dimension’ instead of ‘Reich’. *
*Just kidding
I just figure most people with 88 in their user names were born in 1988. Silly me.
The dialects that were spoken by Germans living in Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia until 1945 have (almost) completely vanished. I remember hearing an elderly refugee in our street speaking Prussian dialect when I was a child. That’s something never to be heard again.
Not quite. The ß is used as a “sharp s” after long vowels and diphthongs, after short vowels we now use “ss”. For instance, “ein bißchen” (a bit) became “ein bisschen”, but “beißen” (to bite) stayed like that. We have ß at the end of a word, as well - the conjunction “daß” became “dass”, but the color “Weiß” is still alive and well.
And, by the way: no one, and I mean no one, would think anything of seeing two s characters together in a word, however, the abbreviation SS or SA or whatever on its own is going to raise some eyebrows.
The Nazis ruined the Nazi Party …
But look at what the Nazis gave us in return:
And now it’s… Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Deutschland is happy and gay! We’re marching to a faster pace
Look out, here comes the master race! Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Rhineland’s a fine land once more! Springtime for Hitler and Germany
Watch out, Europe We’re going on tour!
Springtime for Hitler and Germany…
That’s right … Mel Brooks gags !!!
Not something IN Germany,and only as an indirect result, but they pretty well ruined any chances over the next century or so for peace and prosperity in the Middle East.
Care to elaborate on what you mean by that?
Are you serious? One of the little bits of Mein Kampf that I remember (probably because it was near the beginning of the book, i.e. I never came close to finishing it) went something like this*:
I ask again: are you serious?
*Yes, I am paraphrasing. For sure. But the ‘theme’ and thrust of the words and phrases I used in the “quote” above are absolutely the same as in the original.
Sure, OK.
It is my opinion that the State of Israel never would have been formed when and where it is, had it not been for the genocide against the Jews in the prior decade. So the Holocaust started a sequence of events that led to the formation of the State of Israel. The presence of which has distracted the Arab population of the Middle East, leading many of them to take retributive measures against the Israelis, to the detriment of their own well-being, peace and prosperity. Which influences the foreign policy and global economics of many Middle Eastern nations to this day, in a generally negative way.
Not a difficult sequence of causes and effects to comprehend. Nor to predict…
That’s probably a discussion for another thread, but I’d hardly lay all the disfunctional in the ME at the feet of the formation of Israel.
This is a good thing and the tragedy here is the failure of the rest of the world to learn this lesson. No nationalism is harmless. All patriotism is poison.
All people of every country should be ashamed to show national pride and claim to be the best.
I would go further. I would reject all venues in which countries compete against countries for championships, like the Olympics or World Cup or the Eurovision Song Contest.
We should have no songs of national pride or obeisance to flags. A flag should be nothing more than a symbol of government action.
Moderator Note
I think this could easily lead to a major hijack, so let’s stick to the “in Germany” part of the OP as much as possible.
And this is getting far from GQ territory as well. Let’s stick to the OP rather than opining about nationalism.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
So what’s the 88 connotation? You wanna share?
See post #35.
Germans today are more than a bit embarrassed by any military history they may have had. I had a German explaining the Battle of Wilhelmsthal at the local museum and the general feeling he conveyed was one of Germany being in the wrong for fighting it, or in the 7 years war at all.