The 19th-century German author Karl May taught us about the American Wild West, and Karl Marx warned us about unbridled capitalism. Besides, we've all been there at least once -- on vacation, of course. Be it in California or Florida (that's where you get the best deals on rental cars, you know), we can see right through the Americans.
For us Germans, the Americans are either too fat or too obsessed with exercise, too prudish or too pornographic, too religious or too nihilistic. In terms of history and foreign policy, the Americans have either been too isolationist or too imperialistic. They simply go ahead and invade foreign countries (something we Germans, of course, would never do) and then abandon them, the way they did in Vietnam and will soon do in Iraq.
Worst of all, the Americans won the war in 1945. (Well, with German help, of course -- from Einstein and his ilk.) There are some Germans who will never forgive the Americans for VE Day, when they defeated Hitler. After all, Nazism was just an accident, whereas Americans are inherently evil. Just look at President Bush, the man who, as some of SPIEGEL ONLINE's readers steadfastly believe, "is worse than Hitler." Now that gives us a chance to kill two birds with one stone. If Bush is the new Hitler, then we Germans have finally unloaded the Führer on to someone else. In fact, we won't even have to posthumously revoke his German citizenship, as politicians in Lower Saxony recently proposed. No one can hold a candle to our talent for symbolism!
I've written before about how so many people hate America because we are Americans. And let's face it, it's much easier to do nothing if you can blame every problem in the world on the United States. If it is always the Americans' fault, then other nations have a free pass to do nothing but wring their hands at every nasty event in the world. It is only the U.S. that is expected to actually do something about the nasty events.
Got a genocide going in Europe? Expect the Americans to send troops. Homicidal dictator threatening his own subjects, his neighbors, and countries around the globe? The U.S. will send in its military. Need humanitarian relief? No problem, the Americans will send 20 times the aid of other countries. All this, and then the Europeans can bash the U.S. for some perceived wrong-doing.
I would suggest that we just withdraw from the international stage and say FU to Europe, but the last time we did it, we got Bosnia.
I'm a US citizen of German-Hungarian extraction, first generation, who was raised by parents and grandparents who instilled "Old World" virtues that place a high premium on ethical behavior and moral values. I actually LIVE HERE and observe my fellow citizens.
ReplyDeleteI can report unequivocally that the society that I live in is constantly bombarded by pseudo-information from corporate/government-sponsored economic concerns.
For many decades now this so called "information" has been increasingly and specifically engineered to deliver an influence upon the citizens of my country which has rendered them nearly incompetent with respect to understanding the actual real-world issues upon which any so-called "democratic" society must accordingly decide and select their leadership.
The rest is clear: how can ANYONE with any brains doubt the inherent dangerousness of any nation that is ABSOLUTELY powerful (because it is obscenely wealthy compared to rest of the world) and therefore, as we have abundantly seen, especially increasingly of late, absolutely corruptible??? WAKE UP!
Yes, I wish the Germans would wake up, too. I've never known the American president to say he was going to nuke a country out of existence like Iran threatens Israel. More to the point, the U.S. never has threatened its neighbors' existence, persecuted its own people, taken hostages and paraded them on TV in clear violation of the Geneva conventions, engaged in the kind of belligerence we've come to know and love from Iran. So I agree: how could ANYONE be stupid enough to think the U.S. was a bigger danger than Iran? It truly boggles the mind.
ReplyDeleteThe Germans are still POed about getting their butts kicked in two wars.
ReplyDeleteForty years ago, the Germans were very contrite, realizing that it was their nation and their people's support of Adolf Hitler which led to the gruesome terror of World War II, added to their deep embarassment at their participation in the Holocaust. After all, der Führer might have ordered the extermination of the Jews, but he didn't kill them personally; it required the complicity and active assistance of millions of supposedly decent German citizens.
But most Germans today hadn't been born then. They don't have much reason to feel shame or embarassment, because they were in no way complicit. And thus, they are subject to the regular feelings of patriotism and nationalism as anyone else would have, untempered by their parents'
and grandparents' past actions.
Which means that they harbor more resentment toward their country's defeats in the twentieth century.