As a German: Because we have a lot of Holocaust memorials and are taught a lot about it in school, we love jerking each other off about how much we've learned from our past as opposed to say, Japan, who deny the atrocities they've committed to this day.
But of course, all the changes and improvements are completely superficial and meaningless. We are a neoliberal hellhole and maybe the most pathetically loyal US client state in all of Europe, which is saying a lot. Our political parties will performatively decline engaging with the fascist AfD, but still implement all their same policies because we are a capitalist nation in decline.
Germans think because their newscasters speak in a monotonous, boring voice, that what they're being presented is completely unbiased and nothing but the truth. They really do believe themselves to be the adults in the room. Trump derangement syndrome is also huge in Germany, our equivalents of Bill Maher or whatever still make fun of him, the president of a foreign country who hasn't been in office for over 3 years, while self-fellating over how much better our democracy is because instead of 2 identical parties, we have 5.
Germans think they're the most reasonable, objective and intellectual people in the West while blindly following whatever the current US propaganda campaign says, so completely deluded, ignorant and pathetically loyal that we will happily shoot ourselves in the leg to serve American interests.
I fucking hate this country. I hate its self-aggrandizing, pseudo-repentant, pathetic ass-kissing of Israel. I hate how everyone in this country is a staunch defender of the status quo, how everyone loves to dunk on America with a less-than-surface level understanding of why America is the way it is and complete ignorance about how we're on the exact same track but maybe 3 years behind. Even our "left" loves Israel because there is not a single person in this country who understands literally anything, it's all fucking vibes. Israel could literally come out tomorrow like "We have decided to rebrand the war against Hamas as "Holocaust 2"" and we would lick their assholes for it.
Germans are probably the dumbest, most ignorant and at the same time most self-important people on this godforsaken planet. The dumbest American is 10x more curious about the world than the smartest German. If the US told us to, we would happily exterminate the Jews again, our news would tell us that the Jews started it and that would be enough for the average German to feel proud and righteous about it.
Be grateful that you can't read German twitter
The amount of Israel worship among self-described communists would activate the school shooter gene in US leftists
Edit: I've said before that the reason why the entire world can dunk on the US and the UK is because everyone understands what you're saying at all times. Nobody outside of Sweden can dunk on unhinged ramblings of random Swedes in TV interviews, because their interviews are in Swedish.
Be grateful that you can't read German twitter
The amount of Israel worship among self-described communists would activate the school shooter gene in US leftists
Holy shit.
The amount of Israel worship among self-described communists would activate the school shooter gene in US leftists
and they say Germans aren't funny
And this is why I love to constantly throw shit at Europeans. Even if I don't understand you, I have enough intimate intuition to know you're an entire continent of filthy swine rolling in the mud just like us.
Edit: also screw the sweds. All my Danish and Norwegian ancestors on a part of my family tree hate the sweds.
As a Dane, please note that while I am bound by blood to hate the Swede, any differences have long since been washed out and we suck as much as, if not more, than them. Just the other day I had a fellow Dane on
tell me that they would happily starve for a while if it meant we could keep giving funds to Ukraine.."Dane... would happily starve"
Congratulations, You've met the least self-aware person in the internet.
Yeah, it was one of those blessed moments that make me go "wait, this is reddit, why on earth am I engaging with these losers?" and my mental health is better for it
As someone who grew up entirely in the US, had hardly zero contact with my German family members, and who fluently speaks, reads and writes German, I have to say your description of German people (on social media) agrees with a similar thing that I think every time I go read what is happening on "German" social media, namely, that some Germans have a very peculiar way of being smug and wrong, such that it is literally indescribable.
That's why when people I know in the US tell me that they'd like to live in Germany because of how much more "radical" German politics are, it so directly contrasts with my own experience that my brain disassociates for the next 20 minutes to protect my Ego from having heard something so absurd.
I honestly can't fathom a nation being dumber than America. Maybe that's my American exceptionalism talking but we really are dumb.
There is something to be said for being openly and unashamedly dumb. I feel like us Europeans have this holier-than-thou superiority complex while still being dumb and horrible as shit. But then again, could also be my bias speaking. I would still rather live here than in the US for material reasons.
Europeans really do think that they're better than Americans because they have healthcare, and pretend racism and homophobia are American inventions.
Don't forget bad cops. Only US cops are bad and racist, our cops are wholesome 100. Never mind that just a few years ago it came out that like half of all German police stations had secret far-right Whatsapp group chats, just ignore that bit, our cops have a modicum of trigger discipline and don't blatantly gun down black people in the streets so that must mean they're epic Marvel Avengers.
to be fair, as a bleak ameroid, if we suddenly got universal healthcare and the cops stopped gunning down minorities in the streets with absolute impunity, i would think the Kingdom of Heaven had arrived.
As a german, the least I can say that we at least have the decency to all hate ourselves openly
Trump derangement syndrome is also huge in Germany,
I had an Australian tell me recently that their liberal party being frothing fascists is because Trump set a precedent for them or something? It's not like they only legalized gay marriages less than a decade ago.
"Erdogan is basically the Turkish Trump"
"Milei is basically the Argentinian Trump"
"Wilders is basically the Dutch Trump"
"Orban is basically the Hungarian Trump"
Wow, could there be material reasons for why all these right-wing figures are popping up with similar rhetorics?
NO, IT MUST BE BECAUSE OF THE ORANGE MAN'S BAD VIBES
Yeah it was posed as a question on why the liberal party acted the way they did and I was told I was wrong when I said that they resorted to culture war bullshit because neither party had the ability to materially improve people's lives as they'd been captured by corporate interests. No it must be Orange Man that made the world crazy. The liberal party definitely wouldn't have had China derangement and spent billions of dollars on nuclear submarines to protect themselves from their primary trading partner if Hillary had won.
The most irritating part is knowing that Erdogan and Orban have been in power long before Trump was.
I'm actually friends with this person and she seems relatively tuned in to politics in general, but it seems like a real blind spot born of getting basically all of her information from corporate media.
She's 38, granted she had a bunch of cancer and surgeries that kind of stole several years from her.
This is too accurate. It's wild that despite the massively strong competition, Germans might genuinely be the worst Europeans
I think the perfidious albion inches just ahead personally, but it's a close one
I could literally say the same thing about the UK except we know we're not very clever
I could literally say the same thing about the UK except we know we're not very clever
I wish we did too
maybe the most pathetically loyal US client state in all of Europe,
The dumbest American is 10x more curious about the world than the smartest German.
I could imagine this being true of other Anglophone states besides Ireland (which has some real Catholic morons, don't get me wrong, but also has some more intelligent people), but really? Germany? I suppose I have a prejudice because of German art, but I don't imagine the better among Germany as being nearly this dumb.
Europe in not defined by the EU, it's a geographical designation. If they wanted to exclude the UK, they could have said "continental Europe" or something.
Oh, how about "isn't Israel in Africa?" I think that will be a fun one to try out
As a German: Because we have a lot of Holocaust memorials and are taught a lot about it in school, we love jerking each other off about how much we’ve learned from our past as opposed to say, Japan, who deny the atrocities they’ve committed to this day.
Being part Armenian, part Jewish, I'll say mentioning unapologetic, but peaceful and harmless Japan in this sentence is the easy way, chosen instead of mentioning Turkey which is closer and which is still butt friends with the EU in general and Germany in particular in everything but words (because actions, like numbers for trade and military cooperation, matter, and words don't).
I mean, it can be read as just a detail deepening your point, so whatever.
I hate its self-aggrandizing, pseudo-repentant, pathetic ass-kissing of Israel.
Yes, that thing seemed OK 10-15 years ago, but now is kinda starting to stink.
That last paragraph is unfair to Germans, seems to me that it's true for most of the humanity.
unapologetic, but peaceful and harmless Japan
Japan is part of the West and by no means "harmless"
Absolutely true. Japan is as western as Germany or Switzerland in material terms. Any denial of it is simply racism and equating being western with being white.
Their colonial history and current exploitation of the global financial system gets them the title.
That last paragraph is unfair to Germans, seems to me that it's true for most of the humanity.
Yeah it's hyperbolic to say the least. I'm just so fucking frustrated. I was never much of a "I hate my country" guy until October 7th happened and everyone in this country showed their entire ass all at once. Every delusion I had about this country has been shattered since then, it's been a lot to deal with.
not sure if it directly answers your question but have to pass on this from @the_kid@hexbear.net in the news mega
excerpt
Sometime in the 2000s, a group of mostly Turkish women from an immigrant group called Neighborhood Mothers began meeting in the Neukölln district of Berlin to learn about the Holocaust. Their history lessons were part of a program facilitated by members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a Christian organization dedicated to German atonement for the Shoah. The Neighborhood Mothers were terrified by what they learned in these sessions. “How could a society turn so fanatical?” a group member named Nazmiye later recalled thinking. “We began to ask ourselves if they could do such a thing to us as well . . . whether we would find ourselves in the same position as the Jews.” But when they expressed this fear on a church visit organized by the program, their German hosts became apoplectic. “They told us to go back to our countries if this is how we think,” Nazmiye said. The session was abruptly ended and the women were asked to leave.
There are a number of anecdotes like this in anthropologist Esra Özyürek’s Subcontractors of Guilt, a recently published study of the array of German Holocaust education programs dedicated to integrating Arab and Muslim immigrant communities into the country’s ethos of responsibility and atonement for Nazi crimes. As Özyürek shows, those who pass through these programs often draw connections their guides do not intend—to nativist violence in contemporary Germany, or to the bloody circumstances they fled in Syria, Turkey, and Palestine. For many Germans, the anxieties these historical encounters stoke for migrants are, in Özyürek’s words, the “wrong emotions.” One German guide who leads concentration camp tours recalled being “irritated” by members of immigrant tour groups voicing the fear that “they will be sent there next.” “There was a sense that they didn’t belong here, and that they should not be engaging with the German past,” the guide said. To be really German, they were supposed to play the part of repentant perpetrators, not potential victims.
This expectation has become the basis for what scholars Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz have called the “migrant double bind.” In this paradigm, the core of contemporary “Germanness” is found in a certain sensitivity to antisemitism, conferred through a direct, likely familial relationship to the Third Reich. Migrants and racialized minorities are expected to assume the perpetrators’ legacy; when they fail, this is taken as a sign that they do not really belong in Germany. In other words, in a paradox typical of the upside-down dynamics surrounding Jews, Arabs, and Germans in contemporary Germany, a questionably conceived anti-antisemitism has become the mechanism for keeping Germanness Aryan.
really great article if you want to understand the German brain-type
It's really funny to see Turks having a problem with putting themselves into the "repentant perpetrator" and not "potential victim" role, though.
Typical German behavior on the Holocaust is problematic in the sense that they put their own shame above the reality and possibility of other real genocides, some happening now. So if their repentance means endorsing a genocide committed by someone else - it's fine, their repentance is more important for them.
So moral play is made more important than moral action, or even than refraining from immoral action.
EDIT: Ah, and if you are in conflict with this worldview of theirs and you are Jewish, - no, they are not going to shut up.
It's really funny to see Turks having a problem with putting themselves into the "repentant perpetrator" and not "potential victim" role, though.
as someone whose ethnic group was nearly exterminated by the Turks, yeah lol...
Same here.
Which is a bad pattern really, that most people irritated by such moments have a personal connection.
It is absolutely the most galling shit and every imperial core lib does it.
"Yes we did some horrible things in the past, but we've learned not to which makes us wiser than everyone else"
We freed the slaves all on our own accord, which if you think about it makes us the most moral people to ever exist!
And then we realized colonization is bad, so we agreed with the locals to leave and helped sort things out and set up their governments for them (they needed the help after all, the precious darlings) and then we packed up and left
Unfortunately, they were too primitive and stupid to run the country on their own so it became an impoverished shithole without our wise guidance. That's why we have to have the IMF come in and rescue them and hold their hands on what to do. Because non-white people are simply too stupid to have rich advanced nations. Colonization didn't have anything to do with this, in fact we gave them a headstart and they squandered it!
By the way, racism is evil and an eternal force of the universe that can never be defeated only temporarily repressed. It has nothing to do with colonialism either and has no basis in material history.
I felt ancient the day my doctors started to become noticeably younger than me
P.S. I'm joking. They aren't that much younger but the fact they're either my age or slightly younger was a little weird the first time I noticed it.
Germans project and believe an image of themselves as being a self-critical society that acknowledges the evil of their Nazi past and has now moved past it.
At the same time, they barely even understand who the Nazis were and how they came to power and who beat them into submission so they think it's just being racist and having swastikas.
As such, they're still pretty fash even though they don't know it and feel they have special brownie points to lecture everyone else about what counts as racist or Nazi even though they're idiots.
guy who started a grease fire in the kitchen by accident going on to give seminars in fire safety without ever having learned what causes grease fires
it's somehow worse, because there was a victim of that grease fire who gave their own seminars and actually understood why grease fires happen, but the first guy killed them and stole their stuff after shitting on them for decades
The existence of the current German state was founded on and exists because of that fundamental refusal to understand the Nazis.
It's so pervasive there are people who describe themselves as anarchists and zionists as if those things are possibly compatible. And there are a lot of them especially online.
https://novaramedia.com/2023/12/11/whats-up-with-germanys-pro-israel-left/
I really don't want to look either, I never imagined this deranged position existed but people are always pushing the limits of innovation.
I think for the most part it's just "my side and its allies good, their collective enemies bad", and a lot of people do not think about politics past that unless someone presses them for a deeper moral reason (that they arrive backwards at)
Anarchists who consider Zionists as allies on their side though? Haha
It's likely extremely common in people that venerate Kibbutzes as models of socialism.
And there are a lot of them especially online.
They are far from a terminally online phenomenon tbh, even if they are in a slow decline for the last decade or so (mostly because many become regular liberals or right wingers).
I think we can all agree that the world would be better off if the German speaking peoples were still scattered across a thousand tiny states called like the Grand Archbishopric of Pissdrinken
I was once in Jordan with a bunch of them - they accused everything of antisemitism. After seeing a pic of an Israeli soldier in nazi garb eating children (EDIT: Yeah, that one was antisemitic, they saw it everywhere though, with a generalized contempt for these arabs not having the noble german guilt to bear), they commented on how antisemitic that was and the swastika being drawn the wrong way around and I bursted out "Glad we are here to show them how it's done" and I still think that is the best summary of german thought I can give
That one was true tbh, didn't mean to defend the jordanians here, I meant to say they didn't just see it there
Here's a whole podcast with some good resource/analysis in the links.
Edit: Also a lot of Norman Finkelstein's "The Holocaust industry" goes into the issue with German reparations, the maleable definition of "holocaust survivor," and how "Establishment" organizations largely funnelled the funds to pro-Israel organizations.
Because in the typical euroid fashion, they still believe they have superior opinions.
Because in the typical euroid fashion, they still believe they have superior opinions.
An elegant way of conveying a thought I've had for a while, that being that when eugenics and the open discussion of killing the poor and the mentally disabled was publicly talked about, and how acceptable colonialism was, they thought themselves superior to the non-Western world; when they realized it was insane and evil and stopped, they still believed themselves superior. There doesn't seem to be a point where they see the rest of the world as equals.
They understand that all people are equal....unlike all those lesser people who don't realize that.
That is the essential contradiction of modern liberal eurocentrism. They uphold a basic rejection of their own actions being bad, as why they ARE still superior. Everything is couched in this exclusivity
I'm suddenly very tempted to ask German libs if they condemn the Warsaw Rising.
I think there'll be a split. The, eh, vanilla modern German view would be strongly in favor of it (EDIT: the uprising). But the fringe where the opposite opinion is acceptable starts not that far from it.
German libs seem to be the only ones in the West truly enjoying supporting Israel's genocide. They're totally convinced that supporting Israeli murder of Palestinians makes them clever/moral good boys who are just better than everyone else. Everyone else is sheepish about it or just doesn't want to talk about it, but the Germans watch their media blatantly propagandizing them to support this crime against humanity and eat it up like Uncle Sam dripped some lard over their kibble this morning. It really encapsulates everything that is sick and wrong in the German political consciousness. They've really got a lot going for them as a society, as loathe as many of us here are to admit it, but it makes them so damned arrogant and blind to their ideological domination.
They've really got a lot going for them as a society
Could you expand on that? Thinking of moving
Cause that's how cracker chauvinism works. When you do a lot of heinous shit, you arent guilty. You've simply become an expert.
Because its literally illegal to support Palestine in Germany. It got written in law decades ago so now every political party must support Israel. Who is going to articulate to them the reality? Online foreigners? Thats just people who never had to face their antisemitism.
