Debts, promises and the erosion of democracy | 423 comments (422 topical, 1 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

Talos, I know that. Most Germans do not, though. They find these placards very offensive and unfair and in an emotionalised climate it is impossible to speak about it, and about the different meanings of the nazi symbolic. I suspect it explains a bit of the high approval rates for Merkel. I find the German rhetoric and the lazy-Greeks-campaign at least as offensive and I am shocked that the communication can break down so quickly.

by Katrin on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 06:44:02 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: More heat than light (4.00 / 2)

The show of solidarity around Germany (i.e., i.e.2) helped a lot I can tell you. So did a group of German protesters, protesting outside the German embassy in Athens and getting arrested for it... The thing is, as people are pushed below poverty en masse, Schauble on TV pontificating on how y'all deserve it doesn't help at all...

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

by talos (mihalis at gmail dot com) on Tue Feb 21st, 2012 at 07:05:57 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

Maybe the lack of a common language is more important than we care to believe.

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 01:32:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

Well here comes that argument again. When Germans see Nazi references, is the holocaust the first thing they think of? Not WW2? I feel a bit confused.

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

by Starvid on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 05:13:34 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

Yes, Germans will understand that as a reference to the Holocaust, which is why they find the current produce of Greek cartoonists so unfair.

by Katrin on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 06:22:08 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

But you can't really separate the two. Without the war the holocaust is hard to imagine. Even the action T4, that is the killing of mentally handicapped, started at the beginning of the war. It is easier to justify all sorts of killing when organized killing has started anyway, to hide a heap of corpses with a heap of corpses.

Quite apart from the facts, in the consciousness in Germany the Second World War is the holocaust and then the eastern front in the Soviet union. It is a bit as if you would ask if the americans remember slavery and not the civil war.

Anyway I was very much not talking about any protest signs in Greece but about comparisons partly to the nationalsocialistic dictatorship, partly explicit to the holocaust right here on this blog.

by IM on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 08:50:13 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 1)

The holocaust would have been unthinkable without the war, but you can't reverse the statement.

You have read Talos's post above (btw, I have been to Crete, and I have seen impressive memorials there). It's not only Greece: many Europeans connote "occupation and starvation" rather than "holocaust" when they make a nazi reference. They think they can make themselves understood that way.

Germans connote "holocaust" before other concepts. They too think that everyone connotes in the same way.

by Katrin on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 09:06:21 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

here in rural italy there are people who remember and still talk about how cruel the nazis were.

perhaps that cruelty was par for the course for most any invading/occupying war machine, while the holocaust was novel, in its sheer scale and industrial efficiency, so that's why people in germany blow off any other parts as just normal behaviour during wartime. all armies are perceived as more or less inhumane after all. no saints on the battlefield...

ethnic cleansing is as old as time, whereas the holocaust was organised genocide on an historically unsurpassed level.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 11:41:15 AM EST
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Re: More heat than light (4.00 / 3)

I think that aside from the Holocaust, the other pillar of Nazi horror is that it brought to Europe practices and methods used till then by Europeans against Third World colonies and darker skinned folks. I note that a decade after the war, the UK didn't have a problem with large scale concentration camps and a massive military operations affecting non-combatants, including starving them, as long as it was in Kenya...

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake

by talos (mihalis at gmail dot com) on Wed Feb 22nd, 2012 at 12:39:38 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: More heat than light (none / 0)

excellent, under-appreciated point...

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Thu Feb 23rd, 2012 at 04:16:05 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Debts, promises and the erosion of democracy | 423 comments (422 topical, 1 editorial, 0 hidden)

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