Don't mention the unicorn
Apparantly British MPs have some kind of competition going on wherein every week, one of them must be Basil Fawlty in The Germans? With the latest entry being the one from Shropshire, who apparently never heard of the fact Britain got far more monetary aid from the Marshall Plan than West Germany did. (East Germany, for obvious reasons, got nothing.) Aside from far too many WWII movies, tv shows, books, what have you, this latest round of German bashing seems to hail from disappointment that one of the Brexiteers‘ favourite scripts - „the German car industry wants to sell cars in Britain, so they will force Angela Merkel to give us all we want, and she’ll force the rest of the EU!“ - just refuses to happen. Mind you, no one outside of Britain ever assumed it would, and most certainly no one in Germany (where both the car industry and Angela Merkel have other problems than the delusions of the British upper class) but then, that’s part of the general, ongoing problem - Brexiteers keep talking endlessly among themselves and no one ever seems to take in what the EU has (consistently) said it will and won’t accept. This article from the Washington Post sums up the Brexit developments thus far superbly, concluding with: Britain is one of the richest and most advanced democracies in the world. It is currently locked in a room, babbling away to itself hysterically while threatening to blow its own kneecaps off. This is what nationalist populism does to a country.
No kidding. Says she who lives in a country where national populism produced the worst results in human history. A few days ago, Saul Friedländer spoke in front of the Bundestag, our parliament, apropos the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He spoke of his parents murdered there, of his own memories, of so many others, and he chose to speak in German, the German of his childhood. The horror and shame hit me all over again while I listened, and also the gratitude that he was there, alive, to be listened to. And then you get online and encounter people treating all that horror still as the ultimate role playing game with themselves as the heroes.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1328312.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
No kidding. Says she who lives in a country where national populism produced the worst results in human history. A few days ago, Saul Friedländer spoke in front of the Bundestag, our parliament, apropos the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He spoke of his parents murdered there, of his own memories, of so many others, and he chose to speak in German, the German of his childhood. The horror and shame hit me all over again while I listened, and also the gratitude that he was there, alive, to be listened to. And then you get online and encounter people treating all that horror still as the ultimate role playing game with themselves as the heroes.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1328312.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.