Margaret Thatcher Had A Point About Germany

[Guest TheBlueCat]

I font hate the Swiss. Helvetica is awful.

Quite right, Arial all the way. Interesting factoid: the character widths for Arial are identical to those for Helvetica as Monotype designed it to be a drop in replacement.

[Sir Harold m]

I font hate the Swiss. Helvetica is awful.

[cashinmattress]

Admire them for their traits, but not their identity.

Giving them free reign in regards to capital controls, especially in smaller states, is bad juju.

Germany is rife with xenophobia and latent racism, and I know for a fact from friends there that a great resentment towards neighbours, and even more so with their own governments cosy relationship with the EU government.

Although the socialist/fascist party of old is well and truly dead, the ideology is still strong within the youth. Just take a trip to Dresden or similar dodgy city.

Call it what you will, but there is a lot of race hate there and you can re-brand the fascist party anyway you want.

Sooner or later one of these groups of people will get a politician in place to rally for them.

I can fully understand why a lot of Jewish folk and other religious groups are very unhappy with the social politic there.

EDIT: and their neighbours are tenfold more concerned about the state of affair.

Edited March 27, 2013 by cashinmattress

[Englebert]

Admire them for their traits, but not their identity.

Giving them free reign in regards to capital controls, especially in smaller states, is bad juju.

Germany is rife with xenophobia and latent racism, and I know for a fact from friends there that a great resentment towards neighbours, and even more so with their own governments cosy relationship with the EU government.

Although the socialist/fascist party of old is well and truly dead, the ideology is still strong within the youth. Just take a trip to Dresden or similar dodgy city.

Call it what you will, but there is a lot of race hate there and you can re-brand the fascist party anyway you want.

Sooner or later one of these groups of people will get a politician in place to rally for them.

I can fully understand why a lot of Jewish folk and other religious groups are very unhappy with the social politic there.

EDIT: and their neighbours are tenfold more concerned about the state of affair.

Do you think the English Defence League is a pacifist organization over here in good ol' Blighty? Do you think it logical to judge a whole country based on its fringe eccentrics?

[snowflux]

Having lived in western Germany for 10 years, I'd say that the people there are probably less racist or xenophobic than the English on average. As in the UK, there are people of every kind of conviction, but you don't see the sort of outright jingoism that appears so frequently in our tabloid media. The armed forces, in particular, are not given anything like the high profile they receive in the UK.

Eastern Germany is still a different story though, and some towns there are indeed hotbeds of xenophobia. The trouble is that most of the ambitious youngsters have left to find jobs elsewhere, leaving behind just the old folk and unemployable youth, who then end up joining far-right groups out of boredom and disaffection.

[eztiger]

link

While the EU has been crap for most of Europe, Germany got its country back and others funded it, they got their currency back, and are gaining other state assets without a single jackboot on the ground.

I agree with the old cow, and don't trust their government. German folk I know are just as pissed off at Merkel as everybody else is, and really hold a lot of resent for the annexation of the western halves pensions and future to fund the east... although as mentioned before, now its being mostly funded by their neighbours.

There are two countries that love nationalism and war in Europe. Germany and Britain.

"While the EU has been crap for most of Europe, Germany got its country back and others funded it, they got their currency back, and are gaining other state assets without a single jackboot on the ground."

This reminds me of a conspiracy theory I read about a while ago, "The 4th Reich".

Apparently in the final year of WW2 the german leadership & corporate heads knew the 3rd Reich was done so planned a strategy to rebuild a 4th Reich which would create a european empire carved out not via military means but through political / economic / corporate means (EU cough cough).

The 4th Reich

I think Thatcher was on to something.

[cashinmattress]

Do you think the English Defence League is a pacifist organization over here in good ol' Blighty? Do you think it logical to judge a whole country based on its fringe eccentrics?

I spend late summer, part of it in Germany, on my motorcycle. Have worked there, and have good friendships there.

Yes, hate groups are a big problem, especially in the north and east, on a scale much bigger than anything we've got.

We have the benefit of a closed geography and are not subject to the politics of shared borders such as is Germany.

EDL, BNP, and the rest of the UK brand hate groups are just a bunch of mentally inept w@nkers, as are their Germanic counterparts.

EDIT: and how do you think any German citizen feels, no matter their political view, when they are constantly being brow beaten and demonised. Look no further than your kids favourite war game shooter on the console. Shooting Germans. Or constant reference to Hitler or concentration camps whenever possible, media, print. They are so bloody suppressed it will just be a matter of time for a good chunk of them to snap.

Edited March 27, 2013 by cashinmattress