Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
- 20
- 3
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
If you want civil rights in Germany, you just plain lost already. As you note, the FDP is the only party still on anyone's RADAR that even remotely supports them on principle, and your analysis on the practicalities is correct. And this really is just democracy working as intended. Everyone wants more government that does more things they want done; whom do you hear calling for less government involvement in issue A who does then then turn around and demand more government involvement in the rest of the Alphabet? I maintain that Germans hate the freedom of others more than they love their own. Tell me it isn't so.
Well, but it wasn't always so, was it? I still have memories of a different Germany, where children and their parents would throw Polish firecrackers at the other kids and families who pissed them off for catharsis, where a bunch of 9 year olds could walk into the local OBI, buy a hammer and nails and go build a treehouse in the woods from trash collected in the local gravel pit, of looking for a flatshare in Berlin for a summer job and finding that the place I contacted was actually a ruined squatter house, of taking a ride from a ride-sharing side and the driver turning out to be a construction worker driving a decrepit Opel station wagon at 210km/h the whole way to Munich. Some generations back, I hear, kids would still collect discarded car motors and build human-sized soap-box cars to race each other in.
Germany is the country that begot the CCC and actually saw its foreign policy being made to yield to popular protest time and time again. German is the language that has words for something like the natural sovereignty of an adult individual (Mündigkeit), with attendant rights and responsibilities, and the taking away of it (Bevormundung), which don't even translate into any other language I know. I don't think this aspect of the culture would have shriveled as it did without enemy action; but to see culture as a static inevitability when the enemy sees it as a target is just surrender. What can I do if I want to bring back these things?
I have no idea. I wish I did. If you ever find out, please let me know.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ordnung muss sein.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link