European Politics
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@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
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@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
I think you give her far too much credit. She's a politician and has been Chancellor for over a decade. Anyone with half a brain could see the consequences regardless of their religious convictions. It should also be noted that Merkel made a rather controversial speech not that long ago about how multiculturalism had failed in Germany. How do you reconcile that with then letting in hundreds of thousands of undocumented Arabs?
No I think Merkel saw her chance to go down in history as a saint and took it.
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@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
I think you are being wildly to generous towards her. if she as half as decent as you say, she would have thought about her own people as well. She clearly did not. She is not a decent person, she is an arrogant one. She was arrogant because she assumed she knew best, consultation and a thoughtful process was not required. She decided as leader, she was going to restructure the whole demographic of her country. What the fuck is that??? Humility? she could have taken it to the polls, told people straight up that she wanted over a million young Muslim men to enter the country, maybe drip feed them and see how they assimilate... nah fuck that she just KNEW it would all work. How exactly?
Fuck Merkel and her arrogance in causing turmoil and grief in her own country. She needs to wear the consequences of her hubris and not hide behind somer sort of higher moral standard.. essentially you are saying she is not guilty.. due to being such a better person than everyone else. She is not. -
@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
I think you give her far too much credit. She's a politician and has been Chancellor for over a decade. Anyone with half a brain could see the consequences regardless of their religious convictions. It should also be noted that Merkel made a rather controversial speech not that long ago about how multiculturalism had failed in Germany. How do you reconcile that with then letting in hundreds of thousands of undocumented Arabs?
What’s to reconcile? I didn’t agree with the decision to let them in then and I still don’t now.
As for her speech, she was right. Multiculturalism has failed. But she only realised it too late, the barbarians were already through the gate. That doesn’t make her dishonourable, just catastrophically wrong.
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The criticism of her shortsightedness and ignorance of recent history is a valid one. After all, the prevailing belief was the Turks would eventually go home once Germany no longer required their labour.
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@baron-silas-greenback said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
I think you are being wildly to generous towards her. if she as half as decent as you say, she would have thought about her own people as well. She clearly did not. She is not a decent person, she is an arrogant one. She was arrogant because she assumed she knew best, consultation and a thoughtful process was not required. She decided as leader, she was going to restructure the whole demographic of her country. What the fuck is that??? Humility? she could have taken it to the polls, told people straight up that she wanted over a million young Muslim men to enter the country, maybe drip feed them and see how they assimilate... nah fuck that she just KNEW it would all work. How exactly?
Fuck Merkel and her arrogance in causing turmoil and grief in her own country. She needs to wear the consequences of her hubris and not hide behind somer sort of higher moral standard.. essentially you are saying she is not guilty.. due to being such a better person than everyone else. She is not.I’m not saying she’s a better person. Personally I could give a toss about her religion or anybody else’s. All I’m saying is her motivations are not what RS was saying. It’s not because she wanted to be seen as some sort of saint, it’s because at the end of the day she’s a conviction politician, and whether or not we agree with those convictions, they are what drive her.
I’ll also point out that Germany had an election at the same time as we did. She didn’t get a clear majority ( who ever does over there) but she’s still the Chancellor. So she did go to the polls with it -belatedly - and yet she’s still there. Given the chance to give her the arse the German electorate didn’t. No, I don’t understand it either.
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@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
I think you give her far too much credit. She's a politician and has been Chancellor for over a decade. Anyone with half a brain could see the consequences regardless of their religious convictions. It should also be noted that Merkel made a rather controversial speech not that long ago about how multiculturalism had failed in Germany. How do you reconcile that with then letting in hundreds of thousands of undocumented Arabs?
What’s to reconcile? I didn’t agree with the decision to let them in then and I still don’t now.
As for her speech, she was right. Multiculturalism has failed. But she only realised it too late, the barbarians were already through the gate. That doesn’t make her dishonourable, just catastrophically wrong.
Reconcile how she can claim multiculturalism has failed and then let in 1 million Arabs. Surely if she's all about seeing the goodness in everyone then she would have never made those comments in the first place.
How has she not been dishonourable in all this? Faced with the magnitude of her massive fuck up she is now prohibiting anyone from criticising it. She basically even instructed Mark Zuckerberg to do so. If she was honourable she would have admitted she made a mistake. You think that's going to happen?
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@jc said in European Politics:
@baron-silas-greenback said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
I think you are being wildly to generous towards her. if she as half as decent as you say, she would have thought about her own people as well. She clearly did not. She is not a decent person, she is an arrogant one. She was arrogant because she assumed she knew best, consultation and a thoughtful process was not required. She decided as leader, she was going to restructure the whole demographic of her country. What the fuck is that??? Humility? she could have taken it to the polls, told people straight up that she wanted over a million young Muslim men to enter the country, maybe drip feed them and see how they assimilate... nah fuck that she just KNEW it would all work. How exactly?
Fuck Merkel and her arrogance in causing turmoil and grief in her own country. She needs to wear the consequences of her hubris and not hide behind somer sort of higher moral standard.. essentially you are saying she is not guilty.. due to being such a better person than everyone else. She is not.I’m not saying she’s a better person. Personally I could give a toss about her religion or anybody else’s. All I’m saying is her motivations are not what RS was saying. It’s not because she wanted to be seen as some sort of saint, it’s because at the end of the day she’s a conviction politician, and whether or not we agree with those convictions, they are what drive her.
I’ll also point out that Germany had an election at the same time as we did. She didn’t get a clear majority ( who ever does over there) but she’s still the Chancellor. So she did go to the polls with it -belatedly - and yet she’s still there. Given the chance to give her the arse the German electorate didn’t. No, I don’t understand it either.
Few things here. Conviction politicians don't criticise something and then completely flip like she did.
Secondly, her party suffered an 8.6% swing against it and the AfD got nearly 6 million votes. Hardly a ringing endorsement of her policy and it's not like the German voters had much of an alternative considering the other mainstream parties were on board.
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@jc said in European Politics:
My wife was born and grew up in Chemnitz. Her parents still live there. They tell a very different story. They are uncomfortable with the number of incomers for sure but they are used to a city in which foreigners were rare.
My father in law says that in the last few days there have been hundreds of hard right young men flooding into town and they are very scared. The Leipzig/ Dresden/ Chemnitz triangle has had a problem with neo-Nazis since the wall came down (my wife’s 1st cousin was married to one for years) and even before that intimidation of the Vietnamese and Cuban “Gastarbeiter” was commonplace. He’s pretty clear that most of the people in these rallies are not locals, and rather they are from all over Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg who have been spoiling for this fight for decades.
BTW, anybody who thinks Merkel, for all her faults, doesn’t care about this area of Germany knows nothing about modern German history. (Edit: those were my FiL’s words, not mine)
Thanks JC, good to have some even closer local knowledge. I wonder what their definition of far right or Nazi is? I've been advised that can apply to anyone who is part of any organisation that questions mass migration and this same definition is what is pushed in the media.
Did he say how he knew these men were far-right, Nazis or visitors? I'm sure it is entirely possible but that sure looked like a huge amount of people and from the close up videos I've been able to watch they hardly look like extremists..don't get me wrong they sounded like them being passionate Germans and all but I don't speak the language.
Have they also talked about migrant crime over there? I think it was Chemnitz that had that 7yo raped in a park by a migrant a couple years back back with a number of incidents since, that sort of thing would easily rile the masses regardless of how rare it might be.
As for Merkel. I don't understand why she completely changed her tune in a few short years, the start of the below vid shows a couple speeches she gave on this issue a few years back.
This to me proves that its not even good intentions that are driving her. One could easily argue that she is ultimately responsible for thousands of innocent deaths due to her open border death lottery.
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@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
I think you give her far too much credit. She's a politician and has been Chancellor for over a decade. Anyone with half a brain could see the consequences regardless of their religious convictions. It should also be noted that Merkel made a rather controversial speech not that long ago about how multiculturalism had failed in Germany. How do you reconcile that with then letting in hundreds of thousands of undocumented Arabs?
What’s to reconcile? I didn’t agree with the decision to let them in then and I still don’t now.
As for her speech, she was right. Multiculturalism has failed. But she only realised it too late, the barbarians were already through the gate. That doesn’t make her dishonourable, just catastrophically wrong.
Reconcile how she can claim multiculturalism has failed and then let in 1 million Arabs. Surely if she's all about seeing the goodness in everyone then she would have never made those comments in the first place.
How has she not been dishonourable in all this? Faced with the magnitude of her massive fuck up she is now prohibiting anyone from criticising it. She basically even instructed Mark Zuckerberg to do so. If she was honourable she would have admitted she made a mistake. You think that's going to happen?
But she said it failed after she let the people in. She didn’t think it had failed beforehand. As I said, a catastrophically wrong decision followed by a correct observation afterwards. That doesn’t need reconciling, it’s what I would expect from someone who fucked up.
Yes, she fucked up. I’d be interested to see any evidence for a prohibition on reporting it though, given that such a prohibition would breach German and European law. If you are saying that media are avoiding reporting it, yeah I buy that, because ours probably would too. But she doesn’t have the power to restrict reporting.
Germany has strong - too strong- online hate speech laws but freedom of the press is guaranteed by the German constitution. And at the last election there was significant free and open press coverage of the immigration issues in the Chemnitz Freie Presse so I’m sure it was covered elsewhere in Germany too.
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@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
I think you give her far too much credit. She's a politician and has been Chancellor for over a decade. Anyone with half a brain could see the consequences regardless of their religious convictions. It should also be noted that Merkel made a rather controversial speech not that long ago about how multiculturalism had failed in Germany. How do you reconcile that with then letting in hundreds of thousands of undocumented Arabs?
What’s to reconcile? I didn’t agree with the decision to let them in then and I still don’t now.
As for her speech, she was right. Multiculturalism has failed. But she only realised it too late, the barbarians were already through the gate. That doesn’t make her dishonourable, just catastrophically wrong.
Reconcile how she can claim multiculturalism has failed and then let in 1 million Arabs. Surely if she's all about seeing the goodness in everyone then she would have never made those comments in the first place.
How has she not been dishonourable in all this? Faced with the magnitude of her massive fuck up she is now prohibiting anyone from criticising it. She basically even instructed Mark Zuckerberg to do so. If she was honourable she would have admitted she made a mistake. You think that's going to happen?
But she said it failed after she let the people in. She didn’t think it had failed beforehand. As I said, a catastrophically wrong decision followed by a correct observation afterwards. That doesn’t need reconciling, it’s what I would expect from someone who fucked up.
Yes, she fucked up. I’d be interested to see any evidence for a prohibition on reporting it though, given that such a prohibition would breach German and European law. If you are saying that media are avoiding reporting it, yeah I buy that, because ours probably would too. But she doesn’t have the power to restrict reporting.
Germany has strong - too strong- online hate speech laws but freedom of the press is guaranteed by the German constitution. And at the last election there was significant free and open press coverage of the immigration issues in the Chemnitz Freie Presse so I’m sure it was covered elsewhere in Germany too.
No she held the opposite view BEFORE she made her arrogant move.
She is not remotely a conviction politician. -
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
I think you give her far too much credit. She's a politician and has been Chancellor for over a decade. Anyone with half a brain could see the consequences regardless of their religious convictions. It should also be noted that Merkel made a rather controversial speech not that long ago about how multiculturalism had failed in Germany. How do you reconcile that with then letting in hundreds of thousands of undocumented Arabs?
What’s to reconcile? I didn’t agree with the decision to let them in then and I still don’t now.
As for her speech, she was right. Multiculturalism has failed. But she only realised it too late, the barbarians were already through the gate. That doesn’t make her dishonourable, just catastrophically wrong.
Reconcile how she can claim multiculturalism has failed and then let in 1 million Arabs. Surely if she's all about seeing the goodness in everyone then she would have never made those comments in the first place.
How has she not been dishonourable in all this? Faced with the magnitude of her massive fuck up she is now prohibiting anyone from criticising it. She basically even instructed Mark Zuckerberg to do so. If she was honourable she would have admitted she made a mistake. You think that's going to happen?
But she said it failed after she let the people in. She didn’t think it had failed beforehand. As I said, a catastrophically wrong decision followed by a correct observation afterwards. That doesn’t need reconciling, it’s what I would expect from someone who fucked up.
Yes, she fucked up. I’d be interested to see any evidence for a prohibition on reporting it though, given that such a prohibition would breach German and European law. If you are saying that media are avoiding reporting it, yeah I buy that, because ours probably would too. But she doesn’t have the power to restrict reporting.
Germany has strong - too strong- online hate speech laws but freedom of the press is guaranteed by the German constitution. And at the last election there was significant free and open press coverage of the immigration issues in the Chemnitz Freie Presse so I’m sure it was covered elsewhere in Germany too.
She most certainly did say that years before opening the borders. Look it up. There are videos of it. I remember talking to a Venezuelan living in Germany who was seriously pissed off about it. Conviction politician my arse.
Prohibiting anyone is obviously hyperbole, my apologies, but good luck trying to make a comment about it on social media. Merkel has also been very strident about prohibiting anything that could be construed as criticism of this policy online. Why would she be doing that if she was a conviction politician? Maybe she learned a few tricks from her time in East Germany?
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@rembrandt Out of town people are surprisingly easy to identify in Germany. The accents and dialect vary considerably even over short distances. People in Chemnitz take the piss out of people from Erzgebirge, which is only like 30kms away. People from Dresden mock Chemnitzers as if they were bumpkins. As soon as you open your mouth people know where you come from. I can follow a conversation in Chemnitz but I have no clue what someone from neighbouring Leipzig says at all.
As far as her responsibility is concerned, yeah it’s clearly on her. But in general from what I can see the Germans aren’t as outraged as you’d imagine. They didn’t show her the door at the election as many predicted. The people I know, including my wife, are as mortified by the portrayal of these crowds being representative of German feeling as we would be if German media picked up Valerie Morse’s antics and reported them as if she spoke on our behalf.
BTW in Germany, when people suggest someone is a Nazi, they mean a Nazi. They don’t mean right or far-right they mean an actual fascist. You can be jailed for membership of such an organisation, or for giving a Nazi salute, and the majority of Germans support the laws, which specifically target neo-fascists.
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@baron-silas-greenback said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel There’s no doubt by now that it was a bad idea. But I think it’s probably unfair to Merkel to characterise it in terms of her not caring. She’s a devout Christian, to such an extent that she risked her liberty and maybe her life to help bring down the Communists. She saw it as her duty before God to try and end what she saw as an inhumanity. That’s no different to what drove her to let in “refugees”, and from her perspective the ability to absorb large numbers of incomers probably wasn’t anything like as big a problem as moving 11million Ossis into the GDR. Even the integration probably wasn’t that big a deal to her, it’s not as if everyone in the East integrated seamlessly either.
All her mistakes stem from believing that people are fundamentally decent and that some behaviours are self-evidently immoral so nobody will go there if you treat them well. I reckon she believes in a Christian God so much that she can’t see that Judeo-Christian values are now a minority belief system and getting weaker by the day. I don’t think it crossed her mind that many of the people she was letting in have nothing but contempt for what she believes in.
Her blindspot isn’t her arrogance, it’s her decency. She thought it was innate and she was wrong. God only knows if she has learned from this though.
I think you give her far too much credit. She's a politician and has been Chancellor for over a decade. Anyone with half a brain could see the consequences regardless of their religious convictions. It should also be noted that Merkel made a rather controversial speech not that long ago about how multiculturalism had failed in Germany. How do you reconcile that with then letting in hundreds of thousands of undocumented Arabs?
What’s to reconcile? I didn’t agree with the decision to let them in then and I still don’t now.
As for her speech, she was right. Multiculturalism has failed. But she only realised it too late, the barbarians were already through the gate. That doesn’t make her dishonourable, just catastrophically wrong.
Reconcile how she can claim multiculturalism has failed and then let in 1 million Arabs. Surely if she's all about seeing the goodness in everyone then she would have never made those comments in the first place.
How has she not been dishonourable in all this? Faced with the magnitude of her massive fuck up she is now prohibiting anyone from criticising it. She basically even instructed Mark Zuckerberg to do so. If she was honourable she would have admitted she made a mistake. You think that's going to happen?
But she said it failed after she let the people in. She didn’t think it had failed beforehand. As I said, a catastrophically wrong decision followed by a correct observation afterwards. That doesn’t need reconciling, it’s what I would expect from someone who fucked up.
Yes, she fucked up. I’d be interested to see any evidence for a prohibition on reporting it though, given that such a prohibition would breach German and European law. If you are saying that media are avoiding reporting it, yeah I buy that, because ours probably would too. But she doesn’t have the power to restrict reporting.
Germany has strong - too strong- online hate speech laws but freedom of the press is guaranteed by the German constitution. And at the last election there was significant free and open press coverage of the immigration issues in the Chemnitz Freie Presse so I’m sure it was covered elsewhere in Germany too.
No she held the opposite view BEFORE she made her arrogant move.
Didn’t know that.
She is not remotely a conviction politician.
She is. Obviously I won’t convince you so we’ll have to agree to disagree.
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@jc said in European Politics:
@rembrandt Out of town people are surprisingly easy to identify in Germany. The accents and dialect vary considerably even over short distances. People in Chemnitz take the piss out of people from Erzgebirge, which is only like 30kms away. People from Dresden mock Chemnitzers as if they were bumpkins. As soon as you open your mouth people know where you come from. I can follow a conversation in Chemnitz but I have no clue what someone from neighbouring Leipzig says at all.
As far as her responsibility is concerned, yeah it’s clearly on her. But in general from what I can see the Germans aren’t as outraged as you’d imagine. They didn’t show her the door at the election as many predicted. The people I know, including my wife, are as mortified by the portrayal of these crowds being representative of German feeling as we would be if German media picked up Valerie Morse’s antics and reported them as if she spoke on our behalf.
BTW in Germany, when people suggest someone is a Nazi, they mean a Nazi. They don’t mean right or far-right they mean an actual fascist. You can be jailed for membership of such an organisation, or for giving a Nazi salute, and the majority of Germans support the laws, which specifically target neo-fascists.
Who were they supposed to vote for JC? The SPD, FDP and Greens all supported her policy. The only party that didn't hadn't even achieved enough votes to sit in the Bundestag in 2013. They became the 3rd largest party in 2017.
There is no way that Merkel holding onto power can be interpreted as support for this policy.
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@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rembrandt Out of town people are surprisingly easy to identify in Germany. The accents and dialect vary considerably even over short distances. People in Chemnitz take the piss out of people from Erzgebirge, which is only like 30kms away. People from Dresden mock Chemnitzers as if they were bumpkins. As soon as you open your mouth people know where you come from. I can follow a conversation in Chemnitz but I have no clue what someone from neighbouring Leipzig says at all.
As far as her responsibility is concerned, yeah it’s clearly on her. But in general from what I can see the Germans aren’t as outraged as you’d imagine. They didn’t show her the door at the election as many predicted. The people I know, including my wife, are as mortified by the portrayal of these crowds being representative of German feeling as we would be if German media picked up Valerie Morse’s antics and reported them as if she spoke on our behalf.
BTW in Germany, when people suggest someone is a Nazi, they mean a Nazi. They don’t mean right or far-right they mean an actual fascist. You can be jailed for membership of such an organisation, or for giving a Nazi salute, and the majority of Germans support the laws, which specifically target neo-fascists.
Who were they supposed to vote for JC? The SPD, FDP and Greens all supported her policy. The only party that didn't hadn't even achieved enough votes to sit in the Bundestag in 2013. They became the 3rd largest party in 2017.
There is no way that Merkel holding onto power can be interpreted as support for this policy.
You’ve kind of made my point RS. It simply wasn’t that contentious an issue as we would have thought it should be. When people were much more concerned about the EU than they were about this. Most parties were generally in agreement that the integration of these people hadn’t gone well but they were much more philosophical than I expected. Germans are a much more conforming lot than I would have believed before I met my missus. I don’t know whether it’s because of the shame of Naziism, but they seem to be perfectly happy to have laws on their books that I would find outrageous if they tried to enact them here. And tolerance (to an excessive degree IMO) is absolutely unquestionable. Most people are shit scared of being suspected of being a right winger. As a consequence there’s no real left/ right balance to their politics. Their political parties are reflective of how people behave.
From what I can gather Wessis are generally much more liberal than the Ossis, while also being much more religious.
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@jc said in European Politics:
@rancid-schnitzel said in European Politics:
@jc said in European Politics:
@rembrandt Out of town people are surprisingly easy to identify in Germany. The accents and dialect vary considerably even over short distances. People in Chemnitz take the piss out of people from Erzgebirge, which is only like 30kms away. People from Dresden mock Chemnitzers as if they were bumpkins. As soon as you open your mouth people know where you come from. I can follow a conversation in Chemnitz but I have no clue what someone from neighbouring Leipzig says at all.
As far as her responsibility is concerned, yeah it’s clearly on her. But in general from what I can see the Germans aren’t as outraged as you’d imagine. They didn’t show her the door at the election as many predicted. The people I know, including my wife, are as mortified by the portrayal of these crowds being representative of German feeling as we would be if German media picked up Valerie Morse’s antics and reported them as if she spoke on our behalf.
BTW in Germany, when people suggest someone is a Nazi, they mean a Nazi. They don’t mean right or far-right they mean an actual fascist. You can be jailed for membership of such an organisation, or for giving a Nazi salute, and the majority of Germans support the laws, which specifically target neo-fascists.
Who were they supposed to vote for JC? The SPD, FDP and Greens all supported her policy. The only party that didn't hadn't even achieved enough votes to sit in the Bundestag in 2013. They became the 3rd largest party in 2017.
There is no way that Merkel holding onto power can be interpreted as support for this policy.
You’ve kind of made my point RS. It simply wasn’t that contentious an issue as we would have thought it should be. When people were much more concerned about the EU than they were about this. Most parties were generally in agreement that the integration of these people hadn’t gone well but they were much more philosophical than I expected. Germans are a much more conforming lot than I would have believed before I met my missus. I don’t know whether it’s because of the shame of Naziism, but they seem to be perfectly happy to have laws on their books that I would find outrageous if they tried to enact them here. And tolerance (to an excessive degree IMO) is absolutely unquestionable. Most people are shit scared of being suspected of being a right winger. As a consequence there’s no real left/ right balance to their politics. Their political parties are reflective of how people behave.
From what I can gather Wessis are generally much more liberal than the Ossis, while also being much more religious.
I'll agree with you about naivity and being absurdly passive and trusting. Unfortunately that's a German trait that has had disastrous consequences in the past. Germans generally blindly accept that their leaders will always have their best interests at heart and can be ridiculously slow to the uptake.
I disagree that this wasn't a contentious issue. It was massive, but voters had absolutely nowhere to go other than a dodgy party with very questionable links to unsavoury groups. The fact that this party still became the third biggest must be evidence that a huge number of people were pissed off and were clearly expressing that sentiment.
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@jc said in European Politics:
@rembrandt Out of town people are surprisingly easy to identify in Germany. The accents and dialect vary considerably even over short distances. People in Chemnitz take the piss out of people from Erzgebirge, which is only like 30kms away. People from Dresden mock Chemnitzers as if they were bumpkins. As soon as you open your mouth people know where you come from. I can follow a conversation in Chemnitz but I have no clue what someone from neighbouring Leipzig says at all.
As far as her responsibility is concerned, yeah it’s clearly on her. But in general from what I can see the Germans aren’t as outraged as you’d imagine. They didn’t show her the door at the election as many predicted. The people I know, including my wife, are as mortified by the portrayal of these crowds being representative of German feeling as we would be if German media picked up Valerie Morse’s antics and reported them as if she spoke on our behalf.
BTW in Germany, when people suggest someone is a Nazi, they mean a Nazi. They don’t mean right or far-right they mean an actual fascist. You can be jailed for membership of such an organisation, or for giving a Nazi salute, and the majority of Germans support the laws, which specifically target neo-fascists.
That makes sense though I'd still be interested as to whether these people really were hard-right visitors or just appeared to be. To the average person overlooking last weekend's 'March for men' seeing me, a white man wearing an official shirt and handing out stickers could assume I was a Nazi/KKK member/rape enthusiast based on the rabid chanting of the great unwashed. When I talked to some of the opposition one-on-one they were genuinely shocked that I didn't measure up to the monster in their mind.
Interesting that your experience with the word Nazi in Germany is different from other Germans I've spoken with. Maybe its a regional or university thing but they've advised if you do not toe the establishment line then you are then called 'Nazi' and there is no coming back from that.
Here's independent journalist Luke Radcowski being labelled that while filming a report in Hamburg last year. He's a white man with a camera, not wearing an antifa mask so therefore must be a Nazi..and being a Nazi therefore he must be attacked. Ironically Luke is actually very left leaning.
Also another journalist at the same day.
The impression I have from Germans I've talked to, and to be fair this is only a handful of ages 20-35, the reason why there is no outrage is because absolute guilt has been driven into them from a young age. They must pay for the sins of their great-grandparents. Younger people are starting to question this and no-doubt there is bound to be adults from actual neo-Nazi organisations willing to take advantage of this in a bad way.
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The local paper in Chemnitz is reporting that the dead guy is a Cuban German who moved from Saxony to Bavaria a while ago and was back for a visit. He was with a group of guys including two other German men of Russian descent who were injured (not clear if stabbed) in an argument over cigarettes and/or an EFTPOS card.
One of the other injured men is quoted as saying the very people who are so outraged over this man’s death are the same ones who used to beat them up in the past for not being German enough.
The locals involved are identified as a bunch of football hooligans, about a hundred of them, all known to the police. They have been bolstered by protesters from a wide area.
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Ha interesting that they are big on reporting ethnicities now. Assuming this is accurate then this could very well be a "Hands up don't shoot" or a Mark Duggan moment, facts don't matter when there is an underlying problem not being addressed that is looking for a spark to he ignited.
The government and media labeling 10,000 people as far right will only increase numbers to extremist groups on both the far right and far left. History maybe repeating.