Shameful
Hey everyone, let’s keep the discussion constructive. This topic is important, and diverse perspectives are valuable. Remember, long reply chains rarely change minds, but they often escalate tension. If a conversation isn’t productive, consider stepping back. Let’s focus on sharing ideas, not winning arguments. Thanks for keeping it respectful!
Ffs Germany, why do you do this
I mean… you don’t think they feel a little guilty about what they’ve done to Jewish people in the past?
No, i don’t think so. Black people also suffered from german empires you don’t see germany defending for example the rsf
The international public was always much more concerned about the Jews, that is obviously going to shape the German perception about what they should feel guilty about.
Should i mention all the terrorists attack the Zionists did that target other jews? Did germany condemned israel bombing a synagogues in Iran?
We have a major global oligarch problem.
we do, but how is that related to Israel acquiring arms?
Because the oligarchs want to turn Gaza into a corporate owned city.
Germany sending weapons there tells me that Germany may well be under the same influence the US is.
That does not follow. Israel and Germany have been trading arms since the 1950s.
These are just mutually beneficial trade deals. No malicious intent regarding Gaza required.
Israel has for example some pretty good air defense capabilities, and in the current deteriorated security environment the German government is justified in continuing weapons trade with Israel.
lol Israel has the greatest air defence that American research and tax dollars can provide. I guess getting those repackaged lemons makes it feel like a fair trade.
Sure let’s collaborate with a settler colonial power. The settler colonialism is replacing one group with, another basically you are fine with the extermination of palestinians because it is mutually beneficial to Israel and germany
No, I’m not basically fine with.
ffs, can we have a bit of nuance? regarding Israel/Palestine, this crowd is absolutely rabid.
Germany always manages to be on the wrong side of history
I think Germany has a special relationship with “whiteness” that makes it especially vulnerable to fascism, especially in how Germany is perceived and treated by other groups of white people.
Also though, Germany is a culture bursting with contradictions, within a year of Mein Kempf being published another novel was published The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann by an originally German author who moved to the US.
The Magic Mountain is firmly cemented in German culture… and is indisputably one of the best novels ever written in German or English and is certainly one of the most humanist and openly accepting of humanity in all its “failures” of any great novel of the 20th century. The Magic Mountain is the most supremely antifascist novel imaginable and it is equally allergic to racism and discrimination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann
With the start of the Cold War, he was increasingly frustrated by rising McCarthyism. As a “suspected communist”, he was required to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was termed “one of the world’s foremost apologists for Stalin and company”.[19] He was listed by HUAC as being “affiliated with various peace organizations or Communist fronts”.
Being in his own words a non-communist, rather than an anti-communist, Mann openly opposed the allegations: “As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency’. … That is how it started in Germany.”
As Mann joined protests against the jailing of the Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found “the media had been closed to him”.[20] Finally, he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress,[21] and in 1952, he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland. Here he initially lived in a rented house and bought his last house there in 1954 (which later his widow and then their son Golo lived in until their deaths).
He never again lived in Germany, though he regularly traveled there. His most important German visit was in 1949, at the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attending celebrations in Frankfurt am Main (then West Germany) and Weimar (then East Germany), as a statement that German culture extended beyond the new political borders.[22] He also visited Lübeck, where he saw his parents’ house, which was partially destroyed by the bombing of Lübeck in World War II (and only later rebuilt).
History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.
I think Germany has a special relationship with “whiteness”
No that’s the US. Racism in Germany and Europe as a whole, has always been about cultural and ethnic differences more than skin color. The persecuted slavs or jews were just as pasty as any German, unlike the “honorary Aryans” in Japan.
Germany is a culture bursting with contradictions, within a year of Mein Kempf being published another novel was published The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Two different authors with different backgrounds writing different books? What a uniquely contradictory culture Germany is.
Disregard that one of them is lauded for its literary and cultural significance while the other is basically as important as the art of the deal.And of course the explanation for contemporary German culture and its problematic relation to Israel can be found in the literature of 1924.
Nothing significant happened since then, right? Everyone was on vacation in the 30s and 40s. Occupation, the Cold War, the literal formation of the country of Israel? Surely none of the could have any relevance.I do agree that the Magic Mountain is a great book.
But although some of its themes do go against aspects of fascism, calling it "the most supremely antifascist novel imaginable " seems a bit of a stretch.No that’s the US. Racism in Germany and Europe as a whole, has always been about cultural and ethnic differences more than skin color. The persecuted slavs or jews were just as pasty as any German, unlike the “honorary Aryans” in Japan.
ahahahaha
Read The Color Purple or Their Eyes Were Watching God, the idea that racism actually cares about skin tone in any consistent way anywhere is impossible, contradictory and absurd, it is always mixed up with ethnicity, context and imposed categories. Germany is just the same as any other racist society in that respect. Check your ignorance.
You added nothing to this conversation other than a sense of condescencion.
The Magic Mountain is one of the most supremely antifascist novels ever written and its perspective from the eve of WW1 mirrors our current position with eerie and foreboding syncronicity. The Magic Mountain is easily one of the most important novels of the 20th century, if not all time.
In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Mann moved his own family to Switzerland, and then, after his German citizenship was revoked, to the USA, where he recorded monthly anti-fascist dispatches which were broadcast to Germany by the BBC.
He is ‘one of the great German writers’, wrote Malcolm Bradbury, ‘the spokesman for a modern humanism’.
https://henryeliot.substack.com/p/the-magic-mountain
Come up with a better argument if you want to cut me down.
Read The Color Purple or Their Eyes Were Watching God
Do they contain sociological studies that support your claim that
Germany has a special relationship with "whiteness”
Otherwise I don’t see what you think this is adding to the conversation.
As for The Magic Mountain:
its perspective from the eve of WW1 mirrors our current position
We currently don’t have European empires in a mutual standoff waiting for the powder-keg to be lit. By all accounts most people are more reminded of the inter-war period with the rising fascism.
The Magic Mountain is easily one of the most important novels of the 20th century
I never disagreed but being important does not automatically make it anti-fascist.
In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Mann moved his own family to Switzerland
And just like his cold war experiences that you quoted before, this happened after he published Zauberberg in 1924.
At the time, Mussolini’s regime had barely begun and Hitler was a failed putschist in jail.Come up with a better argument if you want to cut me down.
Dude, your only “arguments” are wikipedia quotes about Mann’s life after he published the book, completely unrelated literature recommendations and an unexplained association of fascism with the eve of WWI.
I honestly find it hilarious you don’t think The Magic Mountain is one of the most antifascist novels ever written, and one of the most effective and wholistic takedowns of fascism ever created in any form ever… your understanding of history must be so mutilated into discrete bloody boxes one preceding after another with no connection between one and another…
Six months later, Mann resumed work on the novel he had begun before the war: The Magic Mountain. His development and completion of the manuscript occurred in tandem with a dramatic political reorientation: deeply shaken by the assassination of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau in 1922, Mann took a decisive stand in defense of the fragile, embattled Weimar Republic. In his essays and speeches of the second half of the 1920s, he continued to warn Germans of the threat posed by the National Socialist Party. Had he not left Germany when he did, it is very likely that he would have been arrested and interned in the Dachau concentration camp.
your understanding of history must be so mutilated
I beg you to open a history book and look up when the rise of fascism happened.
In 1924 the NSDAP was a bunch of violent thugs pretending to be socialists. Their rise to power happened a decade later. The only fascist was Mussolini and he had not yet fully implemented all that we nowadays call fascism.You have not made one single argument that actually ties anything in the book to fascism.
You keep quoting articles about Mann’s later life but the only reference you made to the book itself was mentioning the eve of WWI which at least time-wise sets the action before the rise of fascism.You have not identified one anti-fascist theme in the book nor quoted any literary analysis that does so.
If you desperately want to make this argument, then you have to ask yourself:
What is fascism? What are its defining characteristics? Where does the book address them?
And which themes are specific to fascism? Contemplating mortality as such is not.You have not made one single argument that actually ties anything in the book to fascism.
So you did not bother to read the article I linked before responding?
Yes I have.
Can’t make this shit up. Germany needs a better army because Russia is actively attacking it, so what do they do? Sell their shit to Israel.
A quick reminder that Russia’s attack on Europe is decisively supported by China.
Look I know China personally about as you do and I can tell you one thing: they don’t want any war. They just want to be the centre of the world again and make every nation economically dependent on them. War doesn’t help them, because they win with economy.
You do know what happens to the economy of countries that go to war, right?
By your own argument, China should be giddy about everyone else going to war.
China want buyers for things that aren’t just weapons. They prefer using the weapons for themselves to threaten other countries in the eastern Asian seas
Germany is giving israel weapons to exterminate Palestinians
Attacking Palestinians with submarines?
The naval blockage of Gaza is part of the genocide, so yeah pretty much.
That is also not enforced with submarines.
What do you mean, are saying Israel doesn’t use submarines? Who told you that?
You better believe they have them even if you aren’t aware of their use in sinking shipping.
I’m saying they are not using them in any blockade. Or are there reports to the contrary?
You can bet they use them even if not in a way that has gotten publicity is my ppint, the US would’ve given them some of the most high tech subs in the world, and the tech to retrofit some as nuclear subs, what with all that nuclear material we illegally gave them.
Germany has no right to exist.
No state does. States are just political constructs.
true.
Israel commits genocide.
Using today’s definition of “genocide” per UN, even Canada commits genocide, and HAMAS for that matter.
Neither Hamas and Canada are destroying 70% of other people infrastructures and are currently creating a famine by bombing 85% of the agricultural field .
Hamas eliminates 100% of palestinians who are deemed not to support hamas. Hamas has even been killing the members of a competing party/paramilitary, Fatah. Or other palestinians, who hope to coexist with Israel. Or only are believed to be neutral to the neighbouring country.
And hamas certainly eliminates each and every palestinian who is suspected to be helping to locate and free any israeli, captured by hamas.
Yup. Other than that, hamas is so very good and perfectly nice. “Why so serious?” /s
Israel is doing every single goddamn atrocities Hamas did for 78 goddamn year . Don’t claim that you care about any Palestinians when you support the side doing the genocide
I would only suggest or expect, that you (as well as any other person) to stop lying and putting your own words into others’ mouth. But in the end it’s your choice - and your responsibility. And you’ve just lied 💁
And I certainly keep considering any life as precious and sacred - especially of those, who have little chances of vocalising their peaceful humane believes (like palestinians in the hands of the ruthless hamas paramilitaries - or protesting citizens inside putler’s Russia). That is my choice - NOT your barbaric claims.
Everybody is lying except supporter of settler colonialism like you. I oppose hamas atrocities and israel atrocities .
Colonizers in the West Bank are burning homes, beating up the elderly, and attacking livestock. Israel built the colonies, put the colonizers on the land, armed the colonizers, and protects them when they commit their acts of terrorism
The barbaric rhetoric comes from you
I don’t - and can’t - take any of your claims - as i have just noted how you are lying when presenting your barbaric ideas for my believes.
It’s nice that at least you’re trying to claim to oppose atrocities
- but yeah, these are your claims. So it could be lies, again.
So does germany.
We are part of a genocide… i can’t believe our government approves this…
