Stuwy wrote:
But seriously, who's still scared of nazi's nowday's?
I am. Do I really have to explain it? I was wanting to avoid this and maybe the issue has been discussed too much already, but I cannot let that question stand unanswered. I live in the former East Germany, as you may recall. You can see swastikas all over the place, as MeckMeck said, and I think he is right when he says most of those are not meant to be serious. But that isn't the entire story. Ultra-right dogma has becoming more and more "
mainstreamed"
in the last fifteen years here. There are guys that run around with really short hair and white shoe laces in their jackboots and are proud of it. (And, yes, I know that there are skins and
skins and that they originated in the worker districts of the UK.) They also like to run around in bomber jackets of a particular brand because it contains the letter sequence "
nsda"
, their favourite brand of shoes brandishes a big "
N"
, they greet themselves with "
88"
, the meaning of which I am sure anyone working on the puzzle boat can figure out. Every year they drive to Denmark and throw a big party to celebrate Rudolph Hess. Many of them deny, under penalty of law, that the Holocaust occurred. Several people have been beaten to death/chased throw glass doors/tortured because his skin was black/he was an "
undesired element of society."
A few years ago, several grown men beat up a teenage girl in a street car where I live because her hair was blue. So, yeah, I am still scared of Nazis nowadays.
In the last ten years or so, ultra-right political parties have made it into the state congresses here; currently the NPD, the national party of Germany, is sitting in the state congress where I live. An ultra-right party was in the congress in Baden-Wuerttemberg a few years ago, as well: Ask MeckMeck. In the state where I work, the DVU (German folks union) was elected into the congress about 6 years ago. But you know, in a land in which the unofficial unemployment is somewhere around 20 %, there is a large tendency for simpler characters to draw or have drawn from them questionable conclusions, which leads to an inherent latent political instability. I am sure you can draw some historical parallels here. Maybe one of the Danes hanging around here would like to say something about the role of a right-wing nationalist party in the last ten years in their country. And Like Onei well stated, some may feel that you trivialise certain aspects of history with your comparison.
I agree completely with your assessment of the current state of affairs in the USA. I wish this had been an issue a long time ago, maybe back when french wine was being pouring into the storm drains, french cheese was being stomped flat in the streets, and an act of the congress of the United States renamed french fries into freemdom fries, and no one in the country found that ridiculous. But back then, the patent answer to any objection from outside the USA was "
You guys don't know what you are talking about. You don't understand our situation."
A really good friend of mine said to me "
If they had attacked Berlin, you would think differently."
Yeah, I think Micheal Moore should receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and if I were king, I would have thrown the Limbaugh/Rove/Bush/Rumsfeld/Will faction into a re-education camp a long time ago. I just disagree with your way of expressing your viewpoint, especially as just about any meaning can be interpreted into it.
Maybe you now understand my objection a bit better, and maybe there are better ways to help your cause. I, for one, find the egoistic unilateralism of the politics of the government of the USA appalling, especially when coupled with the general political ignorance of its citizens; maybe you can find a way to do something about that. Clearly, no one can fully exercise his rights if he is uninformed.
[/rant]
-leroy
____________________________
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street -- footless, dressed in red.
-Jimi Hendrix, "
The Wind Cries Mary"