Most of Europe, but most disturbingly Germany (due to their dubious history), is having a huge resurgence in right wing politics, manifesting itself in intolerance of foreigners and ethnic groups. I think we have seen this before.
Name one country where locals do not have “some problem” with foreigners!?
I admitted that we still do have Neo-Nazis around but perhaps you should also look at why Germans (or locals in other countries) don’t really like foreigners.
I don’t want to justify any violence or other racist actions, but when foreigners come as a guest to your country and then start behaving like the have more rights then those born there and making demands while abusing the social welfare system (and the e.g. German welfare system is very generous indeed if you know how it works) you may also think not too highly of them.
Of course people will easily generalize and call all foreigners bad, even that’s not the case and some are beneficial to (or better: needed in) the country.
On the other side it’s so easy to just point the finger at Germany (due to our history) and though I agree that the genocide during WWII does probaly have nothing to compare it to racism exists nearly everywhere, surely in the US it does, too, and I think this is quite comparable.
However that does not mean that the Germans will start it all over again.
Also don’t forget last time this was carried out by the “government”, now the violence originates from small groups (a bunch of idiots IMHO).
I think that I once read somewhere that a majority of Americans still think that Germany is is semi-nazist.
Beats me. You better send Gerhard Scroeder to the US with his photomodel wife and a huge cigar in in his broad mouth in order to show that the present German leader is an altogether different beast and that your country is actually a rich stable democracy with a sizeable foreign population.
But how much is also because the ethnic minority immigrants generally do not try to assimilate themselves properly into the culture etc of the country they have emigrated to.
To often people only want to take rather than give as well.
It is not just Germany either, UK has problems too. Whilst the Chinese population is not generally seen as a problem the Pakistani population is, as demonstrated by the not so recent set of riots etc in northern england.
Even though where I live, in the California Bay Area, is a multicultural area, certain ethnic groups still settle in smaller towns, mingle together in the work place and then go back to their “ghettos”. Little Kabul is in the same town as a large Indian population. Neighborhods are not the mythical melting pot, but people also come here to flee ethnic strife, so “Just let me live in peace rather than stir up old hatreds.”
Germans are an easy target because of the Nazi’s, but weren’t the Japanese and Italians the previous “Axis of Evil”? They don’t get as much criticism these days for their past governments.
Ireland the most unexposed country, to anything other than people being Catholic, freckled and with a deep need for vengeance against the Engish for the 800 years of oppression; is becoming more racist at the moment.
Simply cause we were forever totally unexposed to anything different
Talk to any thick moustached bus driver at on a bus in Dublin and he will share his view on foreigners in Ireland…
“foreigners come to our country…take our jobs and unemployment benefit… drink our beer… steal our women”
Racism is every where… and the seeds grow easy when you need someone to blame for the economy, the weather etc. I guess people feel more secure and sure who they are when they differenitate and associate themselves to others by passport, color or religion.
This has also caused problems in Ireland now, cause simply before to be Irish you needed just the passport, but now since people others than does described in the first sentence above have passports, it forces the question, what is being Irish?
The first victims of the campaign were a number of Boy Scouts, from twelve to sixteen years of age, who were set up in the marketplace against a wall and shot. No reason was given. A devoted priest who rushed to administer the Last Sacrament was shot too. He received five wounds. A Pole said afterwards that the sight of those children lying dead was the most piteous of all the horrors he saw. That week the murders continued. Thirty-four of the leading tradespeople and merchants of the town were shot, and many other leading citizens. The square was surrounded by troops with machine-guns.
Assimilation of third world immigrants is a problem in Denmark. This is partly because they often lack basic skills and knowledge, when they arrive, often because they get on the dole when they get their residence permit and stays on it. All are to blame, I guess.
There is also the “crime” of “driving while brown” in the United States.
Even before 9/11 there were calls to investigate the number of stops made by police of people with darker skin.
I write for Amnesty International, and so many more of the cases now happen in the U.S.
quote:Originally posted by sandman:
O'Brien, who are you trying to convince, and of what? That the Nazis were evil monsters?
No-one’s disputing you.
That their grandchildren are, by extension, also monsters?
Say it ain’t so.
How far did the de-nazification program go in East Germany? Apparently not very far, they were able to find thousands upon thousands of border guards who were willing to murder their own people…where are they now?
quote:Originally posted by O'Brian:
How far did the de-nazification program go in East Germany? Apparently not very far, they were able to find thousands upon thousands of border guards who were willing to murder their own people.....where are they now?
I would very much like to see at least the attempt of an explanation what the above mentioned two things have to do with one another?
But while we talk about borders: I heard rumors there is some kind of border between the US and a country called “Mexico”. You don’t have guards there, right? And even if, they would never carry any firearms. And even if, they would never dare to use those firearms - never ever…
O’Brian, more and more I get the feeling most of your knowledge about Germany comes from a few cheap movies and probably a few magazines whose highest value is the glossy paper they are printed on. Oh, maybe I forgot the one or other tv show… I was born there and spent some time in the area, Rascal and a few others here too. I think we should know a bit about Germany. While it might not be heaven (We would probably not have left if it was.), it is definitely not the Germany your comics introduced to you.
But if you would like to continue on that level, I think my next response would be something like: Hey, this whole thing is not fair! You have Superman flying around there all day and night taking care of law and order, so how could you possibly have any problems?
As Olaf I don’t see the point in O’Brians statement. And surely the border guards didn’t qualify as Nazis. Ok, they had to shot their own if someone attempted to leave but that has nothing to do with being a Nazi.
If you are a soldier (on your own free will or by force / national service) you have to do as told, else you face the consequences.
And I think I said this before: if you are at war and a foot soldier you have no choice at all. Either you kill or you will be killed (by your own officer), court-marshalled if you are lucky.
Neither “qualifies” you being called a Nazi.
Else I would call the American soldiers Nazi’s for killing innocent, civilian Afghan people but that is as far off and so wrong as the example you stated.
Perhaps you still haven’t understood the true meaning of “Nazi”, at least I object against using it in a general context as you do.
when discussing present day racism around the world, bringing up nazi atrocities is pointless. kind of like the america-bashers who always inject the “well, you murdered all those native americans!” into debates about us foreign policy…
What is interesting here is how often Americans complain about other countries killing “their own” people, as if this were somehow worse than killing people who are not “their own” - the most obvious example being the suppression of the 1989 riot in Beijing, in which about 300 people were killed. This number, though tragic, pales into insignificance when compared to the numbers of people the USA has killed in its wars against Iraq and Afghanistan - yet in the eyes of your average American it makes the Chinese communist leaders “butchers” while the leaders of America are not. Why would the Americans draw such a distinction? Because, while the USA ranks quite high in the number of people it kills, most of the victims are people in other countries. Therefore, the new US morality divides killing into two types - one’s own (murder) and not one’s own (justifiable homicide, unless it is Americans getting killed by non-Americans as in the 911 attacks.) Not that the US is incapable of killing its own people, either one by one (mistaken or intentional shooting of civilians by police,) or in batches (MOVE, Waco.) Now it has been revealed that the American army in Afghanistan has been torturing and killing prisoners of war, and at the same time the USA is trying to get immunity from the newly established international war crimes court. It must be said that the behaviour of the American military, bloated with the arrogance of the world’s sole superpower, is getting more and more similar to that of the German army of World War Two.
it’s so nice of you to “interpret” what the average american thinks. of course even us americans, stupid as we are, can distinguish the difference between people dying in a war and people dying while peacefully protesting.
if you can’t see the difference between killing the enemy in a war and gunning down the fellow citizens you’re sworn to protect, then there’s no point in carrying on any further discussion.
i so love how you call the student protests in 1989 a “riot”. did you pick that up from one of the mainland dailies? maybe the prague spring was just the warsaw pact saving czechoslovakia from unruly hooligans, as well.
and as much as i disagree with o’brian’s obsession with nazi atrocities, your attempt at drawing some sort of moral equivalence between the us military and nazi germany is just plain pathetic.
and juba, on the wtc thread, i gave you a link showing footage of the first plane flying into the wtc. you refused to believe it because it didn’t show a close-up of the plane and therefore was not undeniable concrete proof.
and yet, based on completely unsubstantiated testimony with absolutely no hard evidence to back it up, you are willing to condem the us for torture and murder.
can we say, “HYPOCRITE”?
who needs factual evidence when you’re bashing the us, right?
Flipper, you comments just go to prove my point, since you, as a fine example of the average American, regard all those killed by the US army in its numerous wars as “enemies,” and you couldn’t give a toss whether they are combatants, civilians or prisoners of war.
You also prefer not to define the events in Beijing on 3-4 June 1989 as a riot. Perhaps pelting unarmed troops with stones and burning soldiers to death in their armoured trucks do not constitute rioting in your mind. Not when they happen in China, anyway. Well, how about beating a soldier half to death, taking him up on a bridge, throwing him off, pouring gasoline over him and burning him to death? How about burning another soldier to death, hanging his corpse off the side of a bus, cutting open his abdomen and pulling out his entrails? If you don’t know about this stuff, I’m not surprised, because your free and objective American media never told you. Try cutting and pasting this URL (just clicking on it will not work): http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Towers/1427/dp64sldr.jpg
The following two links can be clicked on directly. Warning - it is very gruesome.
There are other, equally gruesome pictures of dead civilians on that web site. The point is that the violence was not all on one side.
*And the 911 clip you linked to in the other forum didn’t show the plane at all. That doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a plane or that the plane wasn’t an airliner - it’s just that your clip doesn’t show it.
oh no! could it be that you’re the one who’s getting biased news?
links please.
edit: just saw your edit. man, i’m glad you decided to skip sites like the irish times or the guardian and instead go straight to the personal website of a chinese national. i mean, how much more objective can you get?
I happen to have met a British freelance photographer who was covering the 1989 demonstrations for the (London) Guardian and witnessed this particular incident. He wrote about it in the Guardian. If you can by any chance get your hands on a copy of the Guardian of 5 or 6 June 1989, you will find his article in there. I think the words were “the first to die were all soldiers.”
This exchange makes me wonder how many participants are really from the other side of the Taiwan Strait or grew up on the other side of the Iron Curtain or Berlin Wall.
Sure soldiers were killed. So were unarmed civilians. There were casualties on both sides.
Such is the policy of China and other repressive governments.
You want to include the U.S.? Even the L.A. riots weren’t pretty, but the Army didn’t start shooting unarmed citizens.
Juba: Bricks and stones versus armored personel carriers and tanks? You blame the students?
Your anti-American rhetoric gives you away. Which Communist school district did you go to?
What does race have to do with objectivity?
Your arguments are like Swiss Cheese (no offense to the Swiss).
