Posted on 05/22/2010 2:10:42 PM PDT by decimon
Reflections on Germany
(Munich) I’ve been walking the last two days through Munich. Much of the city core was bombed out by the allies by spring 1945. Yet today there is little evidence of such destruction. The museums are among the best in the world, the streets and parks spotless, the infrastructure superb, and the people as hard at work as ever. To walk an urban street in Germany is a different experience from say in Athens or Istanbul—traffic follows law, pedestrians are respected, horns are used rarely, trash is absent. In other words, things work and work well.
Such observations sound stereotypical these days, but to even the casual observer the difference between life in Germany and much of eastern and southern Mediterranean seems far greater than the divide between a Minnesota and Mississippi. For someone who has lived in Greece and occasionally visits Germany, it becomes increasingly clearer each year why the European Union won’t work. Germans work and create wealth. Yet under the present system, they do not receive commensurate psychological rewards—and increasingly insufficient material compensation as well.
And history shows us that an unhappy Germany is a very dangerous thing indeed.
(Excerpt) Read more at pajamasmedia.com ...
He is being a little hard on Minnesota here, it's a liberal arctic tundra but at least it has good summer weather.
Boy howdy!
I hope the Germans don’t bomb Pearl Harbor again
I have often wondered what would happen if Germany — and perhaps other European countries — were to open up the camps and herd Muslims into them, and then fire up the crematoria. What the US do anything? Personally, I would be strongly isolationist in this case.
A commenter made a good point: The Germans have been pacified into girly men; they are old and don’t the stomach for conquest.
have
Very soon German workers are going to grasp that all the financial reserves they piled away the last two decades from not doing what a Spain or Italy did are essentially gone. Someone in Munich worked 40 hours a week until age 67 for someone in Athens not to — and for someone in Athens to demand that someone in Munich do so or else
We have the same situation here. And, eventually, even political correctness won’t be enough to keep the real taxpayers from revolting.
“I hope the Germans don’t bomb Pearl Harbor again”
I take it that we should forget that remark because you’re rolling? (Just kidding).
My dad fought in the European theater and one of his most memorable quotes was , “ they should have left the Germans in France, they would have cleaned it up!”
Stephen Ambrose wrote that he was surprised to find out that the veteran GIs in Europe right after the war said they liked the Germans the best. They turned to and starting cleaning up their bombed out cities while Italians tried to steal everything that wasn’y nailed down and the French just sat on their butts and complained.
“The Germans have been pacified into girly men”
Good point. Thinking about it in geopolitical terms, the Germans and other northern europeans should realize that they have to stay engaged in the Mediterranean region out of self interest. If they carve out a new, shrunken EU and abandon the southern tier, those abandoned nations are going to succumb to massive migration/invasion from north africa, and pretty soon the northern europeans will be facing a tidal wave on their own borders. They should make their defense on the beaches, not the Alps - better to fight the fight on Italian territory or in the Balkans than wait until the tidal wave hits Bavaria.
There weren't any comments when I first posted but they now may become a good discussion.
My crystal ball is too cloudy to know if German demographics will proceed as now or if it matters. The German military was so successful in WWII because it fought a new kind of war. It could again.
In his book Germany and the East-West Crisis (New York: McKay, 1959)Willi Schlamm observed that such an attitude was already taking hold among the German equivalent of the Baby Boomers during the 1950's.
Don't overload your rowboat a$$. You have no idea what we're capable of.
LOL! What the heck does that mean, Dieter?
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