I'm a Jewy Jew, and I don't avoid BMWs just because they made Nazi tanks in WWII. I don't avoid Mercedes just because Hitler drove one. I don't avoid Volkswagens or Porsches just because they sympathizes with the Nazi cause and/or in the case of the former, were of Nazi origin. I don't avoid Bayer aspirin just because Bayer made the poison gasses used in concentration camps. I dont... Well, shit, I guess they really are all Nazis.

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My main objection to it comes in its timing. Two years ago, these criticisms would have made constructive sense. Now they're just desperate bleating.

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X amount of years of German "culture," and the only thing they're famous for chucking into the oven are 8 million of their neighbors.

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And in Germany, it is. And in the US, it also is.

America might be leaning more toward fascism (though, god willing, not after Tuesday) but that doesn't mean that we should pardon Germany its past. America may be getting really fucked up, but that doesn't mean Germany is any less so. That's just not how the math works. It's not a zero-sum game.

Those of you are arguing that slavery only existed in the South, and our leader opposed it, and we fought a war to end it? Slavery lasted at least until the Moynihan Report (1965) which helped to create many of the social institutions that our country still relies on today (for good or ill, and somewhat unjustifiably, to be sure). As for Germany, my experience is limited, but I can tell you that they still teach Heidegger in the universities as though his words don't bear with them the terrible history of which they are a part.

History doesn't just end. It reappears in traces in the material facts of our daily lives. Like. It. Or. Not.

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Really? You're stupider than I thought.

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If you talk to most Jews today of whatever affiliation-- Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, whatever-- you'd actually find mostly positive opinions overall of Germany and the German people. For obvious reasons we continue to revile the Holocaust. But at the same time, Germany was the first nation in Europe to give emancipation to the Jewish people in the 18th and 19th centuries, which is why we thrived there so much in the arts and sciences. Germany was far more pro-Semitic and friendlier to the Jews than most other European nations, well into the 20th century-- we'd faced other European Holocausts, pogroms, mass killings and vicious hatred ever since Hadrian's rule during the Roman Empire, whether we were in France, England (rabidly anti-Semitic since the reign of Edward I), Italy, Poland or Russia.

When the Germans opened their arms to us in the 1700's, they had a reverence for high culture, science and achievement, just as we have long had, and the creature comforts we enjoy today are in large part thanks to that collaboration between German Gentiles and Jews in the 1700's and 1800's. It's what brought you antibiotics (first invented by Gerhard Domagk), practical electromagnetic devices and the quantum theory which powers much of the modern world (people like Hertz, Ohm, Kirchhoff), modern medicine (Billroth, Kocher), automobiles (Daimler, Diesel, Benz), biochemistry (Woehler), the chemical industry itself (Bunsen, von Liebig), astronomy (Herschel), mathematics (Gauss, Moebius), plus literary greats (Schiller, Goethe, Schlegel), artists (Duerer, Friedrich, Holbein), philosophers (Kant, Hegel), political figures (Frederick the Great, Bismarck who were much tolerant of the Jewish people than almost any others), and of course composers (Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Bach, Schubert, Schumann, Handel, Egk, Orff, Wagner, Johann Strauss). And this is before we even consider the outsize accomplishments of German-Americans like Westinghouse, Boeing, Eisenhower, Rockefeller, Chrysler, Schwarzkopf, Ruth, Stengel, Steinway, Merck, von Braun (our space program itself), Brecht and countless others.

Considering the small size of their population historically, I'd say it's safe to say the Germans have contributed more to our world than any other people. Like other countries they've had their violent spasms, and even then, even for us in the Jewish community, the picture is much complicated than the Hitler 24/7 BS-- the rest of Europe helped Hitler to gain power via the ridiculous Versailles Treaty provisions, and the German people never liked Hitler (even during the worst of the German hyperinflation, the Nazis never won a Parliamentary election-- Hitler tricked the other politicians into letting him in). It wasn't merely Jews whom Hitler, bastard as he was, brutally targeted-- gentile Germans who disagreed with him, millions of them, were Hitler's targets (and sent to the concentration camps) even before we were!

What matters most is how the German people are today, and every time I've visited and worked there-- whether or not they know I'm Jewish-- the Germans have reliably been among the kindest, most hospitable, most hard-working, best-disciplined and most respectful people I've ever met.

Crime is very low in Germany, their cities are clean and inspiring, their architecture is modern and high-tech yet respectful of tradition, their homes are warm and inviting to strangers, they take care of each other while demanding excellence, and their business and scientific climate encourages great accomplishment, as they have in past centuries.

As LT pointed out in a comment, Germany has the kind of society that does things right, and as the USA continues to decline and struggle with massive national debt, losing wars and old-fashioned imperial overextension, Germany will likely be one of the best beacons of Western civilization to help us out when we need it.

Which brings me to another point: These items in the German magazine are nothing new and there's nothing particularly "German" about them-- these criticisms of American policy have been uttered by American commentators themselves now for the past 8 years. And with good reason, since our policies have been so self-destructively idiotic.

FWIW, the whole "which nation has done more atrocious things" pissing contest is just laughably idiotic. Almost all Western nations going into the 20th century were vilely, violently racist, the USA included.

Great Britain was busy wiping out the indigenous peoples of Australia and Tasmania, killing upwards of 33 million people in India with forced famines and constant military operations in East India, brutalizing Ireland almost out of habit, using the RAF to terror-bomb Iraqis in the 1920 (Churchill's idea), and launching a war against China to sell opium there-- and this is despite the fact that the British were actually defeated militarily in about half the imperialistic BS they undertook (losing in invasions of Haiti and Montevideo-Buenos Aires-South Chile right after the American Revolution, losing in Egypt, getting demolished by Afghans 3 times-- an Afghan army defeated the British by wiping out the British Army in 1842-- getting kicked out of Ireland in 1921, Israel in 1948, getting pummeled by the Chinese in 1950, humiliated in Cyprus, the Suez, Aden in the decade or so after that). And the British, of course, have been all too happy to persecute and mass-murder Jews themselves (or get someone else to do it) since the 1200's.

And the USA? Many wonderful things about this place, which is why my family's here, but then we hardly have clean hands. This nation itself was founded on the mass murder of the native Americans, who have had a unique culture and presence here that has no parallel elsewhere. Then on the use of African slaves for nearly 2 1/2 centuries (with subsequent denial of their descendants' human rights), and also on brutal invasions against Latin American countries, such as the Mexican War-- fought to extend slavery in the new territories, or the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and other lands since the time that fool Woodrow Wilson got all high and mighty. We also have wonderful historical examples like the internment of the Japanese-Americans and the brutal war on Vietnam (more tons of bombs dropped there than all previous wars combined) to be less-than-proud of.

Does it mean that the USA is an awful country? Of course not-- it simply shows, again, that history and the cultures of today are complicated. It's precisely xenophobia and self-congratulatory stupidity that has gotten the USA into this mess over the past few decades, and if we'd listened to the Germans on many tough calls before (such as not going into Iraq), then we wouldn't be drowning in a devastating national debt, our power sapped and our resolve weakened, as we are today. Sometimes, constructive criticism is the best help that a friend can offer.

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Hey Germany: Glass houses, stones.

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