There’s another clue if we look at why we’re not banning it here: it would run “contrary to British instincts”. Our tabloids can’t look at sickening fear, desperation and poverty abroad without worrying about our ethnic purity being soiled. Our government declines mandatory face-nudity, because it’s not quite compatible with our petty, sense of arbitrary national identity. The French are so outraged by women’s oppression that they demand not to have to look at it any more. We see the injustices suffered by Arabs and Muslims the world over, and the first thing we think is “how can we stop it affecting us?”.
For example, there should be a “review of the wage setting arrangements to enhance decentralization in the bargaining process” and member states should “ensure wage restraint in the public sector”, not to mention “further opening of sheltered sectors by measures taken at national level to identify and remove unjustified restrictions on professional services as quotas and closed shops” and “overhaul of commercial legal systems to reduce red tape”, more “labor market reforms”, “tax reforms” and finally, “aligning the retirement age with life expectancy” and “reducing early retirement schemes” should also be priorities for member states.
In short, we should have less room to organise ourselves to negotiate the price of our labour, if you work for the government or in a public organisation you can expect even less sympathy from the EU than from your own government, less protection against (unfair) competition, less legal oversight of business, less protection against being fired, more money for fat cats and less for us and finally the chance to work until we die as retirement ages keep creeping up.
Welcome to the downward spiral. Not mentioned: tackling the obscene bonuses and salaries the economic wreckers we laughingly call bankers still “earn”.
Ah, but when I say ‘you’ who do I actually mean? The generation that blitzed Britain, invaded most of Europe and exterminated nearly all of European Jewry is almost gone bar a few aged relicts gumming their Iron Crosses in very clean senior facilities, and the Germans of today bear no responsibility for past horrors.
Rational people realise this. Nevertheless, negative feelings towards Germany and stereotypes about Germans persist, both in the US and in Britain:
Not that there isn’t a kernel of truth in some of the stereotyping; this video is one of a series from German broadcaster Deutsche Welle‘s YouTube channel called The Truth About Germany and explains the concept of speißigheit:
As if being labelled petty bourgeois, obsessive and dull weren’t enough, one of the most persistent stereotypes of Germans is that they have no sense of humour.
Oh ja? Is dat zo? German comedian Henning Vehn has made it his mission to turn that particular stereotype inside out and give it a good shake:
Here he is trying to entice visitors with his guide to (West) Germany;
…and boggling at the British tabloids’ obsession with the Nazis and WWII:
Yes, our papers are a bit obsessed, aren’t they ? You’d think the German armed forces were some kind of mechanical death whirlwind rather than fallible human beings:
Less mechanical death whirlwind, more Windy Miller.
So what have we learned from this brief foray into German culture and humour? Bugger-all really, other than the Germans are just like us really, and stereotypes (whilst sometimes having at their core a teensy-weensy little seed of truth) are just mental constructs that serve to distance us from our common humanity. It’s much easier to kill a humourless kraut than it is to kill a fellow human being who’s quite nice really. Let’s not be beastly to the Germans – we’re going to need them soon anyway, when the economy goes to shit.
The Kirchner method, rather than starving labor and the state in service of debt repayment, imposes “austerity measures†on the international banks that made the loans (confident that they’ll be back when the situation improves – and they will) and allows leeway in the domestic effects of a financial crisis (i.e. Argentinians weren’t buying Japanese televisions for quite a bit of the decade…) But due to the eurozone arrangement, this way out, whatever the ideological predilections of those in power, is probably off the table now and for a time to come… As it turns out, the eurozone right now looks like an engine for stealing trains from the Greeks to keep Orlando vacations affordable for the Germans…
The whole European project has from the start been designed by technocrats to limit what national governments are able to do, both positively (wage war on each other) and negatively (deviate from neoliberal economic policy). One more obstacle a succesful socialist movement needs to take into account.
Perhaps it was a very hot day and the PM (because, as we all know, he is so very kind to young people) suggested the interviewees make themselves a little cooler.
Perhaps one of the interview panel, explaining the process to one of the candidates as she prepared for her coming ordeal on a handy chaise longue, became a little excited at the prospect of putting such an obviously qualified candidate through her paces.