Comment by LAC-Tech
4 days ago
This is a textbook case of German Schuldstolz - you feel having been militaristic and having mass human right abuses entitles you to lecture others.
All you learned in the last centuries and a half is that you dont have the logistics to fight massive wars. You did not abandon anything due to your own enlightenment, you abandoned it because of massive foreign military interventions, where every single one of your newspaper, radio and television stations were replaced by your military occupiers.
The worst part about your Schuldstolz is that... the regime who did the most to end yours was even less moral and killed even more people than your own. Meaning you aren't even the best at being awful.
So no, I do not care what you have to see about freedom "as a German". You were militarily, ideologically and mentally conquered. Lecturing Anglos is this is just reflecing back our own beliefs but distorted with a German mindset that has no history or tradition of freedom of speech.
> Schuldstolz
Never heard that word before. And I don't think I am lecturing you about something you should do. I was just talking about why Germans in their own free country are choosing to make decisions about their own laws.
If you feel like we are missing something about freedom of speech, that's fair enough. You are entitled to your opinion. What is strange to me is that Americans (and you as somebody from NZ) are starting to lecture us on that we are being censored by our government. Which in itself is ridiculous and even when explaining why we are preferring the rules we have, we get attacked for it.
Germans aren't mentally conquered, this is just bullshit. We have the same freedom to think what we want as all other Europeans. Things are also evolving, the second world war is so long ago, that very few Europeans were first hand involved. What we considered American values (I don't think the Anglo sphere is very united in these) has also rapidly changed. Americans no longer believe in multi-lateralism and shared values, so not sure what reflection you are alluding to.
Your views on the war are also not very informed. West Germany and East Germany were vastly differently handled by the occupation forces. While for East Germany your talking points of a total replacement it true, in West Germany many of the old elites had to be put back in power to aid the western allies in propping up Germany against the Russians. It took a lot of counter culture to fight those brown remains.
Last, I don't know where you take the energy and insights to say that we have no history of XYZ, but it just isn't true.