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Thursday, July 16, 2015

In Discussing Germany You Can be Polite or You Can Be Honest, But Can You Be Both?

     Again, I agree that you can get too carried away demonizing Germany-bigotry of any kind is small minded and wrong and says more about you than anyone else.

     Still, when you look at Germany''s footprint across Europe over the last 2 centuries it's shocking how little positive there is to say. If it's' better to say nothing than be polite I guess we should say nothing about Germany

     I had looked at this sorry history earlier. Germany has found a more acceptable medium to carry out it's aggressive tendencies this time. 60 years ago it occupied France in the Vichy Regime.  After WWII Europe said 'Never again,'

    And this was fulfilled-there has not been a case of a major European country being occupied by another in 60 years-until now with the latest 'aGreekment' which is just a bloodless coup.

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-return-of-anti-german-sentiment.html

    There is so much that stands out. After WWII the allies gave Germany exactly what it won't even hear of for the Greeks-debt forgiveness. Clearly the Germans learned nothing after The Treaty of Versailles. They admired Keynes but they never read his book or they wouldn't be repeating history.

    Yet, Ambrose Pritchard shows us that it's worth than that.

    "Some are already comparing the terms to the Versailles Treaty but this does not quite capture the depravity of it. The demands imposed on Germany in 1919 were certainly vindictive and narrow-minded – as Keynes rightly alleged – but they were not, on the face of it, beyond reach."

    "France was forced to pay reparations after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 that were roughly equivalent to Versailles, albeit in very different circumstances. It dutifully did so, while plotting revenge."

   "What Greece is being asked to do is scientifically impossible. Almost everybody involved in the talks knows this. Yet the lie goes on because the dysfunctional nature of EMU politics and governance makes it impossible to come clean. The country is dishonestly kept in a permanent state of crisis"

   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11744305/Greece-should-seize-Germanys-botched-offer-of-a-velvet-Grexit.html

  So what Germany is doing to Greece is worse than the Treaty of Versailles and as bad as that was Germany had done the same thing to France in 1871 and the French paid their debts.

 As I have noted there is the Germany way of paying debts and the British way.

 "So Germany believes in 2 debt repayment plans"

  "1. The German plan for Germans. The Germans have never in the modern era paid back its debt."

  "2. The British plan for Greece and other debtors. Britain has a long history of sacrificing its own economy to pay back debt. The classic example is 100 years of sacrificing 2.5% GDP between the Napoleonic Wars and WWI."

  Ok, obviously not everything is bad about Germany but I'm making a point here. I love their music. I mean there's nothing better than Laibach.

   http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=laibach

   Certainly the Germans corner the market on profundity in philosophy. You have Kant, Hegel, Marx-though he's tricky to class as he was not solely or mainly a philosopher-Schelling, Heidegger and of course my favorite philosopher of all time: Freidrich Nietzsche.

   However, even if he's my favorite philosopher as a German he was very critical of his fellow Germans. I don't think there has every been anyone more anti-German than Nietzsche himself.

  http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/07/german-pomposity-towards-greece-what.html

  All I'm saying is that their devotion to the Fatherland is a terrible legacy and it continued this last week on Brussels. The EU project was their Trojan Horse to continue their gunboat diplomacy in geopolitical matters.

  Technically they are just one of 28 countries. Scott Sumner swallows this ruse, hook, line, and sinker:

  "It seems to me that the eurozone was motivated by both just deserts and moral hazard fears. (And by the way, it makes more sense to talk about the eurozone than Germany. Almost the entire eurozone was extremely hostile to the Greek position.)"

  http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/07/rashomon_at_the.html

  The problem is that not too many people are as 'gullible' here as Sumner-I use scare quotes as I wonder if he knows better; he is pretty smart-and Germany is suffering a backlash. This defeats the whole purpose of the EU for Germany which was to 'sublimate' their aggressive geopolitical tendencies. 

  The EU project suffers from terrible economics but the EU is not about economics but national vanities, especially the competing vanities of Germany and France. 

  Finally, I do agree with Pritchard that Schauble has turned out to be possibly Greece's only friend in Germany as despite his harshness he tells the truth-Greece would be better off leaving. 

 





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