So much vitriol pointed at the Germans, as the old WW2 enemy by Greeks, that any of them went that way. Naturally, there are good reasons for the Greeks and Italians to throw out everyone. I have been unable to get a discussion on this from people there I can decipher.
We have our ways of thinking here, they have theirs. Much the same as I know Mexicans who really hate Hugo Chavez. I don't see what he does that is so wrong, but they regard him as a crook, although he strikes some as being a champion for the poor, and thus okay.
On the Greek and Italian crisises, when I asked, if it is true as they say, that people who paid in to their pensions are doing without, is that not theft? And that when banks or hedge fund people have played a game, and now expect governments to pay them for it from people that didn't get the profits, is that not theft, too?
They say I am naive, that those banks did fund those governments on a level most of us cannot understand, and they didn't act responsibly with the funds they were given. They also have unanimously said that Kucinich and Sanders and the audit of the Federal Reserve is nonsense. For my own part, I think this is the voice of the 1%, people like the Koch brothers, who call for austerity and letting the poor and elderly die. They think they are victims of prolifigate spending but never seem to factor in the cost of the wars, the daily discrimination and oppression that goes on, and the conquests of other nations as was done to native peoples here and mnay feel deserve restitution. When you finally get there, they say it is the way of the world and that Americans are ignorant of how the world really is.
And as you say, we are not emotionally connected to their history and have not lived through the results of WW2, for which Europe paid a terrible price. More than most Americans can comprehend. I tread carefully as there are long-time grudges and griefs that only require the right trigger words to go off.
Much like many in the USA lose all rational thought at the mention of the word Communist, etc. The thinking part of the brain sputters to a halt and it's all instinct or reflexes. I can't blame them.
I briefly helped a man who survived a Nazi concentration camp and had one of those tattoos on his arm. It wasn't a neat sort of thing, the tattoo was sloppy and it must have hurt him just to look at it. He was suffering a bout of psychosis, and his family brought him to the hospital.
He was convinced the security men that were patrolling outside at night, were prison guards and that they would be 'coming for us.' He was 'not with us,' as I say, 'not oriented to time and space' as others say. It took him a weeks to come back and he clung to me like a life boat.
A Jewish friend in middle school, when I said I'd picked German as an elective, leapt to the conclusion I hated Jews and must want to kill them. I knew a man whose Armenian grandmother was forced to watch as her son's eyes were gouged out in front of her. We never know what these people went through.
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