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250 points rcarmo | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.269s | source
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KingOfCoders ◴[] No.41911577[source]
What a strange idea for someone from Germany. Here you are registered as a citizen and get a letter to your registered address and you take that to the voting station. Vote. Done.
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ndbsbwbw ◴[] No.41911929[source]
Because, yes Germany has always been fair, democratic and non discriminating.
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MandieD ◴[] No.41914474[source]
I wish my home country could be as brutally honest with itself about its past and work as hard to make things right as Germany has been the last several decades.

The disturbing party coming up on the Right feels like Germany has blamed itself for too long. That “self-blame” is a lot of what has enabled modern Germany to be a much better place than it was before the war.

(I’m an American living in greater Nuremberg, and get to see monuments to Germany’s failures on a regular basis)

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playingalong ◴[] No.41914899[source]
Germany is self-blaming only to some extent or for some definitions of this notion.

Yes, they are well aware of what happened in 1930s and that there was Hitler, etc.

And still they conveniently fail to see any connection with today times. It is some unclearly defined Nazis who took over the control of Germany and did all the killings and destroyed a few countries around. But not anyone's grandfather was involved. And supposedly the companies which built their wealth on slave work and death of thousands continue to prosper.

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1. KingOfCoders ◴[] No.41915114[source]
"And still they conveniently fail to see any connection with today times."

Who is they? The people who brought far right leaders to court because those were shouting SA slogans? Surely not those. And I would argue, that the new right indeed does see the connection, they want to have that connection to today times (see shouting SA slogans).

"It is some unclearly defined Nazis who took over the control of Germany and did all the killings and destroyed a few countries around."

Not sure what that sentence means.

"But not anyone's grandfather was involved."

You seem to have missed the 1960/70s where the topic exactly was that "The fathers did this and didn't talk about it" (In the West, East Germany just declared themselves victims of the Nazis) - which directly lead into the red terror (Red Army Faction RAF) of the 1970s as a reaction to "old nazis".

And you seem to have missed the large Wehrmacht discussion in Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht_exhibition (late, I know)

"And supposedly the companies which built their wealth on slave work and death of thousands continue to prosper."

Many companies have paid [0] (late, not enough IMHO) for using slave labor - at least that discussion led to every company pay a historian to write down that part of their history most ignored before. The biggest problem is not the companies but some rich people in Germany like the Quandts who are one of the richest families in Germany and own a large chunk of BMW - they got their money by slave labor, selling to the Prussian army and the Wehrmacht and by stealing from jews.

Compared to that, my (German) grandparents lost their large farms (not complaining, or accusing, but as a comparison) and everything else except their clothing and the clothing they could carry in two suitcases. They were not on the right side of "War Is a Racket".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_Remembrance,_Respon...