Strange Occurrence in Germany
I thought this was a joke at first, but apparently a German man really has attacked an American tourist after shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ and giving the Nazi salute.
This isn’t interesting as an act in itself (especially as the man has since given himself up), but it’s interesting how much I found is illegal in Germany. Turns out not only is assaulting people illegal (like you’d expect), but also the Hitler Salute is illegal, saying ‘Heil Hitler’ is illegal, and a whole lot of other things, including the celtic cross, are ‘punishable’. Not really the acts of a government confident that its citizens are so happy under it that they’d never consider a return to National Socialism. Is it possible that the German government is worried that the people will turn on it as the EU continues to grow? Should be fun to watch, and if I ever find out what happens to the ‘not-a-neo-nazi-really’ assailant, I’ll flag it here.
Bis später.
Posted by Guessedworker on Sat, 22 Dec 2007 10:59 | #
He’ll be prosecuted for a hate crime, I guess.
I wrote quite a while ago about the corrosive effect of the German post-war moral settlement here (the passage is in the middle of the piece). I was talking about the effect on British political values, not German. But if nationalist feeling was slowly killed here, it was quite literally Ground Zero for the German political soul.
There is a perfectly defensible view that the reinstatement of national feeling in German politics - a prequisite for which is the moral rehabilitation of Hitler and a “reassessment” of the Holocaust narrative - is itself the prerequisite for a European deliverance from Judeo-American neoliberal values and the crisis of race replacement.
Cue wintermute. And Friedrich.