News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

Hitler and the Grand Mufti at the time were mutually sympatico, you mean. There's a big difference between that and what you posted, Crow.

Both did in fact share a common Jew hatred.

News / German legal discrimination against Polish speakers [209]

Just follow B.B's prompt instructions and you should be just fine. If a born-again technojerk like yours truly can get it, you can too, no worries:-)

News / German legal discrimination against Polish speakers [209]

Finally had a chance to ck. out the link.

Boy oh' boy, this guy's really in a mess! He sees the whole thing as a free speech issue, but the locals don't agree.

What do you think, Johnny?

@Tacitus, same with me! I had to access the site/link through Google because I don't have a facebook acc.t. I wasn't able to

log into www. hamburgerabendblatt. de directly.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

Sorry again about the misunderstanding. No offense meant, none taken either, I hope:-)

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

You sound almost as though you're gloating while you post.
Nothing funny about scapegoating, Bratwurst Boy, or it's modern equivalent, "Mobbing"!!

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

@Brat,
The tragic irony of it all is that precisely those German-Jews imagined themselves so integrated into German society, many having won the Iron Cross in WWI, succeeded on their OWN merits as "Germans" (no affirmative action back then, let me tell you), often knew, spoke, understood no other tongue than German and loved their "Vaterland" as any of their gentile neighbors.

How horrid soon to discover it was almost all in vain.

News / German legal discrimination against Polish speakers [209]

Thanks again, Delph!

Smelled something fishy right from the start of this thread.
Guess I was right on...for a change.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

...but not that surprising. After all, they were Germans:-)
More ironic than astounding really.

News / German legal discrimination against Polish speakers [209]

How can the German government legally discriminate against Polish speakers, Turkish speakers, any non-German speakers for that matter?
There's some incomplete information here.

Work / Men in child care (creches/nurseries/kindergartens) in Poland [17]

Guess I was so acculturated into thinking that only young women even become pre-school and primary school teachers, I was surprised when this, let's call him Mr. Hellinger. first came into our class.

Work / Men in child care (creches/nurseries/kindergartens) in Poland [17]

Didn't know that.

Thanks, Delph!

Work / Men in child care (creches/nurseries/kindergartens) in Poland [17]

Can't speak for Poland, but I (generation end of '59) had a male fourth grade teacher, a Mr. Ralph Hellinger. at my primary public school.

I was roughly seven at the time and I believe he was the only one such teacher in the entire school!

Later found out he was gay, but then most of us suspected as much.

Life / Political correctness in Poland [210]

You continue to judge "progress" by a white yardstick.

It almost seems as though in an odd way you're justifying the settlement of non-white territories on this earth by whites as "Like it or not, you will have to be advanced as we are.... OR ELSE!"

Doesn't make much sense to my mind, and I'm the first to defend European culture.
What works for some doesn't and needn't work for all:-)

Life / Political correctness in Poland [210]

You certainly have a skewed view of history, not to mention an ideologically driven one, at best.

By what arrogance do you and others presume to define the success of any culture by the degree to which white, European influence has moulded it??

Perhaps you and I feel that Beethoven, Brahms, and Bach have created the zenith of musical enjoyment and/or "high" culture, but probably that remains

OUR little tick in the long run.

Had the white settlers never landed in the New World, who really is to say that the results wouldn't have been just fine, only in a different way.

Culture, unlike mathematics, is NOT quantifiable!

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

Incorrect analogy!

I grew up bilingually with German and English. I didn't end badly for me and I know I'm not the exception:-)

Life / Political correctness in Poland [210]

Whom do you mean by "post-Columbus invaders", pray tell?
Might be that you're on another troll, Rich!

Life / Political correctness in Poland [210]

Social Darwinism is a cancer, suitable for the idyll rich who enjoy lulling themselves into that Never-Never-Land fantasy that somehow they were born with a silver

foot, scusez moi, spoon, in their mouth because they were simply created superior to the hee-polee around them.

For the rest of us know better and know full well that such ideology fueled the Nazis and their first cousins or closest relatives, the eugenicists.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

I believe that knowing BOTH the ancestral language along with the New World language is that happy medium!
Unfortunately, such is ever so rarely the case, then or now.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

The efforts at integration have clearly failed.

Life / Political correctness in Poland [210]

Darwin was right though. Pity his ideas had to be corrupted by the misguided followers of Sir Herbert Spencer, whose "social Darwinism" was later used to

justify Faschism as the inherent rights of the survival of those deemed more "fit" than others, hence blithely leaving G-d out of the entire equation.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

Loved every minute of it, man!

At the time, Berlin was probably one of, if not THE most, international capital cities in Europe, easily as much as Paris or London:-)

Compared with the rest of Germany, I fit right in, no looks up and down at me as I walked into posh stores, surveying glances as I got in Hamburg,

Bremen, Goslar or Munich(:-

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

Come off it, dude! You knew I lived for half-year or so in Schoeneberg.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

The concept of citizenship in Germany is essentially one of birth right.

If someone, born in Germany, of Turkish parents, whose parents never became German citizens, wishes to apply for a regular salaried position (as opposed to off-the books aka "under the table" piece work), by law, that person MUST become a German citizen!

By virtue of having been conceived in the FRG, doesn't guarantee anybody the automatic rights of German citizenship. This remains a key difference between Germany and the US.

During the '90's when I was still living in Germany, there was considerable discussion in the news and on television concerning "the rights of foreigners", or "Auslaenderrechte", and whether "foreigners" ought to be able to granted special status, allowing them to, among other things, vote in a general national election, pay taxes, and so forth. Ultra conservatives back then actually wondered whether or not a person of, for instance, Spanish, Greek, Turkish guest worker parents could realistically-speaking ever become "a German". Because of the heinous legacy of the Third Reich with its infamous "blood laws" (Blutgesetze) of only permitting one of "German origin" (including, though not limited to the so-called "Wolga Germans" as well as "Heim ins Reich"-Kinder) to legally or officially being able to be deemed a German citizen, German Jews having been summarily stripped of their citizenship as of '38), the German government decided to bend over backwards and revisit the entire idea of citizenship status.

Merkel has no intentions of going back on it, Seehofer along with others from the Opposition such as Markus Soeder of Bavaria, and of course the Far Right groups, would ideally like to change all that.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

The US-melting pot culture clearly doesn't work in countries such as Germany. Ain't working much here either any longer, sorry to say.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

@Bratwurst Boy,

You seem to have missed my entire point!
The reason so many live or reside in Germany from nearly everywhere under the sun is a direct result of "white", ethnically-German Germans sucn as Angela Merkel trying to make amends for their past and the crimes committed in their name.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

That's why I mentioned it, Tacitus:-)

Life / Political correctness in Poland [210]

Spilling the "truth" might be healthy for the truth spiller, yet most on either side don't wish to accept the truth as it's presented.

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

...dating of course as far back as the late 18th century, when Poles migrated to Germany to work in the mines around the Ruhr Valley, later "Kohlenpott"!

The names, Krawitz, Wapniewski, Wierzbicki etc. bear ample proof of strong Polish roots in the area.

As you might also have heard, the city of Bottrop had such a large population of Polish descent, it was jokingly "renamed" B O T T R O P K I

lol

News / "It's too late for Germany" (but not for Poland) [1798]

I'm not saying the blandishments for any Third-World or casual foreigner from a less developed economy to join the ranks of German achievement aren't tempting indeed.

If my wife wanted to move over to Germany, both of us knowing the language (I as a second mother tongue), we'd both go in a shot.

The fact is though that no matter how hard Germany earnestly tries to atone for the sins of the fathers, there's plenty of historical amnesia going around to convince the gullible, if willing, from as far away as Japan, that Germany = great food, high tech wonders, spotless streets, non-stop bustling excitement, and a feeling of being at the epicenter of the world today.

They're certainly welcome to their perceptions, I'm welcome to mine.

Myopia however can sometimes be catching, as in the by now trite wisdom "How quickly they forget"!
:-)

Life / Political correctness in Poland [210]

Have I ever heard of "Kler", he asks?

The "Nowy Dziennik" along with other conservative publications practically ripped it to shreds, claiming the expected leftist bias which hates all things devoutly Christian.
Haven't seen it yet. Oddly enough, I saw "Ida" shortly after it came out and the Polish press was appreciative of Polish filmmakers trying to set the record straight.