Merz says Netanyahu will be able to visit Germany despite ICC warrant
ICC says states cannot determine ‘soundness’ of its decisions as Israeli PM faces warrant on Gaza war crime allegations.
ICC says states cannot determine ‘soundness’ of its decisions as Israeli PM faces warrant on Gaza war crime allegations.
So are these people Nazis like the AfD? Anytime I see "Christian" in a political groups' name, I assume they're bloodthirsty racist fuckbags.
They're just a regular conservative party, the pivot to being bloodthirsty racist fuckbags is somewhat recent. Angela Merkel was in this party as well and she was pretty open to immigration and specifically hates the current party chief.
After WWII, German fascists who had nowhere else to go were absorbed by the right parties (unlike in other European countries where the far right was present but fringe). It’s only now that the AfD has broken out into the open, but fascist-leaning sentiment has been at least a small part of the CDU forever.
The party of law and order my ass
I'm just gonna call the police on him!
It's either a ruse or Merz really doesn't give a fuck about the ICC and the global community.
It's stupid posturing for his base. Like the asylum and immigration resolutions he didn't really wanted approved in the Bundestag early this year. He knows that arresting Netanyahu is up to the justice system and Netanyahu knows that too so he's not going to test Merz's empty promise.
The executive does have quite some influence over the justice system. Prosecutors are subject to directives from the Ministry of Justice, and judges who go against the ministry's explicit wishes will hit a very definitive dead end in their further career, as they can forget future promotions.
Thanks to federalism, we might get lucky anyway, because every state runs its own justice system, but it's still highly doubtful this will happen, as pretty much all major German parties subscribe to the same ideological stance towards Israel.
Merz doesn't give a fuck about anyone but himself, iMO.
Merz doesn't have any say in this, unless a majority in the Parliament vote to quit the ICC.
We Germans will soon stop hating on Trump because we just elected our own version.
And the Americans called it 5 years ago already
https://www.politico.eu/article/friedrich-merz-cdu-right-wing-meet-the-german-donald-trump/
To be fair, Angela Merkel called it 20 years ago, and we just now realize what she shielded us from when she got rid of him.
Merz is nowhere near the level of absurdity of Trump. This offer/decision is shameful but he doens't have the same crazy extend that Trump has
As a German, yeah apparently we are. Starting to hate my country.
Well, y'all produced Mein Kampf, which is a definite L for german literary culture (among other bad things), but y'all did produce The Magic Mountain which slaps so it is a mixed bag.
A very violent, uneven, mixed bag.
edit seriously though, to any Germans out there or people connected with German culture that are in deep despair right now, fucking read or listen to the Magic Mountain it is amazing and speaks to every part of German culture that resists fascism and celebrates what fascism abhors (love, weakness, sickness, fragility of body and the wisdom that brings the mind when the mind is willing).
Thomas Mann began writing The Magic Mountain before the outbreak of WW1 and initially it had much different philosophical conclusions/politics, but then WW1 happened, Thomas Mann turned directly towards writing non-fiction works on politics, eventually evolving to become much more humanist through the experience of WW1 and then after WW1 Thomas Mann returned to writing The Magic Mountain with an entirely new, much more nuanced and loving view of humanity. It is a wonderful, magic winter blanket of strangely hallucinogenic calmness, it is extremely dry in an unrelentingly hilarious way and it has sections of prose that rival any other modernist novel period, though I can only speak for the English translation (John E Woods translation).
If you are wondering why I am going on effusively about how relevant a long ass book about being in a sanitarium that was published in 1924 is to modern european, us and global politics, I don't know what to tell you other than fuck just have to trust me...
I met some kids of German diplomats once at a wedding, ages ago. It was a weird bunch that I thought would be outliers because I couldn’t understand how they could be expressing so much guilt for a horrible thing their grandparents did. Yeah, remember that for sure but there’s a point where it starts to look like either a performance or a very bad case of anxiety.
Is either of those a thing? Is what Metz is doing kind of like that?
It exists the idea of the soul of a country which is hard to verify since you can't put it on a couch and ask it hard questions, but assuming there was some suggest that after the Shoah Germany adapted a rather strange coping mechanism in which it turns what other nations have as national pride into a pro Israel anti-antisemitism. National pride of course was not an option after the second WW and the Shoah.
[ Edit: the transition was rather rough here previously. So I added this insert. ]
The idea is to perform ourselves as guilty, as ashamed, as monsters and therefor cannot be accountable, because we distanced ourselves from this event. By separating the new Germany from the old and bad Germany we work around the fact that there was continuity in political personal, security personal, judges, public servants and so on from the third Reich into the Bundesrepublik. But by performing specific ritualistic proclamations of guilt, we become a separate entity. And because we committed it, we know all about it.
[ End of insert. ]
This leads to rather strange behavior, that somehow random Germans are able to tell diaspora Jews and Jewish Israelis what is and isn't antisemitic.
During the currently paused Gaza war most speakers in Germany who were denied podiums on the topic due to accusations of antisemitism were Jews. This also leads to the institutionalization of guilt into specific rituals of proclaiming our guilt and assuming we are therefor forgiven. Stunningly this also doesn't need validation from any Jew. We can forgive ourselves by these rituals.
Nobody actually knows what these rituals do, or if they help any Jew in any way, but we said and did the magic things and now you cannot be mad at us. This in turn leads to people not giving a fuck, because Look we said the magic words, did the magic deep of a knee fall, we are done with it. Letting actual and or casual antisemitism slide, because we had our absolution.
The core of this is "Das Existenzrecht Israels ist deutsche Staatsräson." translating ruffly to "Israel's (unquestionable) right to exist, is identical with/required for the idea of the German state."
We build giant ugly concrete monuments, on which children play and adults take a dump in and somehow don't need to think what the Shoah means for Germany in the year [whatever the current year is]. This mind boggling bending of reality is however so deeply entrenched in the German "psyche" that nobody can talk about it without being marked as antisemitic and a general disturbance to the major consent narrative.
There is honest guilt in some Germans. The fear of it happening again. Seeing the writings on the wall and going "ah shit here we go again" when humanity once more turns to genocide. People who really believe that "never again" should actually mean something. Something which has to do with me, with the history of my family, with the way we conduct social interactions and politics, but there is also the option to just do the rites and be done with it. And in politics, people play it safe. And safe is to not tell Israel that what they do amounts to war crimes/genocide/ethnic cleansing but instead supply weapons and words of encouragement.
When the EU suggested that a special treaty with Israel for cooperation, which as far as I know was mostly symbolic, should be paused during the ongoing fighting in Gaza the German foreign minister threw themselves on the ground and screamed till they dropped it.
All because of the strange intersection of guilt and identity, which poisons any pride we could take (e.g. our constitution is fucking A*) and prevents any substantial discussion about what we need to do now, with this history, with this responsibility.
Once again, as I wrote in the beginning, this is psychology on the state or society level. Nothing that can be definitely proven (as far as I'm aware, there isn't any paper I could link or other academic publication), but it comes up again and again, especially when intellectual Jews talk about the topic, something German politicians and intellectuals are very sensitive about.
It's a right-wing thing, they need that kind of ritual to distance themselves from the slide into fascism, being responsible for creating the preconditions, etc, and still in many aspects defending exactly such stances... just not to the point of utter, direct, active, barbarism. In that sense the Vergangenheitsbewältigung still isn't done, they still have introspection to do, still lessons to learn. It's kinda weird because when I look at the conservative base, the voters, the SME bosses, there's a fuckton of antifa sentiment there out of a sense of general dislike of barbarism, definitely in comparison to the same clientele in other countries, but then eeeew those antifas look left that's icky I can't tell diversity and barbarism apart both look chaotic. You need to go all the way to actual pastors to find people on the conservative spectrum who actually get it.
TL;DR Germany first made a farce out of its own denazification and then turned it into a cargo cult.
I was after this kind of answer, thank you.
