At the edge of an abyss, what Germany and India could learn from each other
What Indians, like A.C Nambiar and N.G Ganpuley learnt from Germany in the Twenties and Thirties is that raising general purpose and total factor productivity is what promotes peace and prosperity. This entails doing sensible things, not stupid shit.
In particular, District officers need to be facilitating income growth rather than expanding welfare expenditure. Mander was part of an older, paternalistic, tradition which saw poverty as inevitable. What mattered was signalling virtue and pretending evil rich people were stealing everything. The German 'beamter', by contrast, was focused on raising productivity. This meant that it supported the 'mittelstand'- i.e. the network of small and medium sized companies which help create external economies of scope and scale.
In the 1940's, both India and Germany were partitioned. India and West Germany (where Nambiar was our Ambassador) did sensible things. East Germany did stupid things because the Commies had come to power. That partition was reversed as the Soviet Union itself collapsed. India's partition still stands because Pakistanis, and now the Bangladeshis under Yunus, prefer to do stupid things. True, some Muslims in India also want to do stupid things- e.g. starting a fight with the majority which they are bound to lose- but they have the consolation of Mander's campervan of lurve.
Germany has confronted its past courageously,
West Germany was occupied by the Western Allies. They did what they were told to do. For example, it was US pressure which caused them to start recruiting Turkish guest workers in 1961.
though its stance on Palestine is a stain.
Trump's isn't. It is common sense. Palestinians want to kill kaffirs. Fuck them.
At the same time, India’s embrace of diversity remains inspiring.
India didn't embrace diversity. It did a population exchange with Pakistan. Mander's people got land which had belonged to Muslims on the Indian side of the border. Those Muslims got land from kaffirs on the Pakistani side of the border. Sadly, a large number of refugees were killed while in transit. Still, the rest of India didn't greatly care. There was no fucking abyss as far as they were concerned. What pleased them was moving into the bungalows and offices of the departing Brits.
Speaking to American philosopher Susan Neiman
who got a post in Germany when the S.D.P/Green coalition was in power. It helped that her previous job was in Tel Aviv.
for her remarkable book Learning from the Germans (Allen Lane, 2019), German pastor Friedrich Schorlemmer
an East German who joined the Social Democratic party. Hopefully he was not required to baptize Jews in the manner of the founder of his Church who said 'If I had to baptize a Jew, I would take him to the bridge of the Elbe, hang a stone around his neck and push him over with the words, ‘I baptize thee in the name of Abraham.'” Say what you like, German wit is no laughing matter.
alerted us, “No country, no culture, no religion is immune to falling into the abyss into which we fell.
Every other country was immune to German stupidity. To start one war you are bound to lose may be attributed to carelessness. Two do it twice and then to be partitioned and occupied suggests imbecility of a very high order. Let us see whether German rearmament- currently underway- ends in a Third World War. Seriously, without American troops on the ground in Germany, those stupid Krauts are bound to get up to mischief.
And once it begins, there will always be people who shut down their conscience and side with the strongman.”
Nope. Once it begins, smart peeps run the fuck away. It is foolish to speak of Krauts as having consciences- more particularly if they are Lutheran. The abyss of anti-semitism into which Germany fell is nowhere more obscenely expressed than in Luther's 'On the Jews and their lies'. Essentially, Luther claims that if you have the ability to expel Jews and destroy their synagogues and scriptures, then you must do so or else suffer eternal damnation. Sadly, Luther did not have an opportunity to meet Sikhs or Hindus or Buddhists. He had seen Romani gypsies and considered it improper for them to live in houses. He truly was the precursor of Hitler's policies.
Look around at our world, at this moment of the profound civilisational crisis in which we find ourselves.
For Europe, the crisis has to do with Ukraine. Will it create an army to fight there? It appears American aid will not be forthcoming if this is the course of action it takes.
Can we recognise that leaders in so many countries around the planet have taken their countries and people to the very edge of an abyss?
Zelensky may have done so. Ukraine was foolish to give up nukes. But no other country appears to be on the edge of an abyss. There may be a trade war and a global recession. But that is a 'shake out', not a calamity.
My desperate hope is only that there are enough of us – in my own country India and in every country of the world – who refuse to shut down our conscience.
Mander doesn't have a conscience. He is a virtue signalling cretin who, sadly, has failed to get anything very substantial in return for his relentless attacks on Modi. But there are plenty such ex-Babus in India.
There is too much at stake.
Mander has nothing left to stake. He has been crying wolf for two decades. Nobody believes him any more.
What is at issue is the world we wish to grow old in, and the world we hope to leave for our children.
Once the Germans rearm they are bound to get nukes and start a third world war- which will be mercifully brief. Sadly, it will also cause our species to go extinct.
If all people, at all times, are vulnerable to falling into the dark abyss of collective, targeted hate and fear,
Hindus aren't. Muslims are. But so are Lutherans and Catholics. They have a long history of hating 'infidels' and launching Crusades or Jihads.
the only defence for humankind is
having a kick-ass army and an offensive military doctrine which deters aggression. Also, you have to lock up Jihadi nutters unless it is cheaper to kill them. It won't be long before the Germans embrace this view.
for all people at all times to recognise, strengthen, and sustain their capacities for fraternity, for care; to shore up their human faculty to treat people who they see as “different” with acceptance and not suspicion,
Mander did not and does not accept Modi or Shah or the BJP. He treats them with suspicion.
and welcome them as human beings of equal worth and dignity.
They are of greater dignity if they hold high offices of state. You are welcome to make false allegations against them but then others may make allegations against you. This means you come under the scanner and suddenly donations dry up. Muslims will only get into your camper-van of lurve if you will give them a little money to do so.
In other words, the only way for humankind is to learn to live together with diverse populations with kindness and respect.
No country has to learn to live with diverse nutters who want to kill kaffirs. Good fences make good neighbours. Germany and the rest of Europe will have to seal its borders and kill or incarcerate Jihadi nutters. Otherwise, the AfD will take power by the end of the decade.
Germany and historical memory
I lived in Germany for a year, in 2016-’17. During this time, I tried to learn from the German people how they courageously and painfully struggled to confront their horrific Nazi past,
There was no need to do so. If you were a Nazi scientist, you got a US visa under Operation Paperclip- unless the Soviets had gotten their paws on you first. There was some token de-Nazification but smart people like Albert Speer got off lightly.
and through this endeavoured to reclaim their moral compass.
Germans have never had any such thing. Still, they used to make good cars.
Above all, the paramount lesson that I carried away from Germany was of how all peoples at all times remain vulnerable to the dangers of being drawn to the politics of fear, resentment, suspicion, and, indeed, frenzied hate.
Germany was exceptional in its stupidity. I suppose, the truth is Prussia had to be cut down to size so the more civilized Western portion could rise.
The German state and people offer an extraordinary, even singular, example of agonised striving through successive generations to collectively confront their shameful collective histories, and to seek repair, atonement, and forgiveness.
This is ludicrously false. Nambiar, our Ambassador to West Germany, was a War Criminal. That's why he got on so well with his old pals. Incidentally, Eichmann, in Argentina, had a well paid job with Mercedes Benz. Nobody- more particularly Lutheran Pastors in East Germany- was seeking forgiveness or atonement. After all, Stalin was almost as anti-Semitic as Hitler. The East Germans were great pals of the PLO. They did not recognize Israel and had an official policy of confrontation with it. Mander truly is as stupid as shit.
They still have significant milestones to cross, about which I will speak soon.
Why are they not declaring war on Israel? Do the Germans not understand that there are a lot of Jews in that country?
But I must underline that there are no examples anywhere in the world in modern times of the kind of journey undertaken by the German people.
The Germans were fortunate in that their conquerors soon fell out with each other. Thus they prospered in relative terms without having to undertake any kind of journey. Who knows in what direction they will go if they re-arm?
What makes Germany unique and admirable is that
it started, and lost, two world wars. Mander creams in his pants when he contemplates this.
its people have owned their collective responsibility, even guilt, as a nation state, for the unspeakable atrocities perpetrated by National Socialism and the Third Reich.
East Germany never did. Angela Merkel, whose dad was a Pastor in the East, did, however, try to avoid anti-Semitic comments. But she invited in a lot of Jihadi nutters.
Their journey of atonement, at its soul, reflects their deep commitment to achieving true fraternity and humanity.
The West did pay reparations. The East didn't. It helped Muslim terrorists in any way it could.
I learned during my months of study that getting to the point Germany has reached today was not at all that easy.
The Germans did work hard and pursued sensible economic policies. What they didn't go in for was atonement. They may be stupid. They aren't mad.
After a generation or more of denial, it took decades of tortured soul-searching to arrive at the place the German people have now arrived in their journey of rare moral salience.
The young used their parents' Nazi past as a stick to beat them with. The alternative would be to have listen to them droning on about all the Jews and the Gypsies they killed in their salad days.
There are limitations to this journey, as I said. But that it has happened at all is its achievement. As Neiman observes, “A nation that erects a monument of shame for the evils of its history in its most prominent space is a nation not afraid to confront its own failures.”
Germans were worried that Nazi stupidity might revive. But they have now lost that fear. Once they rearm, we may find that 'monuments of shame' are knocked down.
No country today has been as brave and honest as Germany in encouraging its citizens and children to acknowledge its own history, and to learn from it the critical importance of respecting and embracing diversity and pluralism.
I suppose, if you are talking to Germans, you should say nice things about them. But why talk to Germans? Seriously, they are as boring as shit.
It is hard to imagine this happening in any other country of today’s world.
There are still 35,000 US troops on German soil. The figure used to be double that. If you are dependent on foreigners, you need to show contrition for trying to kill them in the past.
Think of what the United States would be if its most prominent monuments marked the momentous crimes of its history – slavery, lynching, racial segregation, mass incarceration, and the annihilation of Native Americans.
India had a monument to the Black Hole of Calcutta till Netaji Bose campaigned for its removal. But the siege of the Lucknow Residency is still commemorated. I suppose Indians like thinking of all the lovely White peeps their ancestors killed.
Or countries of Western Europe highlighting monuments that acknowledged the crimes of colonialism.
We should commemorate crimes. Why does London not have a monument to Jack the Ripper?
Or, in South Asia, memorials to mark the mass slaughter of people, mostly minorities, during the Partition riots, and, in India,
but not Pakistan.
the many pogroms and incidents of lynching that followed. Or, even more pertinently, monuments to mark millennia of violent crimes and discrimination against Dalits, indigenous people, and women.
By Muslims? Cool.
Silence during the Holocaust
And yet, where is Germany today? Look at the staggering results of the 2024 elections to the European Parliament. In this election, the far-right Alternative for Germany raced past even the Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Olof Scholz. Winning 16.5% of the vote share, it secured the second largest vote share in Germany and led in all the five former East German states.
Which didn't do any fucking atoning, didn't pay any reparations, didn't recognize Israel, and helped train Muslim terrorists.
Despite all that the German people have done – more, I repeat, than in any country in the contemporary world – to try to rebuild a humane democracy,
West Germany had democracy though, obviously, this was a gift from the Allies. The East had a Stalinist secret police.
how is the far-right the second largest party in Germany today, in power in many provinces, and straining at the leash to take over the federal government one day?
The answer is obvious. East Germany wasn't democratic. True it did apologize to Israel in 1990 but that was after the Berlin Wall fell.
During my year in Germany, I noted much that we can admire and learn from the German people from the ways they dealt with the collective crimes of the Nazi period.
Germany was divided and occupied. You can't learn anything from an occupied country if your own country is too strong to be conquered.
Yet, I left the country that I came to love and admire with many troubling concerns about imperative tasks unfinished. These, I am convinced, must be confronted if the new social contract of fraternity and solidarity that the German people are attempting to craft is to be realised and to endure.
It won't. That shite is obsolete. The question now is whether Germany will rearm and nuke up. If it does, history may repeat itself.
My first concern is that I believe there is still not enough collective introspection to acknowledge the culpability of large sections of ordinary Germans in Nazi crimes.
By contrast, in Mander's ancestral Rawalpindi, Muslims are constantly acknowledging their culpability in the slaughter of kaffirs.
What happened in those years was not merely the result of evil people “up there” led by Adolph Hitler. Germany slaughtered millions of innocent children, women, and men because of the great support Hitler enjoyed from overwhelming sections of the German people of every region, class, and gender. The Holocaust happened both because of the silence and the active support of the large majority of German people.
No. It happened because Germans are stupid. Kill people cheaply using agricultural implements. Don't bother sending them here and there in cattle trucks. Gas chambers cost money.
I suppose the truth is the Death Camps were a great way to serve the Reich without having to go to the Eastern Front.
It was easy to locate the locus of evil in Nazi Germany in Hitler and the top leadership of the Nazis. It has been much harder to look within the German society of that decade. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary men and women participated in, or actively supported, genocidal crimes organised by the Nazi leadership.
Other regimes- e.g. Vichy France or the Iron Guard in Romania were very enthusiastic about rounding up Jews and sending them to their death.
The Hitler Youth recruited most teenage boys, and there were many who reported on their neighbours.
That continued under the Stasi in East Germany. The fact is Hilter was playing catch up with Stalin.
The military, the civil services, the church, intellectuals, professors, doctors, scientists, leaders of industry, artistes, and so on were culpable – the list is very long.
If everybody is guilty, nobody is guilty.
Historians who I spoke to in Germany estimate the active opposition to Hitler’s regime was in the vicinity of 1% of the people.
But a goodly portion of that one percent still believed that Germany would starve unless it conquered land to its East. As for Jews, Gypsies etc.- like pigs, they were co-eaters. Killing them meant more food for the rest of the population. Like I said, Germans were stupid.
This does not mean that all the remaining 99% supported the Nazi genocidal project. Many were guilty because of their silence.
This is a totalitarian claim. Failure to report suspicious activity to the authorities is a crime only under the worst sort of Dictatorship.
Their weak defence that they did not know has worn thin – did they not know, or did they not want to know?
Does Mander know that he has been lying about Modi for the last 23 years? Perhaps not. His mind is full of shit.
Forced labour camps dotted all of Germany, and not just big businesses but also small enterprises like wayside bakeries and farms employed forced labour. Concentration camps were also not in the wilderness. People saw and inhaled the smoke from burning human bodies that rose daily to darken the skies from the chimneys. And people could not in all honesty claim to not know what the probable fate was of Jews who were marched out of places where they lived.
If the Jews did not know their destination, how were neighbours supposed to get that information? As for 'forced labour'-POWs below the rank of officer were subject to it. In England there were Italian POWs bringing in the harvest.
What then could be the reasons for their silence?
They had no duty to speak out just as Mander has no duty to keep telling stupid lies. Now he is pretending that he has some Divine ability to judge who is guilty and who is culpable. But he has no ability. He is a stupid, virtue-signalling, self-publicist.
The first was, indeed, fear. This is often cited as the defence by ordinary German citizens when agonising questions are asked of them by later generations.
The proper question is why they didn't run the fuck away. It should have been obvious that Germany would lose.
But fear was often an alibi rather than reason for silence.
The reason this nutter makes so much noise is because he is afraid that his Ali Bhai will slit his throat if he doesn't spread anti-India propaganda.
There is evidence that even within the uniformed forces, there occasionally were men who refused to join the enterprise of killing Jews, but they did not suffer drastically – they were just shifted to other responsibilities.
Killing Jews was safer than going up against Rooskies. The safest thing was to surrender to the Americans.
Many quiet acts of resistance would not have resulted in severe punishment.
Because they wouldn't have been noticed.
The second possible reason for silence could have been indifference. I am not a Jew, a Roma Sinti person, a homosexual, a Communist, a political dissident, a disabled person, or a homeless man. This will not happen to me. So why should I care?
Because if your country does stupid shit, its economy will be in the toilet. Emigrate if you can.
A third reason was that many willingly profited from these crimes, such as by buying cheap properties expropriated from the Jews; filling jobs vacated by expelled Jews, including in universities; and opening small businesses in place of those that were earlier owned by Jews.
I suppose Mander is describing his own family. They lost property on side of the border and gained property from Muslims who had to leave India. Germans lost a lot of territory because they lost the war.
Prodigious profits were also made from forced labour, not just in big industry but also in small farms and bakeries.
Mander believes that making a profit is proof that a ghastly crime has been committed.
But a fourth and the most culpable reason was that some people supported the project of fear, hate, discrimination and ultimately extermination.
Mander doesn't think he is culpable for his project of arousing fear and hatred against Hindus in India. Sadly, he has not so far been able to enjoy the spectacle of Hindu extermination in a Hindu majority area. Still, he was a government officer when Sikhs were slaughtered. Strangely, he didn't resign in protest at that time. I suppose, it is only Muslims who matter to him.
Daniel Goldgahen in his harrowing treatise Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Vintage, 1977) documents that most of the mass killings were not carried out by army soldiers but by the civil police and civilian recruits. There was no shortage of people who volunteered. He speaks, for instance, of men whose day job was to shoot maybe a hundred Jewish children, women, and men a day. They would typically return home in the evening, shower, and go out in the evening with a girl or with friends. Next morning, they would return to the same task.
It was safer and better paid than fighting on the Eastern Front.
It is difficult to estimate precisely how many of the German people harboured active ideological support for the Third Reich and how many were fearful, indifferent, or profiteering bystanders.
His parents estimated how many Muslims would slaughter them if they remained in Rawalpindi. They got the fuck out.
Historians were unwilling to make estimates, but some suggested that the first could be as many as 40% of the German people at that time.
I suppose the percentage of Punjabi men eager to kill infidels was closer to 90%.
I fear that while acknowledging the crimes of Nazi Germany, there is still too little acceptance of – and collective introspection about – the culpability of ordinary Germans in the excesses of National Socialism, including the overwhelming majority of German families.
Mander is obsessed with everybody's culpability save his own. Yet who else has killed fourteen trillion disabled Palestinian Lesbians of Colour in the last three hours? Why is Mander not denouncing himself for this terrible crime? Is it because those Palestinians are Buddhists?
Historians estimated that maybe just 0.1% of Germans saved Jewish lives. But in a recent survey, more than 18% of young Germans spoke of how their grandparents had saved Jews!
Perhaps those Germans were of Turkish descent.
On the question of culpability, I also wonder about whether various other sections of German society need to reflect more on their specific culpabilities of the past.
The answer is no. The fact is, if you learn that your grandparents were good at ethnic cleansing, you might want to do some yourself.
For instance, has big business sufficiently atoned for the crime of mass forced labour?
All business enterprises are very evil.
Or doctors and the medical profession for the policies and practices of eugenics and the culling of persons with disabilities?
Doctors are very evil. Did you know that they aren't incessantly holding themselves culpable for slaughtering fourteen trillion disabled Palestinian Buddhists on a daily basis?
Or the Church for its intensely problematic role during the Nazi years?
The Church has always taken a dim view of Jews.
Or academia, cinema, and the arts for their ideological legitimisation of Nazism?
Not to mention their craven support for Stalin and Ulbricht and Honecker.
They need to do this not only to embrace guilt but also to think about how they went so horribly wrong and assume responsibility for it not happening again.
Selective fight
Mander is being very selective. Hitler is bad but Stalin and Mao get a pass. Muslims, of course, can do no wrong.
My second major worry is whether the project of dealing with and coming to terms with their past is seen primarily as fighting anti-Semitism, or whether it has broadened into a fight against any form of anti-minority bigotry and discrimination.
There is no project. This is just something useless people gas on about.
Too often this is seen as the historic responsibility of the German people to fight anti-Semitism, while in practice (not in principle) being indifferent or blind to or at least less concerned about other forms of anti-minority discrimination and violence.
Rapists are a minority. Germany must do more to support them in their choice of life-style.
I worry (relatedly) about the signs of anti-Muslim sentiment that I found even among officials and organisations committed to fighting anti-Semitism. Do both official and societal battles against anti-Semitism not see their mandate to fight all forms of discrimination, against every minority?
Why are they not chopping off their own dicks to show solidarity with Transgender people?
A large part of my own extended family is furious with me; some have cancelled me out of their lives, because of my public defence of India’s Muslim minorities.
This nutter thinks Muslims immigrants should be welcomed in India even though Muslims are not subject to Islamic persecution in Pakistan or Bangladesh.
They remind me that our families suffered unspeakable violence, including mass killings and rape, at the hands of Muslim mobs in the Partition violence of 1947 in what is now Pakistan.
Once Germany started losing the war, its people suffered unspeakably. The rape of Berlin was very thorough.
They say that after all of this personal history, I have gone to the “wrong side”. They are unwilling to heed my answer – “After all that we suffered during Partition, who better than us can understand what it means to be targeted with hate and violence only because of their identity? So I am on the right side; it is you who are on the wrong side. Don’t you see?”
Sadly, what we see is that he is on the wrong side of the Indo-Pak border. Let him take his campervan of lurve and fuck off back to Rawalpindi.
That, in the end, it is not my identity that should drive my opposition to discrimination, but my ethics.
What should drive a person is doing useful things. Opposition is useless unless it is effective. Mander is wholly ineffective.
Another major anxiety that I have about Germany’s “memory culture” is that there seems to me a problematic separateness and even an implied hierarchy in its official remembering. The memorials in Berlin to murdered disabled people, homosexuals, and Roma Sinti are separate, but also much smaller, more modest than the commanding memorial to murdered Jews.
Because more Jews were murdered. Also, Jews are smart.
It seems to me important – ethically and politically – for German society to remember, reflect, and atone for each of these mass murders both separately and together.
What seems important to Mander is telling other people what to do. Once a Babu...
For the German people to build a humane and inclusive country, they need to introspect even more profoundly about, for instance, the intimacy of their culpability for the murder of persons with disabilities.
What the Germans have built is an affluent society. That's the only reason people want to live there. Making it humane and inclusive in the manner Mander suggests would make it very poor and horrible to live in.
Historians spoke to me of families that not infrequently tacitly consented to giving up their disabled family members for “euthanasia”.
Sadly, Mander's family didn't give up this cunt.
The Roma and Sinti people tell me that judges and police persons even decades after the Holocaust believed that they were culturally criminal and deserved to die. And I watched an extraordinary film, Great Freedom (2021), about a homosexual man who was sentenced to a concentration camp. He survived it, only to return to prison in “democratic” West Germany, where homosexuality continued to be a crime for decades.
It wasn't prosecuted after 1957 in the East. Buggery was a luxury even Communism could afford.
And it is only recently that Germany is having a belated debate about its disgraceful colonial history.
Some shitheads may be talking about it. Nobody else cares.
Unlike the UK, France, and the Netherlands, Germans until recently almost forgot that their country had its own history of very cruel colonialism, with mass slaughter, concentration camps, and eugenics.
Also, they had almost forgotten that the Romans fucked them over big time.
Does Germany respect diversity
Finally, very significantly, I worry about problems with the question of what constitutes “being German”. I think that if Germany is to be authentically democratic, it must willingly, bravely, and generously embrace, even welcome, diversity.
And chop its bollocks off. Seriously, dicks cause RAPE especially of the Environment.
Germany was after World War II still relatively homogenous, even more so after most surviving Jews left its borders (although it must be stressed that Jews in Germany were culturally integrated into society). Therefore, the Germans found it difficult to welcome immigrants. In West Germany, immigrants were called “guest workers”; the underlying notion was that we invite you to come to our country, to work, but then we expect you to go back to your land.
Mander was a guest in Germany. He was dropping a big hint that maybe he should be asked to stay. He could help the country atone for all its sins.
Not just you, but even your children and their children who were born in Germany, and know no other country. East Germany cloaked its unwelcome in the garb of “socialist solidarity”; it welcomed workers from socialist countries like Vietnam, but wanted them to ultimately return to “build socialism” in their countries of origin.
Is Mander against 'building Socialism' just as his parents were against 'building Islam' by getting their throats slit? No. If the thing is stupid and evil, Mander is for it, not against it.
Has this changed when more than an estimated quarter of Germans are today of immigrant background? I fear not nearly enough.
Mander won't be happy till Germany comes under Sharia Law. He fears this won't happen in his life-time.
The requirement for immigrants who seek a German passport to not just learn the German language but also the “German way of life” remains to me a fraught idea.
Mander thinks Germans should learn Arabic.
What is the German way of life?
Eating pork while drinking beer and speaking German.
Is Germany multi-religious or Christian?
Christian.
Is it multi-cultural, or is there one dominant culture to which all prospective German citizens must adhere?
The latter.
Is it multi-lingual, or must all Germans be proficient in German before they are admitted into the German nation?
Is it a country where heterosexual males are not subject to compulsory gender reassignment surgery? Mander hopes it isn't.
Is there, and should there be, a hierarchy of belonging? Who belongs to the German nation, who does not belong, and what are the conditionalities of belonging? What is the place of people of colour, those not fluent in German, and believers in Islam, in Germany, an ageing country where these numbers will only swell more?
What is the place of Islamic terrorists in Germany? If it isn't that of the ruling class, Mander will cry and cry.
Germany also has around a million people of African descent, dating to before the rise in immigration in recent decades. Are they full and equal German citizens? In a recent survey of discrimination against Black people by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, Germany and Austria were found to be the worst offenders in Europe with 64% people of African descent reporting that they felt discriminated against.
It is White, Christians, who should feel discriminated against. Why don't the Germans just slit their own throats to save the Jihadis time and trouble.
Is the idea of Germany, in practice, a German-speaking, white, culturally Christian, heterosexual country, and do all those who wish to belong to this nation but are not all or any of these, become people with lesser eligibility to belong, at least until they learn and assimilate?
Countries should either be as Islamic as Pakistan or they should chop off the dicks of all heterosexual kaffirs.
Given the Nazi obsession with racial purity, do we not see the pitfalls?
Did you know that Nazis were obsessed with not chopping their own dicks off? Kindly atone for being a fucking Nazi by chopping your dick off, Herr Scholz.
I learned from many non-white Germans I spoke to that white German society is still not fully ready to accept diversity as part of German identity. It is immigrants coming into Germany who are in a sense reforming the German nation.
Sadly, many of those immigrants aren't cutting off their own dicks. Mander finds this highly culpable.
Germany and its Palestinian blindness
During the months that I spent studying Germany, no one could have predicted the genocidal war unleashed by Israel after a Hamas assault of October 7, 2023. But when it did come to pass, I found all of my fears of tasks still unfinished in Germany’s memorial culture were sadly too well-founded.
Scholz wasn't chopping his own dick off. Fuck you Scholz! Fuck you very much!
In 15 months, the military actions of the Israeli state razed most of Gaza to rubble, killed women and children on a scale unseen in this century,
German rearmament means that they will soon do worse- perhaps to Muslim ghettos on their own territory.
targeted hospitals, health workers, schools, aid workers, and journalists, and used starvation and terminating water and electricity supplies as weapons.
Stuff like that is only cool if done by Muslims to Kaffirs.
Author Jonathan Cook
who is married to an Israeli Arab who hasn't suffered at the hands of the Zionist state because she hasn't tried to kill Jews. Incidentally, the guy suggested that the Ghouta Chemical attack was the work of the Syrian rebels. Hopefully, now they have triumphed, they will bring him to justice.
writes in the Middle East Eye,
because he is paid a lot of money to do so
“It was no surprise that, in rationalising its genocide in Gaza, Israel first spread wholly false stories that Hamas had baked babies alive in ovens,
As opposed to raping them to death.
evoking the crematoria of Auschwitz … It is no surprise that Israeli popular culture has so dehumanised Palestinians that report after report finds those imprisoned by Israel face systematic torture, sexual abuse, and rape.
Whereas Hamas was actually operating a holiday camp. No Israeli was held hostage.
Or that Israeli soldiers regard Palestinians as so vermin-like that, as western doctors who have volunteered in Gaza keep warning, Israeli snipers and drones appear to be shooting Gaza’s children for sport.”
Rather than as a matter of religious duty.
The response in Germany to Palestine overturned, indeed, squandered so much of the moral advance it had made to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust.
The only way to atone for killing Jews is to support those who are killing Jews. Mander is a moral imbecile.
The multitude of crimes against humanity by the Israeli state did nothing to shake the support of the German establishment for it. It became abundantly clear that “Never Again”, the resounding historic resolve after the Holocaust, did not extend to all people. The response of Germany and the entire Western establishment to the genocidal assault on the Palestinian people was Islamophobic, even perhaps racist.
White people should kill themselves unless they are killing Jews. Everybody should atone for their culpability in not killing themselves- unless they are Muslims in which case they must atone for not killing Mander's parents.
Soon after the war started, German Chancellor Scholz visited Israel and Egypt, and while declaring his country’s solidarity with Israel, also said Germany’s existence depends on that of Israel. It was [former chancellor] Angela Merkel who had coined the phrase “reason of state” in German, meaning that the foundation of Germany is tied inextricably to the existence and security of Israel.
That was before Zelensky blew up NATO. Germany will now rearm. Hopefully, it won't invade Poland out of habit.
This resolve was interpreted to mean that pro-Palestinian protests were banned and suppressed across Germany. The official claim was that these were anti-Semitic. The German state refused to acknowledge that opposition to the policies of the Israeli government, especially the hard-right coalition currently in power, was not necessarily anti-Semitic. Protestors also included Jewish and left-leaning German groups. National Public Radio’s Berlin correspondent Rob Schmitz reported, “So many people here are angry about this ban on rallies supporting Palestinians. They’re saying that they do not support Hamas and only want to show support for families in Gaza, but they’re not allowed to do that.” Al Jazeera reported that even Germans who stood with Israel could not ignore Palestinian suffering.
Why ignore it when you can laugh heartily at it?
Berlin schools were authorised to ban Palestinian flags and keffiyeh scarves and the pro-Palestinian slogan “From the river to the sea”.
They also ban the swastika and the slogan 'kill the Jews!'
Germany has the largest Palestinian diaspora in Europe, estimated at 300,000.
Decent, hardworking people in the main. You don't hear of them running around raping and knifing people.
But the protestors were not all Palestinian, or Muslim. German public broadcaster ZDF found in a poll that 61% respondents did not feel that Israel’s military actions in Gaza were justified. German Green lawmaker Lamya Kaddor admitted to CNN that it was unfair to equate pro-Palestinian supporters with Hamas sympathisers in Europe. “Not every expression of solidarity with Palestine is support for Hamas; the desire for the Palestinians to have their own state and for peace is not anti-Semitic; a Palestinian flag is not a criminal offence.”
What about expressions of solidarity with German women attacked by immigrants?
The German government went further to suppress dissent. It passed a law adding a condition for people seeking naturalisation in Germany. They would now be mandatorily required to affirm Israel’s right to exist.
Because Terrorists are incapable of telling lies- right?
Welcoming these changes to German citizenship law, Interior Minister Nancy Faeser maintained, “We have also made it ... clear: Whoever doesn’t share our values, will not be able to get a German passport. Here we have drawn a crystal clear red line and made the law much stronger than before.
But the European Union has referred the matter to the European Court which may strike it down. Perhaps, the Germans don't really want to implement it. They are merely trying to take the wind out of the sails of the AfD.
Anti-Semitism, racism and other forms of contempt for humanity rule out naturalisation. There is no tolerance for that.” Again, there is the same confusion between political opposition to a regime and “racism” and “contempt for humanity”.
Perhaps this confusion is deliberate. The Germans will say the European Court prevented them from making good their promise.
Even more complicated is the German export of military arms to Israel. In 2023, there was a 10-fold rise in German arms exports to Israel, worth 326.5 million euros. This slowed down in 2024 in the face of lawsuits that the exports broke international law because the arms could be used for genocide and crimes against humanity The German defence in the International Court of Justice was awkward and unconvincing. “For every [arms export] licence that is granted, the German government carefully assesses whether there is a clear risk that the particular item subject to licensing would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, or grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949,” the counsel said in court.
Again, the Germans may be being disingenuous. Anyway, it is European rearmament- involving expenditure of over a trillion dollars a year- which is the real jackpot.
German-Palestinian academic Anna Younes,
who teaches in the 'Gender Studies' Dept. of a German University. No doubt, the Taliban will soon establish some such thing in Kabul.
born and raised in East Berlin “right next to the wall”, is scathing and agonised by these actions of the German government. She thinks that Germany’s support “for the genocide in Gaza” has only served to show that “Palestinian lives … Muslim lives, Arab lives, and non-white lives in Europe and the Middle East” are expendable.
Which is why she doesn't live in Gaza. Hamas considers its people to be expendable- for the greater glory of Iran.
I recall how moved I was to witness a recording of the commemoration of the Holocaust Remembrance Day in January 2022.
He was so moved, he had loose motion.
But author Cook searingly speaks of the hypocrisy of the West while commemorating the Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2025. The roll-call of leaders who attended the main ceremony at Auschwitz was impressive, including King Charles III, Scholz, and Emmanuel Macron. However, as Cook observes, Western leaders are determined to look back at the crimes of the past, but equally determined not to look at the crimes of the present – crimes they have been so deeply complicit in perpetrating.
Imaginary crimes. Who hid my TV remote? I think it was Sir Keir Starmer.
Cook speaks of “an unwanted ghost at the commemorations. In fact, tens of thousands of ghosts. Those ghosts included the children shredded by US-supplied bombs; the children who slowly suffocated under the rubble of their destroyed homes; the children whose bodies were left to rot, picked apart by feral dogs, because snipers shot at anyone who tried to retrieve them; the children who starved to death and dying in their parents arms because they were seen as “human animals”, denied all food and water; the homeless babies who froze to death in plunging winter temperatures; and the premature babies left to die in their incubators after soldiers invaded hospitals and cut off the power”.
Hamas didn't mind this happening. What was important was to hang on to as many Israeli hostages as possible.
At the foundation of German support to Israel is ultimately guilt. As a German said to Al Jazeera, “Almost every German has ancestors or relatives who were in some shape or form involved in the slaughter of six million Jews”.
Almost every Muslim has ancestors who killed kaffirs- including 'kitabi' Jews and Christians.
But as Cook says, “The Holocaust has been turned into a shield that, rather than protecting others from becoming victims of genocide, is used to protect those in the West who wish to perpetrate it.”
Did you know that Sir Keir Starmer, when not hiding my TV remote, often tells his pals that he wants to go to Gaza and kill some Muslims?
Learning from each other
When I started my fellowship to study how the German people dealt with their Nazi past, I was also looking for what Indian people could learn from Germany’s journey of atonement.
East Germany did no atonement. West Germany had to because it was occupied by Western powers.
But as I went along, I increasingly began thinking about an imagined dialogue between the German and Indian people, and of learning from each other.
There was a genuine dialogue between Bose and Hitler.
What do I think the German people can profit from learning from India? I think that both Indian and German people – and indeed all of humankind – can learn from what is finest in India’s civilisational practice.
i.e. surrendering to Muslims or other foreigners.
India has been brutal in its oppressions of caste and gender.
India has been ruled by foreigners during the period when that oppression was at its worst.
However, at the same time, more than any other civilisation, it has been most comfortable in embracing diversity.
India became less diverse when it became independent. But Pakistan's diversity decreased even more.
Christianity came to India centuries before it came to Europe.
Indian Christianity had a rigid caste system.
Islam travelled to Indonesia from India, not Arabia.
No. It was transmitted by Arab Muslim traders which is why the Shafi, not the Hanafi, school is dominant. The Muslims of Kerala are Shafi because they were converted by Arab traders.
Eight major religions of the world originated or parked their caravans in India, and made the land their own. Each took from it, but gave richly to it as well.
Sadly, Confucian China did not park its campervan of lurve in India.
So, briefly, let me talk of four major lessons I have learnt from what is best in my own country.
Gobshites like Mander are tolerated but have no political power.
• The idea of equal belonging without conditionalities. You do not have to learn to be like us, the dominant majority, to be eligible to belong. We need to accept, respect, learn from, and, in the end, celebrate each other.
Germany too can turn into a shithole. Just invite in any caravan of jihadis and sit quietly as the cut your throat. It must be said, the Indians were very good at defanging Islam in India.
• Second is that the idea of secularism does not require the denial of religious faith, but instead equal respect for every set of religious faiths, including the denial of faith.
In other words, secularism does not have to be secular.
The Abrahamic religions are sometimes (and I believe wrongly) interpreted as maintaining that “their” path is the only path to the divine.
Sadly, Mander's parents didn't stick around in Rawalpindi to debate this matter with the Muslims there.
This interpretation makes it difficult to incorporate equal respect for other religious beliefs.
It makes it easy to kill heretics and infidels.
In The Argumentative Indian (Penguin UK, 2006), Amartya Sen argues that the singular strength of the Indian philosophical tradition is the giving up of certainty,
All Indian philosophical traditions establish the certitude and inerrancy of Scripture of some sort or the other. This even the case with the Lokayata. It is a different matter that 'Pyrrhonism' is a tool used in Shramanic religions (which is where Pyrrho got it from). But they don't deny the inerrancy of their own Credo.
and the embracing of doubt, of the reality that I could be wrong.
You could be wrong. The Buddha can't.
This tradition continued in ancient and medieval times, under Buddhist and Muslim rulers, in Indian and Sufi Islam.
No. What continued was the claim that there was a higher esoteric doctrine knowledge of which could yield super-natural powers.
• Third, that hatred cannot be fought with hatred – it will only deepen hatred further.
You can kill and drive away people you hate. That's what happened to Mander's people.
Likewise, violence cannot be fought with violence.
Which is why Churchill and Roosevelt and Stalin refused to fight Hitler.
That too will embed violence more firmly.
Getting conquered and occupied is what rid Germany of violence.
We need to find a new idiom of resistance to fight hate, based on love.
Gandhi had it. But, it was useless. Bose turned up in Germany to ally with Hitler. He and Nambiar raised an Indian Legion to fight as part of the Waffen S.S.
A small example of this was our “Karwan e Mohabbat”, or Caravan of Love, to respond to the epidemic of lynching that swept India not with hate, but with radical love.
It was useless. Nobody wanted to get into this silly man's campervan.
Much greater examples from recent history come from the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi,
which ended with the partition genocide
Martin Luther King Jr,
who put an end to Black on Black violence- right?
and Nelson Mandela.
whose successors were brutal and corrupt. It remains to be seen whether Whites will have to flee the country.
• To imagine and try to build a social contract founded on fraternity, solidarity, egalitarian compassion, and social caring, which must include, indeed, front-end the practice of radical love.
Radical love should leave my back-end alone.
Let me elaborate this last. Fraternity as an idea is admittedly problematic because it literally means brotherhood, but what about sisterhood and siblings of other genders?
What about donkeys? St. Francis of Assisi had lots of brothers who were donkeys.
The Hindi word in India’s Constitution is much finer and more apt – bandhuta.
The Constitution was written in English. Fraternity was translated as 'bhaichara' (brotherliness) or 'bandhutva' (being related to).
Derived from Sanskrit, this literally is the idea that we belong to and with each other. We might be of different castes, classes, ethnicities, faiths, and genders, but we are still tied to each other.
Mander is tied to Modi. Why does he hate him so much?
There are many sibling ideas of fraternity. Some of these are empathy, or our capacity to imagine and feel the pain of the other as our own. Then there is what I call “egalitarian compassion”, which is not compassion as charity given by the strong to the weak, but a relationship of shared pain between people of equal worth and dignity. At this moment, you may have suffered immense pain and loss, and I am there for you. But even as I do this, I am mindful that a day can come when I am the one in great suffering, and you will be there for me.
Some of Mander's fellow IAS officers did useful work and thus helped increase Income and Government revenue. This useless tossers' empathy and compassion were useless.
Another critical sibling idea of fraternity is social caring, which to me – paraphrasing Noam Chomsky – is the idea that we should take care of each other.
By doing useful stuff not posting as Mother Theresa.
But perhaps most of all I speak of the idea of radical love – a love that is based on great courage and conviction.
as opposed to a love that does useful things.
To explain the practice of radical love, let me turn to Gandhi’s last months, the most painful but also the most beautiful chapter in his life.
He had lost salience. Mountbatten pretended he was a 'one man Boundary force' because India was doing nothing for the refugees flooding in from the East. Gandhi was killed because he insisted India hand over cash to Pakistan even though war had broken out. As Ambedkar told his wife, his death was a blessing in disguise.
His country was torn apart, smouldering with fires of hate that seemed entirely out of control. The smoke from these blocked out all light of hope and kindness.
Not for the vast majority of Hindus who were completely unaffected. Sikhs, like Mander's family, suffered most.
A million people slaughtered each other. Pakistan, torn out of India, was founded as an Islamic country.
Which is why Mander's people ran away from there. If Germany becomes majority Muslim, German Christians will have to flee.
Gandhi’s last and most significant battle
which he lost immediately. India complied with his assassin's demand that Hindi in the Devanagari script be made the official language. Urdu could go fuck itself. Also, Ambedkar ensured that Muslim Dalits were stripped on affirmative action entitlements.
was against those who wanted to make India a mirror image of Pakistan, a Hindu supremacist country, unwelcoming to Muslims.
Nehru passed a law preventing Muslims who had fled across the border in panic from returning and claiming citizenship. Property was taken from Muslims to permit the resettlement of people like Mander's family.
Gandhi fought for India to be a country that belonged equally to people of every faith and identity, including Muslims.
He lost. Get over it.
For this, he defied the rage of millions of people who had lost their loved ones and their homelands forever.
One of them, Madhanlal Pawa was involved in the first assassination attempt. He confessed this to his landlord- a Professor of Sociology- who immediately alerted Morarji Desai. Desai threatened him with arrest and threw him out.
His last heroic battles for peace and forgiveness, his ringing call to Muslims to not leave for Pakistan,
The Muslim population of Delhi fell from 33 percent to 5 percent while the old fool issued such 'ringing calls'.
and the spilling of his own blood when a Hindu supremacist assassin felled him, quelled the fires of hate that had engulfed the subcontinent.
Godse was Chitpavan. Congress organized a pogrom of Brahmins in Pune. It was the muscular Hindu party par excellence. Ask Delhi's Sikhs what happened in 1984.
It was Gandhi’s radical love that began the healing of my broken nation.
No. Getting rid of the Muslims and centralizing power in Nehru's Delhi started the healing process. Sadly, Nehru listened to the wrong economists and became reconciled to begging bowl diplomacy.
Radical love is love, such that I suffer your pain and injustice as though it is mine.
In other words, it is hypocrisy.
It is love so powerful and resolute that for your defence I am prepared to go to prison, and if necessary, even give up my life.
But doing so has no effect whatsoever. Sulking in a jail cell or getting shot doesn't help anybody.
It is this radical love that alone that can mend and heal our broken world.
No. Mending and healing requires resources. My radical love can't pay for the heart bypass surgery you desperately need. The job of an IAS officer is to increase resources by raising general purpose and total factor productivity. The job of a hysterical publicity-seeker is to pretend his campervan of radical lurve isn't a nuisance pure and simple.
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