COMMENT: The fallout from the eurozone crisis is producing some interesting phenomena, not the least of which is the open expression of German chauvinism [1]. In a recent story, the normally respectable Der Spiegel unleashed a remarkable comment about Italians.
Can you imagine an American editor, even an editor of one of Ruppert’s Rags [Murdoch], letting a comment such as Herr Fleischauer penned make it to press?
Even the flatulent ESPN was obliged to fire a headline writer for his comment about Jeremy Lin (the Chinese-American point guard of the New York Knicks basketball team.)
“Germany vs. the Rest of Europe” by Floyd Norris; New York Times; 2/17/2012. [2]
. . . . Within each class, attitudes are hardening against the other. “The birth defect of the euro was to put very different cultures of economic activity in the straitjacket of a single currency,” a commentator, Jan Fleischhauer, wrote in the German weekly Der Spiegel after an Italian cruise ship ran aground last month.
“Be honest,” he added. “Did it surprise anyone that the unlucky captain of the Costa Concordia is Italian?” He asked whether anyone could imagine that a German, or even British, captain would have behaved as the Italian did.
An Italian newspaper, Il Giornale, fired back with a front-page article denouncing the Der Spiegel commentary. “We are persons to avoid, a burden for Europe,” the author, Alessandro Sallusti, wrote. “The Germans are a superior race. We have already read that in the speeches of Hitler.”
Germans are increasingly angry about having to bail out Greece and other countries, while those countries react bitterly to being forced to take orders from Berlin. The Financial Times reports that “a right-wing Greek newspaper depicts Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, in a Nazi uniform above the headline ‘Memorandum macht frei’ — an allusion to the memorandum in which Greece’s foreign creditors demand more austerity measures and to the Auschwitz slogan.”. . . .