Daily Mail and German Bashing

I know I have promised to stop reading the Daily Mail. I even considered installing the wonderful Kittenblock as recommended by @ivan_jelical  but this time it was my husband’s fault. To keep up with the gossip from his home country, he skims the Bild Zeitung daily. It is a populist tabloid belonging to the Axel Springer publishing house, read by almost 2.9million Germans and highly influential.

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Yesterday, he remarked that the Bild had an article about the Daily Mail and then he clicked on the DM website to read the article in the original English.

“Bloody hell, it is even worse than the Bild Zeitung”, was his first comment – and that is saying something as he always rants about how terrible the Bild is.

As he read the Daily Mail article Germany’s Economic Colonisation of Europe, he got steadily angrier.

Basically the article puts forward the theory that Germany is taking over Europe by stealth, with the help of the French. Now, I won’t go into the ins and outs of the economic situation as there are other more knowledgeable people out there talking about this. I do wish to have a good old rant about the rhetoric used in this article.

… Brussels-backed putsch…

Having mounted one coup, there is no reason why the EU shouldn’t mount another…

What we are witnessing is the economic colonisation of Europe by stealth by the Germans.

Once, it would have taken an invading military force to topple the leadership of a European nation. Today, it can be done through sheer economic pressure: it might be that within a few days the Germans along with their French allies will have secured regime change in the two most tiresome countries in the eurozone.

Whether the Greeks will swallow the austerity policy about to be imposed on them by the Fourth Reich’s new Gauleiter there remains to be seen. Given the expressions of anger already seen in response to previous milder measures, one must suspect not.

 

Excuse me? The FOURTH REICH?

Do you really know how insulting, and scandalous that is to the Germans? To Angela Merkel, who is doing what she can to prevent a Euro meltdown.

Bild Zeitung called this “FIESES NAZI-VOKABULAR!” – nasty nazi vocabulary and for once I am inclined to agree with them.

My husband remarked that it has been 66 years since the end of the war and still the Germans are being bashed over the head by the British tabloids.

I wrote about his before the election last year. The way in which the British tabloids shape opinion in UK and then express surprise when a asylum seekers’ hostel is bombed.

Please don’t misunderstand my point. The Germans are well aware of their history, are shamed by it. But even those now  in power in Germany were not born at the end of the war. And the Germans are becoming frustrated and angry at comments like this. Not only in the British tabloids but from British people who they meet on holiday.

Friends in Germany have told me about being taunted by British children when they were on school trips to London. They were called nazis and krauts by goose-stepping youths. This is not a one off happening, it has been widely reported in the press over the past 19 years since I moved abroad.

Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, is more acerbic about the problem. “If you want to learn how to goosestep, go to Britain,” he once complained.

And no wonder, when the British press is showing the youngsters how to do it, from the boardroom down.

Express owner Richard Desmond today launched an extraordinary tirade against Telegraph bosses at a meeting of their joint venture print works, hurling a string of abuse and goosestepping around a boardroom in mockery of a German newspaper group’s bid for the paper.

This must change. Enough of this.

We must teach our children about the past 66 years of German history, and the thousands of years before 1939. We cannot base our entire opinion on one shameful period of German history, but should acknowledge all that the Germans have done since then to make amends.

What are we teaching our children, if all they know about Germany is the Third Reich, and Nazis? And bier. There is always bier.