>Accountability and culture

The culture that brought us the SS and the Stasi.

This may be the most ignorant comment I've ever -- and I mean ever -- read on a web discussion board. And I frequent many discussion boards.

Current German culture is equivalent to German culture under the Third Reich? Really?

Is current American culture equivalent to early-through-mid 19th century American culture? Should we discount everything the USA does because you once kept/traded/abused black people as property? Then continued to legislate such thinking via Jim Crow well into the 20th century?

Now that I look, I notice your post history is littered with anti-German racism rooted in complete historical ignorance. I'm wondering what your angle is.

No, it's the reverse. The nazi era and the Stasi have resulted in a modern Germany that is fiercely oppositional to anything that leads in this direction.

There are very strong open source, transparency and anti surveillance movements in Germany. Stasi is the entire reason WHY we have strong privacy laws here.

As Goebbels pointed out, all it takes is the right kind of threat, either real or manufactured ("Think of the children!"), and those "transparency movements" you speak of will fade out more rapidly than the grandparent post.

That doesn't work as well if the culture has been inocculated.

How does one do that?

Well, I don't know if this is still done today, but when I was in 7th or 8th grade, they (school) drove us, by the busload, to visit a concentration camp.

We were shown the lampshades and wallets made of human skin. The place to stand where inmates would be executed during what they thought were medical examinations. And so on and so on.

It is quite possible that the next "Western" genocide will happen somewhere in Europe. But as somebody who has grown up here, I can assure you it won't be in Germany.

I just wish that history was thaught like this everywhere.

I have to agree. I spent two days in Berlin this week and went to the Holocaust memorial, etc. I was impressed with the way these things are talked about with such openness - to make sure that this stuff never happens again. Also, I've traveled to several european countries and found Germans to be quite open minded regarding race, religion, etc. since I think the past has a lot to do with that. Happy that the german education system and culture appears to have a strong culture of 'learning from mistakes'. Clearly that isn't the case for the US with Vietnam, Afghanistan and now Iraq.

To be fair there are still lots of racist and intolerant people here. And nazis, though the antifa usually kick their asses.

But the tolerant and open minded strain is pretty dominant. Germany is 9% foreigners. Frankfurt is like 30%

  The culture that brought us the SS and the Stasi.

Really? Really? With an account that is as old as yours you cannot avoid posting a comment like this? Do you consider that mature? Useful? Reasonable?

I don't. You just disqualified yourself from any meaningful discussion, ever.

My wife treated people with mental issues for some time and I have the utmost respect for people that can handle this stuff.

You, instead, are without protection. You post stuff like this and shout out to the world that you have no clue, that you have no idea what your are talking about, what the topic of this thread is and .. just show that HN really should provide a feature to ignore other people.

Please - go away. You didn't contribute and you're a sad, sad idiot.

Bad memories of those periods are a non-trivial part of why they are surveillance adverse today.