Earlier quoted context omitted.
That, my friend, is very close to a Godwin point. Let's be careful here.
The original comment is about German attitudes towards the accumulation of power, which are a direct product of their experiences with Nazism. Germans don't want uncontrolled groups accumulating power precisely because it could lead to a situation like Nazi Germany. Once Godwin's law became a meme it outlived its usefulness. Yes, people tend to hyperbolically compare things to the Nazis. But the Nazis were a real thi…
Germans don't want uncontrolled groups accumulating power precisely because it could lead to a situation like Nazi Germany
Uh huh. Really. Germans totally hate uncontrollable groups trying to take over Europe?
Please spare me sanctimonious Germans claiming some sort of moral high ground they don't have. In fact from a British perspective it appears Germany has learned nothing from its experiences at all. It's actually quite amazing how desperate they seem to repeat history over and over.
Germany is by far the biggest and staunchest supporter of the EU, which is literally an uncontrollable group accumulating power as fast as possible. It is partly because of hardline EU supporters like Merkel and Macron that both Switzerland and the UK are hurtling towards all out trade war with the rest of Europe, and why UK/EU talks have gone nowhere. The EU is building its own army, its democracy is a sham and it treats its own citizens with contempt, as can be seen in this remarkable blog post by the Commission (it has to be quoted now because the backlash was so huge it got taken down)
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190215/18005841607/eu-co...
The reason the French and German governments hate Libra is threefold:
1. They are very easily manipulated by their local press barons who perceive Facebook and Google as business threats. See the old link taxes that became Article 13 at the EU level.
2. They are institutionally cynical about their own citizens, who they see deep down as basically being stupid sheep. This shines through in their writings (see the link above) but has the more insidious effect that nobody in EU power structures really believes their own country could ever create a Google or a Facebook. So from their perspective, constantly attacking these firms is pure win: it creates an external enemy in a world without many, and these firms are usable as cash machines to keep the EU budget afloat.
3. One way the EU controls its southern member states is by letting pro-EU governments effectively buy votes by running huge deficits, financed by money printing by the ECB. If a country elects an anti-EU government, the ECB threatens to turn off the money supply until they do (this is very visible in Italy).
In other words the EU's power comes at least partly from manipulating the currency supply. This is bad for the typical German citizen who tries to save money, but good for the project of uniting Europe under a dictatorship:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/sep/08/europe-cent...
Germany has recent experience with governments that try to take over Europe and governments that manipulate the money supply for political purposes. Indeed ECB policy is very unpopular with the Bundesbank and German government. But they can't do anything about it because their ideological commitment to EU domination overrules everything else, and the head of the EU Commission controls the ECB.
Ultimately, Germany's experience with hyperinflation, Naziism and the DDR has apparently left it convinced the moral thing to do is support a power structure that's taking over Europe as fast as possible, printing huge sums of money to do so, which is engaged in a power struggle with Britain, and which is run entirely by people who aren't elected.