A Nationalist and a Globalist

A nationalist and a globalist walk into the Oval Office…

This is a fascinating dialogue. Your country was conquered, split in two, every woman aged two to eighty-two was raped, cities were razed, a million men were put in concentration camps. “Not a good day for you, eh?” says Trump who thinks in terms of countries.

Merz is clearly befuddled. Nazis were defeated. Nazis were bad. Defeating them is good. So it was a good day. A day of freedom. He’s not a German first. Or second. Or fifty-fifth. He’s part of humanity at large. His goal is to fight for things like freedom, no matter the costs to Germany. Those costs are not even on his horizon.

Two worldviews are colliding on front of us. This is truly remarkable.

11 thoughts on “A Nationalist and a Globalist

  1. Germany’s dictator had started a war of conquest so disastrous for his nation that it resulted in the consequences that you’ve described. The tragic date was not the day of Germany’s military defeat.

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      1. Given how pompous and self-righteous it was while sanewashing Trump, were you making fun of yourself?

        Trump used the word “pleasant”, not “good”. And Merz agreed! Did you not hear that? He added that “in the long run” they got rid of the Nazi dictatorship. What else could he possibly say??? He couldn’t agree with Trump without a qualifier.

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          1. What was the joke? That Trump thinks in terms of countries, not categories he can use to disparage people? That Merz was befuddled while he was anything but? That someone in the world stage, when referencing a war of conquest and other atrocities that ended in the aggressor’s, which happened to be his country, military defeat did not focus on the negatives for his country?

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  2. This is a really simplistic take on that exchange. Nazi rule was a complete and utter disaster for ordinary Germans. Yes, the end of the war was also extremely ugly, but even fairly conservative Germans consider it a good thing that Nazi rule ended.

    Also, Merz would have been commiting political suicide if he had agreed with Trump on that. The vote of no confidence would have sailed through the Bundestag before he got back to Berlin.

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    1. Indeed.

      Was there a better response to Trump’s trolling in this context? Should Mertz have gotten all defensive? Or start talking about how proud he is of the great achievements of German nationalists and add “heil Hitler”?

      By the way, Mertz trolled Trump too, by presenting him a copy of his grandfathers’s German birth certificate, not so subtly hinting to Trump that he is a descendant of the immigrants.

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