Hacker News Reader

Comment by yosamino | Hacker News Reader

Germany is a really bad example though. The German way is to pretend racism just doesn't exist - today is the aniversary of a racist, arson attack that happened in 1994 killing 7 people (one of them pregnant) where the official line is still "the guy was just crazy what can you do ?!".

If you want to transplant the "master"-example, look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts as well as a weird insistance that offensively named streets, underground-stations and (for some reason) pharmacies "must not need to be renamed, why would you even be offended".

Germany is not the example to go with concerning offensive language.

View on HN

You just showed the problem: Mixing completely different things and pretending it's the same. The parent comment and the parent-parent and the submitted text all talked about something, you come up with something else.

> look at all the discussions of how they name certain sauces,schnitzels and deserts

Okay I do - and that is exactly the useless actions that the submitted text and this discussion is about. For some reason you just ignore all that was said and just repeat those exact criticized points as if nothing happened.

Well, they parent tried to transplant the word "master" into a german context and noted it doesn't translate. I then gave examples of words that work analogous to the word "master" in English. These things are connected by the concept that "I'm not offended by them, why should anyone else?"

Where these discussions about how Germans call their pharmacies connect to the article is that in both cases the arbiters who decide how things are called are the white - once you start to involve the people that these offensive words are about, you suddenly get a different sense of how important or offensive these words are. There's a recent example of a talkshow where a couple of white more-or-less-celebrities decided that these words are just german heritage, and really what is all the fuzz about ? To appease the ensuing mini-scandal the station organized a roundpanel of people who might be affected by these slurs - and surprise, they really weren't so fond of them.

Or see this article about a campaign to rename a trainstation: https://isdonline.de/umbenennung-der-mohrenstrasse-mehr-resp...

You are obviously right, changing words by itself doesn't change a thing - but if I can't even count on someone not using slurs about me, I can't expect to respected at all.

I don't buy the assertion that the German way is to pretend racism just doesn't exist.

There are racists, and fascists, neo-nazis and old-nazis. They do exist, it's just that they don't pose that widespread of a problem in every day life, like it does in other western countries.

I'd say gender (in)equality is something you will encounter much more often in every day life over there.

We've got a far right party that gets around 13% in national elections, in some states around 25%.

We've got a minister of interior that does not want to start a study on racism in the police forces.

That's two of the big issues, that's not even every-day racism where it's hard to get an apartment or a job with a "foreign name", underrepresentation in leading positions or that in some parts you'll get at least hassled for walking with brown skin.

Germany is and always has been extremely conservative and integration/racism is an issue precisely because the largest party always saw imported skilled labor as people that should be forced back "home" again, even with a second and third generation growing up in Germany.

Something about gender equality to keep in mind:

It's about choice ... there are women (also in Germany) that gladly _chose_ to stay at home, _chose_ to prepare meals for their husband and _chose_ to care for the kids.

On the other hand there are women that _chose_ to give their children into daycare weeks after birth to go back to work.

It's not about condemning any lifestyle as wrong, it's about given everybody (males included) the ability to life their live as they want.

Sadly this is far from the reality with median wages being barely high enough to sustain one person, forcing women (and men) to work and robbing them of their agency.

> The German way is

What exactly do you know about "the" German way?

> The German way is to pretend racism just doesn't exist

I don't know if and where you've been to Germany, but having went to school there entire years of our history class were dedicated to the Nazis.

> but having went to school there entire years of our history class were dedicated to the Nazis.

To be precise it is about the atrocities committed by the Nazis and how they managed to subvert the society to be able do their crimes. By the way they started early on to change the everyday language.

"Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment" - it was candidly named, if nothing else.

> Indeed, Goebbels initially opposed the term propaganda, recognizing that in popular usage, both in Germany and abroad, it was associated with lies. Even after the ministry had been in existence for a year, he proposed changing its name to Ministry of Culture and Public Enlightenment, but Hitler vetoed this proposal.

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ministry-o...

See the thing about that is, that it let's you neatly compartmentalize racism to the nazis, and since the nazis don't exist anymore (well, the ones being talked about in history class) there is not racism or antisemitism anymore.

That is of course simplifying it a lot, but Germany as a whole has a problem with right-wing extremism who almost regularely murder people, and a police force who regularly have scandals involving members being present day Nazis, and these Problems not being adressed properly.

So I am not sure learning about The Nazis of the olden days is very helpful withouth showing the reach that these ideologies have into present day Germany.

And I say that as someone who has gone through these years that you reference as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com