The famed German writer, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, points out the hypocrisy of Germany's anti-Bush attitudes in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung this week scolding his countrymen for appeasing the fascists in Baghdad and acting with moral amnesia "as if they would never have lived under a totalitarian regime".
He says the same people who marched through the streets passionately chanting "No Blood for Oil!" are the same ones who would be most outraged if they had to pay more to fill up their Audis, heat their homes, or take their sacred summer vacations.
He also says that while accusing the United States of materialistic motives they conveniently overlook that that Russia and France have the largest economic interests in Iraq and Germany was, for years, it's biggest arms supplier.
Eamonn Fitzgerald in Munich has more on the story including this juicy quote:
"It is not the first disgrace of those who warn and remind; not for the first time have the worry lines, which furrow the German brow, proven to be precipitous. It is not so long ago that East Germany was regarded here as unshakeable; it was seen as one of the most successful industrial nations of the world; the social democracy did everything to co-operate with the SED [the East German communist regime]; Poland's Solidarity movement was, as a result, treated as a dangerous troublemaker. Stability was everything; the Soviet Union was an invincible colossus, which only the Americans and other cold warriors provoked, while the heroic besiegers of Mutlangen [an American military depot] dared challenge the provocative rearmament of the United States.
It sort of makes you wonder, how wrong do you have to be before people stop believing you?
Well, things always see to take a little longer in Europe.
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