Eh, I think that's a bit overblown. In theory, Germans are famously methodical and precise, in practice the rail network is falling apart, a major bridge in my city recently collapsed due to lack of proper maintenance, and "made in Germany" is mainly an encouragement to buy local, rather than buying for quality.

My experience of Germans, having lived among them for almost a decade, and having married one of them, is that you can usually find a counterexample to any supposed German characteristic just by looking around the room. If there is any overarching theme to the German psyche, it might be a tendency to conservatism (in the sense of preferring to do things as they've always been done), but at the same time you've also got radical groups on the left and the right that are a fundamental part of the democratic fabric of Germany.

I think there are some cultural touchstones that are very German, and those have an influence on how Germans think and act, but I think this can be very contradictory and it's difficult to draw a single picture here. For example, people are very conscious of antisemitism here because of how much it's talked about in schools and the media, and that informs national foreign policy. But at the same time, Germans, like most Western Europeans, have grown up in a time of peace and see war and aggression as a cardinal sin. Both of these inform the German response to something like the situation in Gaza, but the result averages out to a policy that's broadly in line with many other liberal European states.

All in all, I think you'll get more insight from phrenology than from trying to figure out the German character in too much depth.

Who or what should we be discussing or consulting ethics with? Is the line drawn at the written word?

It’s easy to read your comment as meaning ‘never let others influence your opinions on right or wrong’ which is (I hope!) obviously ludicrous.

Yes, I do read books to give me different perspectives on life that help me form my beliefs about what is right, wrong and ethical. The suggestion that’s a bad idea is pretty incredible to me. Where do you think I should go for such things?

  >I sure hope you aren't looking to a book to inform you on what is right or wrong

The entire purpose / point of this book is that the overly-oppressed majority is easily susceptible to becoming "NAZIS," and why National Socialist mentality ought to be actively DISCOURAGED.

But you're just going to see the swastika on the cover (which is used appropriately as the symbol of hate it represents) and you'll not even attempt discussions at preventing future Nazi-creating societies.

Good work /s

If you search my username, I have provided the couple-dozen quotes from this book that alarmed me most, in regards to society in 2020 (when I first read the book). I am not a supremicist in any capacity — I am a blue collar union electrician (so: I hate everybody equally smile_face.GIF). But I've heard it all on jobsites, and not all hate is "misdirected"...

So... Culture? Are we doubting the existence of culture now?

so what are you suggesting causes, for example, the French to strike more often than other Western countries? or Japan to typically have particularly low inflation? or Argentina to typically have particularly high inflation?

The most obvious place would be the ideology of the Nazis. We're told they were in some sense right wing or "far right" and thus must be more extreme versions of the Republicans. The primary historical sources don't show that. They show the National Socialists running on an ultra-left wing platform as you'd expect, they called each other comrade, and the Nazis grew by converting communists and other far leftists. There is even a speech where Hitler says he welcomed the Bolsheviks into the party and that the Nazis were almost all left wing people in the early years, because he needed people who would beat up their enemies. It's in one of the table talks I think.