During the last few days I noticed a few people demanding that every Ukrainian refugee in Germany who is of able bodied age should be forced back to Ukraine to either fight on the front or work in ammunition factories or hospitals. As far as I can tell no major publication or politician has echoed this sentiment yet. I hope that will stay this way. But the sheer audacity with which these people demanded strangers to be sent to their death is astounding. “Fighting to the last Ukrainian” really is something they want and it sickens me.
Interesting. Here in Germany we can also feel the sanctions quite a lot. Electrical bills also went up and big concerns announced that they would leave Germany and outsource their production to somewhere else. So a lot of people are afraid they could end up jobless in a while. And yet support for Ukraine is not going down. I think it just makes people more bloodthirsty.
We have had our arguments over territory, but by and large the average person here have never had a very anti-Russian point of view to begin with. It was a pretty popular language to study for business reasons, because we do so much trade with them. We also don’t have much of a connection to Ukraine.
I think a lot of the Japanese opposition was more a “war is bad” point of view, as opposed to “russia is evil”. Which results in people just wanting a resolution as soon as possible. On the other hand there’s not a good understanding of the circumstances that caused the war, and the news doesn’t really report on it. So there are still plenty of people who think Putin woke up one one day and decided to invade for no real reason. They just would still prefer the killing stops now.
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Maybe but then again Annalena Baerbock herself said that things won’t go back to being normal “even after Ukraine has won”.
So it might be self delusion at this point.
Things won’t go back to normal because Baerbock’s mission to further subjugate Germany under the boot of the US will have been a roaring success.
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I think the answer is multy tiered. A big reason for the mentality of many Germans is Germanies recent history.
A lot of Germans still feel somewhat guilty about WW II and believe it’s their duty to prevent another Hitler. But since analysing the reasons for Hitler’s rise to power would require a critique of capitalism and it’s inherent relation to fascism it’s not taught that way in school (or anywhere). Instead it’s the usual “great man theory” nonsense.
Combine that with the systematic smear campaign that is going on since the dissolution of the GDR and you end with the current situation. Tons and tons of Germans believe that the GDR was a horrible rouge state where the Stasi disappeared you for thinking a single subversive thought, the UdSSR was worse than Nazi Germany and Stalin was best buds with Hitler.
Now we are in a situation were Germans believe that Putin is trying to rebuild the UdSSR and since communism is worse than fascism, it’s totally justifiable to arm Nazi’s to fight Russia. But Putin is also totally just like Hitler. This has gotten so ridiculous that a common name for Putin is Putler now (Liberals and contradicting themselves, name a more iconic duo).
Supporting the fight against Russia is seen as a way to show that we are good boys now and have learned from the horrors of fascism and supposed horrors of communism. At least that’s what somewhat well off liberals believe.
Those who actually feel the consequences of the war flock to the far right AFD party. Mainly because there is no good left wing alternative. The Linke is busy with infighting and the DKP is way too small and the average member is older than 50.
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I mean, it is going down. You can see it by the rising numbers for the AfD. While people will likely never outright go “this is a waste of time, let’s ditch Ukraine to save ourselves” there’s a lot of people going for the party they think will give them just that - and it happens to be the far-right - who have no qualms about supporting Russia over questions of morality and aren’t constantly infighting.
The whole War in Ukraine really was the nightmare scenario for the left.