I've mentioned this before -but it is so striking and it hits you so hard, it's worth mentioning again. In Britain, everybody hates everybody else. Board a bus (maybe not in London, as there they're permanently overcrowded and you can't even make out people, just smelly armpits and mouldy rucksacks) and you will feel the antagonism in the air. The obese woman will glower at somebody of normal size, the pensioner will glare at the woman with a pram (oh not for long, they're all to cowardly to make a fuss), the whole charabanc will collectively hate the one non-white person daring to sit down. The bus driver could murder every single one of them, you can see the hatred in his eyes when you get on.
It is the only country where car drivers actively try to run over pedestrians crossing the road. They speed up, instead of slowing down, it's a collective sport there (I am not making this up, I experienced it many many times in Edinburgh and elsewhere.) Road rage is a daily occurrence (only recently one woman died because she asked another one to move her car out of the way.) There are millions of other permutations in that country where one group of society actively, aggressively and openly hates another one.
Why is this, you might ask? Not being a sociologist, or prison psychologist - just somebody who's lived there far too long, my take is that the country is so run-down, so impoverished, crumbling and decaying that a great big greed/envy bubble has built up. Everybody feels entitled to something that either has been taken away or is under threat of being cut. So they figure, (rather primitively it might be said but hey ho) if it weren't for the immigrants, the white-trash English family could carry on enjoying their benefits. If it wasn't for all those pensioners, the NHS benefits would be just like they used to be in 1962. If it weren't for the attractive size 10 women, all the ugly obese ones wouldn't be reminded that they might have to give up eating five mega-buckets of chips per day. If it weren't for them toffs, we could share the spoils of their fortune. It's a sort of low-intellect socialism mixed with an animal instinct of "I want that".
So you can imagine, how powerful and apoplecticly incandescent their collective hatred of Germany is. The country that they (because they live in a rference system which is forever 1945) conquered. The country which unfortunately then didn't squander its Marshall Aid money (for the record: Britain got even more money than Germany from the US) on overseas colonialism, an insane idea of world power via the 'Commonwealth', and a socialist wet dream of spectacles and dentures for all. But instead got on with it, rebuilt its manufacturing base, rebuilt the towns that had been lain to ashes in the process of sulphur-bombing civilians.
A country which is now prosperous, affluent, happy, generous, benign, and can afford to overlook the nasty, dirty griping, the slanderous accusations of Nazism - and of course the resentful foaming at the mouth that "oneself" lives in a derelict hovel of a country where high streets are decaying and empty premises are filled with charity shops, gambling dens and tabel-top bars, where the infrastructure has completely and utterly broken down, where families with a startling number of kids live in tiny, shabby 1940s houses, a population that is the most morbidly obese in Europe, women who dress like Bulgarian prostitutes on a flat-rate contract, and an alcoholism rate which is all the more understandable as living in that run-down hate-filled environment really is a punishment which ought only to be metered out to people who are happy to live in it.
Marie-Paule Graham (@mpg4 on twitter) wrote this comment and asked me to post it on her behalf:
ReplyDeleteAs a Brit living in Germany, I have to say I'm horrified at the anti-German headlines and tweets. If Britain doesn't want to participate in the EU, it should simply leave and if that's what the people really want, they ought to organise some kind of peaceful movement to achieve that end. It is supposed to be the world's greatest Democracy, after all, is it not? We're certainly reminded of that often enough.
The sad thing is they don't. They complain and spout bile and vitriol against the people who were in the same position as their own parents, or the parents of their friends, a couple of generations ago. It's sad and pathetic.
In the last few days I've come to the conclusion that the greatest disease plaguing Britain today isn't the latest antibiotic-resistent superbug, but the inability to think for ones self. The vast majority have no idea what Europe is all about because they never exercise their right to Freedom of Movement - which, by-the-way, doesn't mean a couple of weeks in Spain.
Come a live in another European country for a few years and then tell us about how fucking awful it all is.