Re: By your reasoning, this should not have happened.
-John
And by your reasoning, the US shouldn't be today the world's leader economically, culturally, and geopolitically.... According to your obsolete equation--the highest your ethnic purity = the highest your overall performance-- today, the US should be merely a crumbling banana republic lagging Russia in technology, lagging Japan in financial clout, and lagging Europe in cultural influence.... Remember my answer to French Statesman Georges Clemenceau who quipped: "The U.S. is the only country that went from barbarity to decadence, without the detour through culture!"
Well, since Clemenceau died before the outbreak of WWII and even before Nazism could display its full-fledged toxicity, I can all the more easily retort that Europe was the only region that went from decadence (the Roaring 1920s) to barbarity (WWII) with the detour through culture (Einstein, Freud, Picasso, Heidegger, Maurice Ravel,...)
As regards Germany's ethnic purity in the post-WWII years, suffice it to say that over two millions Gastarbeiters were called in from Turkey... As to the allegedly "miraculous" recovery of both Germany and Japan, it was not as much related to their ethnic stock as it was to the self-serving US strategy. Putting the two losers of WWII back on track was a prerequisite to a viable American hegemony vis-a-vis the USSR and the PRC. Besides, Western Europe was the largest outlet for the US's Fordist mass-produced outputs. This last condition, BTW, is no longer true: today, Asia represents the biggest potential for the US. Just look at what happened with Coca-Cola: over 6,000 jobs are scheduled to be trimmed over the next year. Half of them concern the Atlanta HQ and half of them concern Europe --and no restructuring is planned for the Asian market. As we put it in French: C'est un signe qui ne trompe pas.
Gus. |
