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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (107800)	7/24/2003 4:29:48 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I am just not seeing how alarming that is- any more alarming than, for example- rampant American odd perceptions about the French. In a context of very odd world opinions, held by large percentages of people here and elsewhere (although of course the odd opinions vary country to country) I'm just not able to get very "alarmed" about the Germans. I would give my qualifications for my opinion in terms of what I read and what movies I see and who I know, but it would make this paragraph much too long, and I'm not really sure I should make an appeal to my own authority, especially when subjectivity is the issue.

To: Neocon who wrote (107800)	7/24/2003 7:26:59 PM
From: ThirdEye	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

It would be a serious error to view the results of a German poll in isolation from all other events post 9/11. Indeed, it is a testimony to how extremely shocking and upsetting 9/11 truly was to the psyche of the masses. People will dream up wild implausible and bizarre explanations for powerful events that are fundamentally unexplainable, such as the depth of evil displayed by this event. But, why, except in the context of how WE have handled it here in terms of policy response, would there be such unexpectedly widespread belief that we had something to do with it ourselves? What are the circumstances that permit people to casually attribute such nefarious acts to our own government. It's because they feel powerless in their own lives, in their own culture. And, for whatever reason-and some of them are probably pretty good ones-they feel they are already in the far-reaching grip of some kind of unseen political and economic forces that sap their power from them. Alienation produces skewed thought. This poll says that 20% of German society is already so alienated from the American ethos, for acts they know we have committed, that they are ready to believe almost anything about us, including the worst, even if they don't know for sure. This is not good news and cannot be written off as the rantings of kooks.