Starker on 10/12/2020 at 00:33

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Likewise, I'm grateful for the US recognising and opposing the occupation of my country, and I favour democracy in general, but that doesn't erase what the US has done in South America and many other places in the world. West Germany and Japan were beneficiaries of the Cold War. Many other countries were not.

Also, the initial plans for Germany were quite a bit different: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgenthau_Plan)

nemyax on 10/12/2020 at 09:12

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Dear citizens of France! Your country granted political asylum to some islamists living in Moscow. Moscow wasn't exactly a war-torn city, but who cares. These people moved to Conflans-Sainte-Honorine with their six-year old boy and got everything they ever could wish for. To express their thanks, they raised a head-chopping terrorist. Enjoy your multiculturalism, dear citizens of France.

demagogue on 10/12/2020 at 10:13

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One has to appreciate what it does to a country to have a decade period where rule of law just doesn't exist. You have to rebuild every single institution from the ground up, and almost none of the people that had any experience with how a functioning legal system actually works are around since they'd all been purged ages ago.

I'm learning this with Myanmar right now. Like it's 1952 when native German institutions can finally start up again, nobody would have gone to law school since 1934, many liberal lawyers and bureaucrats before then are probably outside the country with no desire to return, or they're in their 60s and haven't practiced in 15 years. And for most of the actual practicing lawyers, all they know is the judiciary and every agency is an extension of the executive, so they're not sure what independence of a court or agency even looks like, and are probably deeply suspicious if it can happen again.

I teach postwar reconstruction and transitional justice, and of course Postwar Germany is the first big case study... A lot of mistakes were made, but it also had some positive aspects, the constitution was one of them. (It's much better than the US's own constitution.) And the willingness of the population to take ownership of the constitution & rule of law under it was another. Considering how sensationally Weimar democracy collapsed--Hitler was democratically elected, remember--one could understand people worrying if democracy was really the way to go. But I suppose a lot has to be said for sheer exhaustion with extreme politics and of course the massive investment coming in to rebuild.

Well I could talk about it at length, but this is a Trump thread. The punchline in the present context is that people may be underestimating the harm Trump's stupid fantasy legal adventures will be doing to trust in democratic institutions. It just takes one generation to forget about rule of law, and suddenly it doesn't matter that the US had been a constitutional republic for 250 years, just like it didn't matter for Germany in that period, or other examples you could point out. Like the US South still hasn't recovered from the open lawlessness against its Black population, and the Civil War ended 150 years ago.

lowenz on 10/12/2020 at 12:21

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First (and second) soviet constitutions were great too.....one-party rule and dictatorship not so great :p

SubJeff on 10/12/2020 at 14:06

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Sounds like savagery to me.