Peter Dorman — The Greek Transportation Giveaway “Scandal”, or Why Germans Are Furious at Greeks

Making sense of Germany.

Most Germans are reasonable and are motivated by goodwill toward others, at least in the way that most people everywhere are. But they live in an information bubble which spawns a further echo chamber of public commentary, so the mental world they live in is simply different from the one outside their borders. (I don’t know first-hand, but there may be a similar bubble enveloping the Netherlands, Finland and a few other countries.) Inside this bubble there is a steady stream of “news” whose common denominator is that slippery, corrupt Greeks are scheming to take advantage of Germans’ hard-earned wealth. This is something that every German now “knows”, part of the conventional wisdom that forms the bedrock for political analysis.

To really understand how this works you would have to be there. It’s not a matter of one or two biased news reports, but a steady stream of news, every day, in little snippets and major headlines, that reinforce the underlying message. Here I’ll present a small example that, multiplied by a hundred, gives a sense of what’s going on.

Regardless, Germans got the blame for Hitler even though most Germans had no idea of what was happening at the extermination camps (where did they think those Jews were going?).  Americans got the blame for Iraq even through the government knowingly lied to them about it (to question it was unpatriotic). Now Germans are being sold a narrative about Greeks that is resurrecting memories of Nazism.

But as they say, "ignorance is no excuse." Both America and Germany have tarnished themselves. Democracies especially are held to a higher standard.

Econospeak
The Greek Transportation Giveaway “Scandal”, or Why Germans Are Furious at Greeks
Peter Dorman | Professor of Political Economy, The Evergreen State College