- Moderator
- #6,976
You cited the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon cultures as leading lights for liberalism. Are these not Northern and Western Germanic cultures, respectively?
I'm pointing out the absurdity in lumping those cultures together as some kind of holistic grouping.
The Germans have been far from the leading light in liberalism (they remain the leading example of where it can all go wrong and descend into far right wing ultra-nationalist garbage, and a further example of where exactly far right wing ultra-nationalist garbage leads to). The British too have had their fair share of Imperialism and Colonialism (and all the crap that that entails).
Im happy to say the British and her colonies have possessed the most stable form of Liberalism over the centuries. But I'm not prepared (as you were) to hold 'Germanic peoples' (including Anglo-Saxons etc) as some kind of shining light for 'how people should treat other people'. Not only are European nations almost perpetually at war with each other (the past 65 or so years of peace in Europe has been one of the longest periods of peace on the European continent in all of recorded history), you can pluck out repeated examples of genocide, colonialism, imperialism, fascism, dictatorships, pogroms and worse on the European continent, and in most of those examples (World Wars, Nazis and the Holocaust, Colonialism etc) the Europeans are almost an outlier in just how bad they've been.