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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   582 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 17, 2026

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Being opposed to libertarianism doesn't make the CDU left-wing.

That is true, but it certainly makes it mis-aligned with American values. In the US, at least, freedom of expression, freedom of political participation and robust societal discussion of current political issues has been a nationwide shared value. It is not the value of the Left anymore - which is why one is tempted to associate the similar positions of CDU with the left wing - but going back to the original topic, if even the supposed "right" in Germany is hostile to the values that many in the US hold sacred - one is tempted to ask, what kind of alliance do we have? What do we have in common? Of course, US history knows many cases where we temporarily allied with countries much worse than todays Germany - such as Stalin's USSR, for example - but that was the alliance of necessity, and it was dissolved once the need passed. Is this the kind of alliance we have between US and Europe, which was necessary when USSR was alive? Is it still necessary today? In which form? To what purpose? I think these are the questions that need to be asked.

It does seem fair to point out that America created modern Germany, in pretty much its current form. If I remember rightly, a lot of the German opposition to free speech, the censorship apparatus and one-party media was put in place by America for obvious reasons, and the CIA maintained a very strong grip over German media for decades.

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