German Pacifistic Nature

This is one of my essays when I drill down into a topic that Americans tend to notice and can't really grasp or understand.  To be honest, there's around five ingredients to the German tradition that exists now....over being pacifists.

First, once you got into the 1960s....between birth-control, women appreciating careers, and the taxation upon the general public....the birth-rate is pretty well set to 1.5 kids per family.  So parents over the past couple of decades in Germany have grown this attitude that standing up for something that might involve a war, and the loss of their one and only child....well, it's not acceptable.

You have to put yourself into this situation.  It's hard to find families that go beyond two kids.  If faced with some stupid conflict in a faraway land....you'd rather not go off and volunteer to solve this conflict or get involved in a messy situation.  Avoidance then makes sense.

Second, intellectual growth and control of the news media means that you get generally one formatted message and if the intellectual crowd wants to go pacifist in nature....well...it's a pretty easy sales-job.   

Lets face facts, it's hard to find any intellectual who wants to take an aggressive walk-into-a-conflict type scenario.

Third, WW I and WW II have some lasting impact upon society's motivations.  If you go and look at the top twenty urban areas of Germany in 1940....each had to go through a major rebuild in the era of 1945 to 1965.  People have memories of the destruction and the suffering of Germans.

Fourth, a great deal of the public tone since 1945 has come from the two major church units of Germany (the Catholics and Protestants). Both have sought pacifist path's ahead. You can go and review the Christmas message and New Year's message for each year...the theme is to avoid confrontation as much as possible.

Fifth, global views accelerated over the past two decades in Germany.   You can ask a group of a hundred Germans in the age group of twenty-five, and most will now identify themselves as European as much as they are German.  This is a group that widely travels....thinks of multiculturalism as a positive trend....and talks of a big world which they are part of.

Trying to get this youth group entangled into any circumstance where chaos might be involved....simply violates their trust of a mutual world. 

So this pacifistic nature has anchored itself down into German culture.  Why rock the boat?  Why challenge things?  Surely talking will reach some conclusion, which leads onto another chaotic moment and more talking, with more chaos, and more talking.  All of this seems better than some physical action that would mess up their pacifistic nature.

Challenging any of this?  Why?  In some dramatic way....years out into the future....some event will occur and force some type of rethinking upon this logical sense of the world.  Let them follow that path and rediscover the real world.