It is a habit of mine to criticize the German media correspondents in the USA, namely those in Washington, for the deteriorated image of America in Germany. After all, Germans consider the biased and misleading reporting of German journalists as factual and trustworthy.
But it’s not the German correspondents alone who shape German’s perception of the U.S. – have a look at this interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about a special kind of German diplomat…
The German Chair
A tale of torture at the hands of an America-hating diplomat.BY BRET STEPHENS
(…) the (relatively senior German) diplomat (posted to the New York consulate) ushered me into his study. … I made the normal chitchat of first encounters: praise for the unobstructed (and million-dollar) views of the Hudson River; a query about what he did at the consulate. But the diplomat had no patience for my small talk. Apropos of nothing, he said he had recently made a study of U.S. tax laws and concluded that practices here were inferior to those in Germany. Given recent rates of German economic growth, I found this comment odd. But I offered no rejoinder. I was, after all, a guest in his home.
The diplomat, however, was just getting started. Bad as U.S. economic policy was, it was as nothing next to our human-rights record. Had I read the recent Amnesty International report on Guantanamo? “You mean the one that compared it to the Soviet gulag?” Yes, that one. My host disagreed with it: The gulag was better than Gitmo, since at least the Stalinist system offered its victims a trial of sorts.
Nor was that all. Civil rights in the U.S., he said, were on a par with those of North Korea and rather behind what they had been in
