http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-33538098/

BBC Trending
Who's calling on people to 'Boycott Germany'?

BBC Trending
What's popular and why
15 July 2015

German brands and products are the latest target of political activists upset about the Greece bailout.
#BoycottGermany was first mentioned on Twitter in connection with the Greek crisis over the weekend, but started picking up on Monday. The hashtag has since been used more than 30,000 times, driven up the trending charts across Europe by left-leaning and anarchist voices.
Some are urging people to avoid products with barcodes starting with a sequence of numbers which indicates German origin:

However, the codes refer only to the location of the parent company, not the place of manufacture. An item with a barcode beginning 401 could well have been made in France, Britain - or even Greece.
One of the most retweeted messages comes from David Graeber, an American anarchist activist and anthropology professor at the London School of Economics. He references the post-World War II cancellation of debts accrued by the Nazi regime:

Others are calling for specific targeting of German luxury goods. "Don't buy that Volkswagen or Miele," one user says. Anti-Nazi propaganda posters are also being widely circulated:

But the hashtag is also being widely used in Germany, and many were answering back to the calls for a boycott.

German journalist Thomas Walde sarcastically tweets: "Does the Greek demand for #BoycottGermany include German aid money? No? Well that's alright then."
Although Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called the bailout agreement "irrational", he's pushing for the country's parliament to ratify the agreement by the end of Wednesday. Among the conditions for the bailout are higher taxes and an increase in the retirement age. The BBC is running a live page containing all the latest developments, which you can find here.

Media caption
#ThisIsACoup trended worldwide - it started with a movement of left-wing activists in Spain
Earlier in the week the hashtag #ThisIsACoup trended across Europe as a reaction against the bailout agreement, and one of the Spanish activists behind that hashtag - it was being widely used by the Spanish left - was also one of the first to tweet in support of a boycott.

For their part, German businesses do not seem to be too worried about the call for a boycott. "We're taking this seriously, but there's no reason to panic," Volker Treier, head of the German Foreign Trade Chamber of Commerce, told Reuters on Tuesday. "There have been such calls, time and again since the beginning of the Greek crisis. They largely fizzle out without any effect."
And some are reacting to the hashtag with humour, and jibes about Greece:

According to Greece, from what I read.. Yea, Germany screwed them over for profit & wanted to again.
So I boycotted immediately.

* But,I don't like the Nazi analogy .. that is not appropriate & doesn't apply *

Why boycott Germany for Greece's proliferate spending. They have social programs like money grows on trees and debt does not need to be repaid. The US has gone in the same direction.

Greece and all the whiny people of Greece on the government dole can riot all they want but actions have consequences.

pftttt

Well.. that's your opinion.


* Was everyone waiting for me to post ? *

Can we wait until after Oktoberfest?

Well d'oh. Of course it's my opinion.

I'm going to buy some German beer right now.

So they want to bite the hand that is feeding them? Not a smart move.

I have no issue with Germany. I am part German

hi

I would have to say if Greece wants to boycott a country for screwing them economically, they need to boycott themselves.

I am more politically motivated by how a country treats it workers when I choose who to buy from and Germany is on my approved vendor list.

I guess this is why it was trending.
I have no idea how it started....
I even read, that a militant group must be behind it, because of some symbol (I never seen before) on social media.... Though I did NOT see ANYONE use it... it was just REPORTED to have been used. * suspicious *



tta1128 quote
The US has gone in the same direction.

I definitely agree with that ^^^^^ , we have our debt of 2 Trillion to China plus our debts to other countries , etc..

The Euro is our creation, it is NOT our mother in law. ~Renzi(Italy)



The way I see the latest bailout is the Greeks have a 3 year heads start to re-invent itself now, the other German "colonies" haven't quite figured it out yet, it is not sustainable.... Over the thousands of years, for the Greeks, this is just a mild breeze in the grand scheme of things.

Who made the Germans paymasters? Well the Germans of course

Niet!!!

I read all the the " cheese & olive " quotes. I agree .

Giving money to the poor or a relative or our children & then saying " But you can't do this or that with it", is a control & manipulation tactic.
Takes brass b@lls or ovaries to say, NO.
* Look what was going on in New York... soda, sugar, breastfeeding... . Now, what people can & can't buy with food stamps *

This is why we don't want the Euro in Britain. It's a poisoned chalice and you can't really blame the Germans for putting conditions on it when they're bailing out Greece. They're basically the major shareholders in the thing.

Yes, when you're paying the bills you call the shots. It's common sense but then when does that make any difference today?

-----------------------------------------------------
With this rationale... break out the rice steamer & chopsticks. Not the disposal ones we can't afford it.
We have landlords then.
* Approximately how much we owe China, 1.7+ TRILLION *

http://useconomy.about.com/od/worldeconomy/p/What-Is-the-US-Debt-to-China.htm/

Landlords may have a debt bug up the a@@, & want back rent or have property rights. Who knows?

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/17/asia/china-south-china-sea-land-reclamation/

http://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-europe-divided-by-a-sense-of-crisis-and-a-sea-of-amnesia-1.2291224



There is no euro zone crisis. It'��s impossible to understand what'��s going on now if you start out with the assumption that there is a single community of nations experiencing the same historic moment. There isn'��t. If, for example, Germany seems detached from the sufferings of the more peripheral euro-zone countries, it'��s not because Germans are hard-hearted. It'��s because their own current experience is not of crisis but of bonanza. The euro may look like a disastrous project for Ireland or Greece but in Germany it'��s an enormous success. The German branch of the consultants McKinsey calculated the economic benefits of the euro��s first decade when the currency had 17 members. Those benefits were divided 50/50: half went to Germany, the other half to the remaining 16 countries.
Those were the good years, but what of the euro��s bad times? For Germany, they don't exist. The euros weakness has been a jackpot for Germany. It has made German exports, especially to China and the US, much cheaper than they would have been otherwise. In 2014, total German exports swelled to €1.1 trillion, with an 11 per cent rise in sales to China and 6.5 per cent to the US. Even the Greek crisis has been fabulous news for Germanys finances. The longer the crisis goes on, the more investors sail to the ��safe haven�� of German government bonds and the more Germany saves on the costs of borrowing. This year alone, Berlin has saved an estimated €20 billion in borrowing costs because of the Greek crisis. It would be cynical to suggest that Wolfgang Schäuble as finance minister has an interest in keeping the threat of Grexit alive (as he did again last week), but in terms of hard cash, he does.
All of this has many implications but one of them is that, as Hamlet put it, the time is out of joint. There is a complete disjunction between what ��now means in Germany and in much of the rest of the European Union. Germany��s now is not Ireland��s now or Portugal��s now or Italy��s now. This is not a moment in European history – it is at least two parallel moments, one of loss and anxiety, one of economic and political triumph. And in this divergence something crucial is lost – a sense of history itself. When the present means such different things, the past loses its meaning too.

Perhaps the most telling quote of the current crisis was uttered by Angela Merkel last week after the new version of gunboat diplomacy had brought Greece to heel. She was asked whether the measures to be imposed on Greece were not reminiscent of the disastrous Versailles treaty imposed on Germany after the first World War. ��I don'��t take part, she said, “in any historical comparisons.�� The present, Merkel implied, is not to be understood through any awareness of historical experience.
There are two big problems with this. One is that it is, aptly enough, itself a case of recent history repeating itself. The great delusion that overtook economic orthodoxy in the 1990s was precisely that “historical comparisons had been rendered redundant by the rise of a new form of super-efficient finance capitalism. The slogans of that time – “this time it's different��; the end of boom and bust���� were intended to teach us that history had nothing to teach us. The past consequences of deregulated, feral capitalism were irrelevant. And that worked out well, didn'��t it?
The other problem is that Merkels amnesia doesn'��t extend merely to Versailles or to the elimination of Germany��s debts in 1953. Even more recent history is forgotten – including the history of the euro itself. It is forgotten that it was Germany that overruled Jacques Delors plan for a euro zone that would include fiscal transfers between its member states. It is forgotten that the underlying assumption of the euro was, as Andrew Moravcsik epitomised it, that “the deficit-prone countries of southern Europe would adopt German economic standards lower price inflation and wage growth, more saving and less spending – and Germany would become a little more like them, by accepting more government and private spending, as well as higher wage and price inflation��.
Reckless lenders
If the Greeks were meant to become a lot more German, the Germans were also supposed to become a little more Greek. Germany reneged on its part of this deal. And it is forgotten that prudent Germany had its own versions of Anglo Irish Bank and its own reckless lenders, pumping money into Ireland and Greece, Spain and Portugal in search of a fast buck. None of these truths seem to feature in Germany��s self-image as a blameless victim of other peoples follies.
The result is that we have one part of the euro zone all too aware that it is living at a moment of historic crisis and another – the one that calls the shots floating along on a sea of amnesia. And this is deeply dangerous for the European Union. It was founded on a sense that its members shared a common, and disastrous, history, a past that must never be repeated. It could flounder on the growing sense that history is only for the losers.

I don't buy German products almost a year ago..

Considering you are actually in Greece, I don't blame you.
Boycotting is a powerful & peaceful statement. It USE to be common in The United States, but sadly most younger than myself have lost that... & look where we are now.

German was one of the two languages spoken in the household, while I was growing up.

Lived there, loved the country and the people.

I'll be boycotting Greece.
Their own government's stupidity got them where they're at.