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Germans should stop feeling guilty: Ahmadiznuts
 | As reported in the German media: |
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad declared Thursday that it was time for Germans to stop feeling guilty for "crimes" of Nazi Germany more than 60 years ago.
| I've got that same sick feeling I had last night, when I found myself agreeing with George Clooney: because I find myself in surface agreement with Mahmoud, I fear becoming something like him... |
| His is a non-sequitor argument: the issue of guilt is irrelevant. As Fred notes below, the issue is what you learn from the behavior of your forebears. Ahmadinejad references 'guilt' not because he's concerned about it, but because it's convenient to the argument he's making. |
In a speech in Zanjan, north-west Iran, carried live on state television, Ahmadinejad did not directly mention the Holocaust, the term for the mass extermination of Jews in Europe during the Nazi German regime. But he spoke of how "every new-born child in Germany is still regarded as being in debt to a mob of impudent and insatiable Zionists."
That's a relief. We can part ways on our opinion and I feel safe again, my IQ restored. At the end of the war, Europe's Jews and the Germans said just about the same thing: "Never again." The Jews resolved never again to become victims, and with a few exceptions they're kept that resolution. West Germany made a national resolution never again to become oppressors. Their constitution reflects it, and with a few exceptions their citizens accept it. Israel's a reflection of the Jews' determination, and the lack of German participation in even worthwhile military operations is a reflection of theirs.
We're three generations removed from the war. The Hitler Youth are now little old men. Their elders are virtually all gone, just the same as the ranks of the men who fought them are gone. Today's Germans are no more the Germans who perpetrated the Holocaust than they are the Germans who fought for Kaiser Bill. They did learn the lesson of their parents and grandparents, and Never Again has become ingrained. So has the determination of the Jews not to be made into fertilzer and lampshades. They have no more reason to let Muslims kill them en masse than they have reason to let Germans kill them in large numbers, but there's a much higher likelihood of the Muslims doing it than the Germans. |
The Germans should no longer permit themselves to be made to accept guilt, Ahmadenijad said. In Germany, instead of parks there were "memorial sites" which now, even in the third generation since the war, Germans are reminded of the crimes of their ancestors.
| Germany has lots of fine parks. Besides memorials to the Holocaust, it also has other memorials. One in Berlin is the Kaiser Wilhelm Church, which was left in its bombed out condition as a reminder of what war can bring. Another, also in Berlin, is made out of the barrels of cannon captured from Napoleon Bonapart, an earlier advocate of World Domination™ whose Empire didn't last a thousand years, either. |
| I was in Berlin in August 2001 and stayed in a hotel right around the corner from the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. It looks just like the Twin Towers looked a month later, after the planes hit but before the buildings came down. |
"The war has been over for more than 60 years, but when you go to Germany, you can clearly see how this civilized people must still atone for the crimes in the Second World War," he said. | And Imam Ali has been dead for more than 1300 years, Mahmoud. I think you Shia ought to get over it, already. Put a little love in your hearts for the Sunni and stop it with the swords and the flails. |
Ahmadinejad's speech is the latest in a series of controversial remarks on the question of the Holocaust in recent months. At one point he used the term "fairy tale" to describe it and on several occasions said the Jews in Israel should go back to Europe.
Posted by: Seafarious 2006-04-29 |
