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Honoring those who stood up against pure evil
EFLChancellor Gerhard Schroeder confronted the lingering demons of the Nazi era Tuesday and honored Germany's oft-forgotten resistance movement 60 years after the most famous plot to kill Adolf Hitler, saying that the army officers, civic leaders and ordinary people who usually paid with their lives were heroes. Schroeder said July 20 is a reminder to Germans to "defend again and again the values of freedom and tolerance that we consider so self-evident today." And somebody reminded him today that his government failed to do just that... in Iraq. Schroeder's money quote was "One cannot be a traitor when one tries to free one's country and the whole of humanity from a barbarian dictator." So true, isn't it? "History would have taken a completely different course" had the plotters killed Hitler and ended the war, 10 months before the Third Reich actually surrendered, said Peter Steinbach of the German Resistance Memorial Center. Historians estimate several hundred thousand Jews of the 6 million who died in the Holocaust would have survived, including those in Hungary. Germany would have avoided Allied bombing of many of its cities and the massive losses of soldiers in the war's final months. And Europe might not have been divided into Soviet and Western camps. We will never know what could have happened had Saddam not ended up in a spider hole. As long as we stand up for civilisation and fight for freedom in the world we don't have to blame ourselves for the consequences. Only if we don't. Posted by: True German Ally 2004-07-20 |
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