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| Europe |
| Honoring those who stood up against pure evil |
| 2004-07-20 |
| EFL Chancellor 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 |
| #4 They stood up against nothing. The fact is that most of the July 20 conjurees wanted was closer tp "nazism light" than anything else. The plan was to make a separate peace with the Allies so to be able to put all German's forces in the eastern front. And they wanted to keep most of the spoils: an Alsace/Lorraine here, an Austria there, the Sudetes of course and so on. Most of the conjurees were, at best, from the imperialist Prussian school (the same one who used Belgian civilans as human shields during WWI). They didn't long for freedom, they didn't long for democracy, they weren't revolted by the atrocities in the eastern front, the murder of the mentally deficient or the final solution. They opposed Nazism only because they thought deposing Hitler would prevent Germany from being crushed. Stauffenberg was nearly alone to oppose Nazism for moral reasons. |
| Posted by: JFM 2004-07-20 4:50:16 PM |
| #3 Thanks, TGA. Maybe our pointed barbs about hyper-pacifism are making it through. Is it too much to hope that Europe is awakening, and realizing how suicidal and extreme the policy of "war is never justified" is? |
| Posted by: jules 187 2004-07-20 4:05:53 PM |
| #2 well said tga |
| Posted by: Dan 2004-07-20 3:24:49 PM |
| #1 TGA--I'm glad you posted this. I was thinking a few days earlier that the 60th anniversary was coming up, but it slipped my mind until I saw your post. |
| Posted by: Dar 2004-07-20 3:24:13 PM |