A German foundation has said it will no longer be awarding a prize for political thinking to a leading Russian-American journalist after criticizing as “unacceptable” a recent essay by the writer in which they made a comparison between Gaza and a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe.
I think Germany has actually accepted a lot more responsibility for the atrocities they’ve committed, compared to nearly every other European nation guilty of colonialism and genocide. I have British friends who were taught almost nothing about Britain’s colonial past in school, while every German has to learn about the Holocaust in school.
In a way I understand Germany’s reluctance to compare a Jewish ethnostate to Nazism, considering what they did to the Jews 80 years ago. But I think that comparison is completely justified and Germany should know better. Israel is an apartheid state, and Netanyahu is one Auschwitz away from being just like Hitler.
They did accept responsability, but in itself has no value if they cannot raise their voices against another genocide that is happening right now. Totally agree with the res you say.
It still has value if it stops then from committing another genocide themselves. But yeah, they could be doing a lot better.
Yeah, it is not. Defending who commits genocide is not what you’d call a “stop”.
Yeah I completely agree. They know better than anyone what fascism looks like, and the fact that they choose to do nothing is sickening.
The lesson learned doesn’t seem to have been that killing large numbers of people because of their etnicity is bad, but rather that killing large number of Jews for their etnicity is bad, but doing it to members of other etnic groups who are still seen as untermenschen is fine.
Basically (and forgive me the racist terminology but I think is representative) they’ve just reclassified Jews as “whites, like us” and carried on approving violent racism against those they see as “not like us”.
Fascism might have been kicked out of Germany, but it seems to never have left the hearts of the German elites and many of its people.