Namibian President Hage G. Geingob blasted Germany on Saturday for defending Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, pointing to the genocide Germany itself perpetrated on Namibians in the early 1900s.
Germany was defending Israel …
Well, Germany is kind of in a tough spot here…
Only because the Holocaust was always framed as “that horrible thing that happened to the Jews that we need to prevent from ever happening again to Jews” instead of “that horrible thing that happened to people (some of which were Jews) and we need to prevent that from happening to any people ever again”.
One if our own making. If we stopped defending genocide we wouldn’t be here.
While I disagree with the German and Israeli governments, “you did genocide too” is not an argument for anything. You will be hard pressed to find a country that never participated in one and the current situation hardly compares to randomly invading and colonizing a country not even on the same continent as your own.
There are plenty of arguments you can find against the Israeli and my own Government, no need to resort to populist speeches.
“you did genocide too” is not an argument for anything
Actually that’s not the argument.
The argument is: first recognize all your genocides, before attempting to defend one.
We recognize the genocide against hereros and Namas as genocide though. We even started paying reparations recently finally.
Which would still be a stupid argument, because these two alleged genocides are very different in nature, scale and also completely unrelated. I disagree that that’s the argument tho.
From the article posted here:
“The German government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil,” Geingob’s office said on social media.
“In light of Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history, President Geingob expresses deep concern with the shocking decision communicated by [Germany] … in which it rejected the morally upright indictment brought forward by South Africa before the ICJ that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” Geingob’s office said.
Yes, thank you, I’ve read the article.
You will be hard pressed to find a country that never participated in one
This is false. But keep lying to yourself.
Thank you for providing exactly as many examples as everyone assumed you had.
When did the Irish commit a genocide? When did the Irish invade and pillage other nations? When did the Irish ethnically cleanse a land claiming that god gave it to them? Your problem is that you reduce the world to Western Europe, and history to the last 500 years, and even then, I found Ireland as a counter example in a continent with a history of colonialism, genocide and ethnic cleansing. Everyone was doing it, is not an argument, and is not true.
If we move out of Europe we find even more examples of nations that don’t have a history of genocide and colonialism. Take Egypt or Iran or Chad or Algeria or Vietnam for example. In fact, any country that was a victim of European genocides and colonialism by definition is a counter example. Namibia therefore is another example.
The countries founded on settler-colonialism and ethnic cleansing are a minority, and mostly exist in the new world (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina) except for South Africa before its liberation and for now Israel. Very few countries in all of human history has been founded by replacing the indigenous peoples by foreign invaders. The empires of the past such as the Roman Empire focused more on assimilating the indigenous peoples not replacing them. The Crusader Kingdoms is a historic example of European settler-colonialism and we know how that ended, it was nothing like Roman or Byzantine rule of the Middle East. French Algeria is another more recent example. Everyone does it, is really just your way of saying a lot of European empires did it, and everyone else isn’t human or doesn’t matter.
Slovenians never commited genocide.
I don’t think it’s that hard to find a genocide free nation. Shared experiences make up your culture and that informs your politics.
Germany would likely be on the right side of history if they had incinerated millions of men women and children.
Exactly what I said was going to happen: That the genocider nations were all going to vote along ideological lines.
Genocide in Namibia is not the genocide Germany is known for
Because most people just don’t know about it.
The point was that German relations with genocide are not restricted to holocaust, and their justification of supporting current genocide by the past genocide is straight up hypocritical and their argument completely falls apart.
