poor innocent us
A German newspaper has asked Queen Elizabeth to apologize for the British bombing of German cities during WWII. My favorite part, as described by the Guardian:The paper ran photographs of German corpses laid out on Dresden streets and asked the question: "What have the British got against Germans?"(This may be an online version of the same story, minus the photograph referenced above. It's all I could find on the German newspaper's website.)
Somewhere, Ernst Nolte is smiling.
posted by Chris Bray @ 9:21 PM
3 Comments:
I'm struck by how much Nolte reminds me of the Japanese Internment apologists here in the US. Both believe in group guilt for individual crimes, assume guilt among the oppressed unless innocence can be conclusively proven, trumpet isolated pieces of information that seem to support their claims while ignoring the vast bulk of information from which they pulled these scraps, use the evils perpetrated by a third group (the Empire of Japan or the Soviet Union) to justify actions against the oppressed group, and fight tooth and nail over every single scrap of evidence and then claim that, if one piece of evidence is less than rock solid, that it invalidates the whole idea of a Holocaust/Internment and, if a piece of evidence survives their attacks, they dismiss it's significance or use the very fact that they attacked it to label it "disputed".
In one Simpsons episode Hitler's car is on display at a carnival. Bart gets in and crashes it. Then Nelson says:
You wrecked Hitler's car. What did he ever do to you?
I can't decide what I think about historical apologising. Sometimes it seems justified I suppose. I don't know. .
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home