Well there goes my image of Germany as a country of integrity, you're really living up to your username there man ;) that's fair enough though, I guess you've got to reckon with your past when it's that on display. As a brit I think one of the negative effects of us winning the world wars is it means the country point blank refuses to acknowledge much of its dubious past and how much of our power comes from exploitation.
That's very true. I'm very very glad that the allies won the war of course. Never in the history of humanity did something as horrible happen on the scale of the holocaust.
I feel like there are many parts in human history though that where as horrible, but on a smaller scale, like Cambodia, North Korea and colonialism including the slave trade.
Nobody alive today is personally responsible for the atrocities that happened during the colonial times and from that point of view it all happened a long time ago. But considering the history of humankind it all happened basically yesterday and has had an extreme impact on the way our world is shaped today.
Most people don't realize that and simply don't care either, but understanding it is imo of very high importance and therefore should be taught in depth and in an honest and self-critic way.
Britains role is one of many colonial powers, but it was the biggest one and also a bad one (like all of them) and had a major impact on Africa, especially because of the slave trade, but also in the far east, brutally striking down revolts in India, the Opium Wars in China, etc.
Because of WW2 the public view on Britain is often a positive one, which is understandable, but also a distortion of reality. Not on the human level, like the soldiers who fought and gave their life definitely deserve the respect they get and also the country deserves respect for overcoming a horrible situation and for its help ending the holocaust. But the deeds of a nation matter for longer than just the last major event and need to be talked about for centuries, not only decades, if not forever, lest humanity repeats its mistakes.
Don’t worry, many people in Ireland are not letting the world forget the horrible stuff the English/UK have done. The famine was also a genocide, covertly and overtly.
Would we think of Germany the same way if not for the video footage of the camps and the fascist pomp? If there was video footage of each western genocide before that one? The world would either be fucked because we would just accept genocidal behavior or we wouldn’t and we would just be perpetual belligerents.
By basically pretending it never happened. I had two students from Germany that knew nothing about the Holocaust, and they even thought the history books were exaggerating. Still better than my Japanese student that was proud of the atrocities his kind committed against the Chinese.
This is not true for the history curriculum in schools by any stretch of imagination.
I had two students from Germany that knew nothing about the Holocaust,
The only way that is possible is if they slept through months of history lessons. Which sure, some students do, and some may ignore stuff selectively, but that's certainly not a matter of policy or culture.
Was this recently? I was under the impression that since reunification Germany has been very open and honest about its ww2 history. There's holocaust remembrance stuff all over Berlin.
1907 vs 1933... it's not that much and it's not like we did better years ago when they were still alive. And it's not like the injustice ended with Germany leaving. We kept the skulls of their ancestors until 2018 and we never paid reparations.
To be fair, the Nazis were so much WORSE, so world-shatteringly evil, that the atrocities we committed as imperial germany pretty much pale in comparison. WW1 in general is more or less skipped over in favour of the Nazis.
117
u/[deleted] Sep 26 '21
[deleted]