It is only natural that the Germans should hate their conquerors, the Americans. It is a secret, repressed yet passionate sentiment that I find every time I speak to a German or a Hungarian. Der Spiegel has an article that gives expression to this feeling: It describes America's current problems in the typical fact-filled, apparently objective way, yet one can intuit the underlying pleasure derived from America's misfortune. I am not criticizing, I said it is only human and natural. That's the way we are all made. Thomas Schulz writes:
In fact, the United States, in the wake of a real estate, financial economic and now debt crisis, which it still hasn't overcome, is threatened by a social Ice Age more severe than anything the country has seen since the Great Depression.
Because they lacked savings, Americans began borrowing money to cover all of their other expenses, including education, healthcare and consumption. American consumer debt now totals about $13.5 trillion.What Schulz lets unsaid is the comparison with the prosperity of the sober, austere, hardworking Germany of 2010. Yet "Rejoice not when thine adversary falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth" (Proverbs 24:17–18).
Many people threaten to suffocate under the burden of their debt. Some 61 percent of Americans have no financial reserves and are living from paycheck to paycheck. As little as a single hospital bill can spell potential financial ruin.
27 comments:
I've read something similar, somewhere. That - I think I'm getting this right - Deutschland tried to go all-American after the first war. But then once the depression started, with great misery in Germany, and they saw Americans still partying around in American movies - they hated America.
Not to mention that debt wise, Western Europe owned the balls of Germany, and the Yanks had the balls of Western Europe. So the Yanks were really on top of the question of whether the Versailles reparations obligations could be lightened up a bit. And since they didn't live right next to an angry Germany, or anywhere near it, the Yanks didn't have too much of an immediate concern about whether Deutschland went tits-up, went bananas, whatever. They sure as hell started caring in the mid-30s, but I'm not sure how well they foresaw that. Maybe they thought that because of Russia and international Bolshevism, Germany was 'stuck' with the West and wouldn't be able to do a thing about it, no matter what.
So the Yanks wasting wealth up on the big screen were not just the landlords of the Germans, but also basically their rulers via Versailles. So, they hated them. And maybe all this has something to do with why the threat of American hegemony over all of non-Bolshie Europe loomed large in Hitler's second book, but not in Mein Kampf.
And then, Germany had a hell of a time getting a positive balance of trade so they could pay obligations. I've read about why, but it is hard for me to fully grasp. Maybe because Germany had been more destroyed in the first war than the others had, the others could produce things more efficiently, which tempted Germany to import more and more. Anyway, they had to keep devaluing the Reichsmark, painfully. In the end, it was sort of like the whole nation had to move back in with their parents, so to speak - or at least borrow a ton of dough from whoever had it; very unpleasant.
Anyway, you can see why they re-armed illicitly, and (in concert with that) busted Versailles. One can almost cheer for them, or could if only they had stopped there, or even after the whole Anschluss / Sudetenland / Polish corridor jag - but of course that's hardly what happened.
Rob,
The war ended 55 years ago. It is new world out there. I find German obsession with Versailles and Hungary's obsession with Trianon rather unproductive. Schadenfreude is not a German invention. The word is and it has been adopted by everybody.
Actually Germany was not damaged at all in the 1st WW. Long distance aerial bombing had not been perfected. The war was fought entirely on the soil of other countries - France, Russia, etc. In the 1st few weeks of the war the Germans advanced 1/2 way to Paris and (without mechanized armor) their advance stalled and everyone dug into trenches and for the whole rest of the war the front moved very little even though millions of men were poured into the meat grinder on both sides. Half a million men would die and the French would advance 500 yards.
I don't know what the explanation for the post-war balance of trade problems was, but the fact that the country was intact only made them more bitter - the Nazis played on all sorts of "stabbed in the back" (by the Jews) myths because how could it be that Germany had lost the war and surrendered even though not a single German window pane was broken? The next war they didn't have to wonder why they had to surrender and that paradoxically led to a better political recovery. The fact that their old capital base was smashed to bits and they had to start fresh also paradoxically led to a better economic recovery. Life is full of paradoxes.
The modern German obsession is not with Versailles - they are past that. Now they are obsessed with Dresden. There is a refusal to see the big picture and to understand that even if innocents died there, it was not even sufficient karmic payback for what the German people had done. Those who were cooked in their basements by the firestorm had not long before been on the streets cheering Hitler and his victories, been purging the Jews from the life of Dresden. Hosea said " they that sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind."
K
The Germans are hurting themselves and the rest of Europe by running huge trade surpluses. By refusing to buy goods from other countries they created an imbalance that went into real estate. China and Japan have the same problem. The debtors should simply not pay.
Why? They bought and consumed. They have to pay. Thats the way commerce is done.
K,
The Germans who perished in the bombing of Dresden and other population centers had, by and large, no karmic debt to pay. They happened to be living in a nation where power had been usurped by a gang of murderous swine who exploited democracy's susceptibility to rabblerousing and the historical circumstances which Germany found itself in. If they were collectively responsible for the Nazis, then the Russian Jews were collectively responsible for the Communists. At the time, the people ordering the bombing of German cities could not care less if every Jew in occupied Europe was to die, as attested to by their refusal to accept them as refugees in any significant numbers.
B
I dont believe in karmic debt although the Bible mentions "to the seventh generation". Nations have no permanent enemies. About the refugee problem, Roosevelt organized the Evian conference before the Holocaust, and it was clear that the Jews were alone and no one wanted them. No one.
I don't believe in karmic debt either but the Germans who are complaining today about Dresden are ignoring the big picture. Taken in isolation, Dresden was a war crime. Under the circumstances, it was understandable. The Germans who harp about this make it sound as if it came out of the blue, but it did not. Of course in a war, mostly innocents die on both sides but in modern total war there are no innocents - that's just the way it is. Read Sherman's letter to the citizens of Atlanta, 80 years previous. This was no secret by 1933. So you should think REALLY really hard before you start one or put a madman at your head. There were millions of fanatical Nazi's (some of them in Dresden) - where were the million of equally fanatical anti-Nazis? They liked Hitler well enough when he was winning for them. All wars start out with all sorts of polite ground rules and by the end you are so filled with hatred of the enemy people that you don't give a damn how many of them die as long as it saves the life of one more of your boys. Bomber Harris may not have care about the Jews but he sure remembered Coventry.
K
Germans are embarked in a rehabilitation program, not in the sense of denying or justifying the extermination of European Jewry or other atrocities, but in the sense of emphasizing their own suffering and the unjustices done to them. They are emphasizing the forced relocation of million Volkdeutsch with loss of property and some lives, and acts of revenge (mostly Russian) after their defeat. The war is now ancient history and it is easy to reconstruct its narrative. History will be written and rewritten by the nation that is strong in a certain era, that is, if the Germans become stronger, we will surely hear more about THEIR suffering.
I am no psychologist, but it may be healthy for everybody to close the WWII chapter.
History is history - what's done cannot be undone. All the narrative in the world will not bring back your Uncle Icik or my Uncle Gedalia or any of the other 6 million .
BUT, you have to understand that these narratives have an agenda for future action attached to them, which is why they are important. IF Germany was not an aggressor nation, IF it had no more moral culpability than England, THEN you have to draw different conclusions about the meaning of the war, conclusions that have implications for the future foreign policy of Germany. THAT is what is so dangerous about these revisionist view.
One of the secrets of the peace that has prevailed for 65 years now in Europe is that the Germans were willing (or felt they had no choice but ) to close that chapter. And part of the reason that they were willing to close the book was because of their tremendous feelings of guilt - if you are an arsonist and set the town on fire, who do you complain to when your house catches fire too? Territory that had been German for 1000 years or more was torn from Germany, millions were displaced, tens or hundreds of thousands died in the transfer of population, but not a peep was uttered and Germany became the richest country in Europe. Contrast that with Gaza where people are still crying over their grandfather's olive grove and tell me which is psychologically and physically healthier.
One of the reasons for the difference is that (rightly or wrongly) the Arabs feel that this wound was inflicted on them by the Western powers and that they were the victim of other people's plans and had no culpability for their displacement. Do you really want the Germans to start thinking this way too?
K
K,
The people responsible for murdering our relatives got fucked much less frequently than the people who had nothing to do with it, is the impression I get from reading German post-war memoirs. For instance, they did not have ODESSA to move them to Latin America. The dumbshits that the Allies and Soviets put in charge of denazification just needed to send numbers up to their higher-it wasn't the 82nd Airborne in charge.
Before Coventry, the British bombed German cities like Hamburg repeatedly, under the assumption that the population would get angry at the Nazis-they were early adapters of Douhet's theories. The blockade that they imposed on the continent was similarly designed to punish the civilian population into rising. They had used this method with success in managing tribal rebellions in the inter-war period from Arabia to Pakistan. As the course of the war showed, it didn't work well against a non-tribal enemy, but when you have a hammer (an air force primarily adapted to nighttime "strategic bombing,") everything looks like a nail. We got in on the game too, and even outdid our mentors, in the atomic bombings. A good book that traces the evolution of this thinking is Human Smoke. The idea that civilians were fair game was widespread in British society at the time, as was the idea that the "Huns" should be sterilized and otherwise eliminated as a nation in the event of a successful conclusion to the war.
The participants are mostly dead and gone-we owe them nothing, nor do we have anything to fear from them. I do not think that the Holocaust was due to any inborn propensity of the German people, and am therefore not afraid of them repeating it, at least not more than I am afraid of any other nation repeating it. Conversely, I don't think that Americans or Brits have any kind of inborn propensity to incinerating and crushing hundreds of thousands of the enemy's women and children.
The idea that we should guilt-trip the Germans with a version of history designed with this in mind, in order that they stay passive, strikes me as objectionable. I believe that history should strive to reflect the truth first and foremost.
Let me propose something radical: the Germans should now be enabled, as defenders of the West, and not neutered any more.
I do not think they are a threat to our fundamental values, or to the State of Israel, or to World Jewry.
But we need them now. They are, Russia and the UK notwithstanding, Europe's most important people, and they need to take a stand.
Am I wrong in this?
Anon.
B,
I am no post-modernist, but there are a lot of "truths" out there and, as I said before, which truth you choose to emphasize in your national myths and which you chose to ignore has implications for the future which are of more than academic interest. If you look at the people who are all excited about the Dresden firebombing, they are not necessarily people who wish America well and are willing to use any bludgeon they can get their hands on.
As J said, it is time to close the book on Versailles and Trianon. The last soldiers of WWI have almost all died. WWII is still a little fresh in our memories - I don't think we can close the book on Auschwitz and Treblinka just yet. The Germans themselves remain cautious. like a driver who has killed someone in an accident and doesn't want to kill another. I think this is a good thing and don't want to encourage them to resume their Prussian traditions by telling them that America and Britain were just as evil. Mainly because that wasn't true, not by a stretch, Bomber Harris notwithstanding.
K
K,
I'm more interested in knowing the truth about a particular event than worried about the fact that it may be used as propaganda by unscrupulous people. I do not wish to have anyone manipulate my perception of history in order to control my thoughts about and behavior in the present, nor do I wish that for anyone else. What happened in WW2 has nothing to do with any German tradition, Prussian or otherwise-if it did, it would have happened in WW1 or the 19th century, when those traditions were much stronger, yet we see nothing like it. Finally, just as some of the victims of Auschwitz and Treblinka are still alive (may they live many more years,) so are some of the German victims of Allied strategic bombing and postwar ethnic cleansing. On a grand scale, there is a major moral difference between the two, but I'm sure that the victims of the second did not feel much better than the victims of the first. Isn't it only fair to include the second in the narrative of the war?
PS The idea that because all the Germans didn't go line up and march against the Reichstag, they deserved what they got never made sense to me. It's usually expounded by those who have never lived under a totalitarian government, or kept their mouth shut if they did.
I think as dictators go, Hitler had far more popular support than most, at least until he started losing the war. That doesn't mean the good citizens of Dresden deserved to be incinerated along with their little china statues and their lovely architectural treasures, but hey, shit happens. If they didn't deserve it, they sure deserved it more than the Jews. Just as everyone in prison didn't do it (if you ask them) somehow every single person in Dresden was not a Nazi and not guilty of anything - all they did was make music boxes and pumpernickel bread. And maybe because all those innocents died and their cities were bombed into rubble, Germans have been extra cautious not to start any new wars ever since (unlike after WWI), so they didn't die in vain.
Yes, its true that Harris thought he could bomb the Germans into overthrowing Hitler and yes he was completely wrong about that(and it was probably a war crime to boot). We can say all this w. 20/20 hindsight. BTW, his general idea worked just fine in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - those 2 bombs saved millions of lives, more Japanese than American - maybe Harris was right that what was needed was ever more, bigger bombs - just one more city reduced to ashes and THEN the Germans would have revolted and/or surrendered. But, as I said, shit happens - if you start a war it can spin out of control in ways that were totally unanticipated at the beginning. Not all the generals with a psychopathic streak were German. Play with matches, etc.
K
K
There is absolutely no doubt that more of what Bomber Harris was dishing out would sooner or later have brought Germany to her knees.
That's why the Nazis went for the atomic bomb themselves; it was their only escape.
But they'd kicked out or killed the only people who could have given it to them.
Poetic justice, I think.
The other lesson from Dresden, Hamburg etc, is that when Anglo's get pushed beyond a certain point, we become an entirely different kind of person.
Something to bear in mind, as the immigrationists continue trying to destroy Europe.
Anon.
Germans should now be enabled
Enabled to do what in particular?
Judging the Russians by the same standards, they loved Stalin just as much as the Germans loved Hitler. Does this mean that they too deserved incineration? The percentage of Communist Party members in Leningrad was probably even higher than the percentage of Nazi Party members in Dresden, since the Soviets took their version of "coordination" further. For instance, my great-grandfather, who was an engineer in a small light-industry factory before the war, was a party member, as was my grandfather, who fulfilled an analogous role in a printers' a decade after the war. Does this mean that they share the guilt for the GULAGs and the tens of millions who died there and as a result of Soviet agricultural policies? Would it somehow have justified dropping a 500lber on their apartment building, crushing or incinerating them, my great-grandmother and grandaunts as they slept? Would you say "they're less innocent than the victims of Auschwitz" forty years later? Also, you can note that the reasoning behind Hitler's treatment of the Jews was that we were a carrier for the bacillae of Bolshevism, whose works were well known through Europe as they were publicized by various refugees and escapees from the USSR, so there's a fair bit of analogy there.
You need to pick a train of reasoning. Either the reason the Germans have been so peaceful is that we and our Soviet allies committed atrocities so massive in scale as to scare them in perpetuity, or it's because we have not let them remember and discuss those atrocities. Me, I think that it's for the same reason the rest of Western Europe has been so peaceful of late, plus the fact that for the second half of the 20th century, Germany was split in half and occupied.
Finally, as far as playing with matches-Britain had pioneered intentionally bombing civilians, and did it to Germany repeatedly, while being asked to stop, for months before Germany reciprocated. I have zero sympathy for the Germans' cause, but it's not enough to make me ignore the truth.
Dear Anglo-nobody doubts that the inventors of the concentration camp are capable of doing revolting things if pushed, or that they're capable of pushing themselves.
"You need to pick a train of reasoning. Either the reason the Germans have been so peaceful is that we and our Soviet allies committed atrocities so massive in scale as to scare them in perpetuity, or it's because we have not let them remember and discuss those atrocities. "
Option 3 - they can remember and discuss these atrocities all they want while understanding that they brought them upon themselves. You can't discuss Dresden and Hamburg unless you remember Auschwitz and Coventry and Leningrad, etc.
I can detect that B is no Anglo-phile. While I agree that the English can be perfidious, I'd take their brand of perfidy over the (old) German kind any day.
K
K,
If they have a right to their own history, then they have a right to interpret it.
I personally don't see any way in which Dresden is earthly justice for Auschwitz or Leningrad. The people responsible for Dresden didn't care much about Auschwitz. As far as divine justice, I prefer not to interpret earthly events thus, since we all have much to atone for. I'd have to extend that reasoning to myself, my country and mypeople, and, well... As far as the causation between Hamburg and Coventry, you've got it backwards: Hamburg came first.
I'm neither an Anglophobe, nor an Anglophile. I'm a truthophile. I'd much prefer Bismarck over Churchill or Roosevelt, but the latter two were better than Hitler. Pitt Sr. was probably better than Bismarck as a statesman, and so on. I have an aversion to interpreting history for the convenience of today's political shibboleths.
Dear B
It actually takes a lot to push us over the edge, but were getting there.
Anon.
It actually just takes a little bit of free rein plus self-righteousness, and the Anglos revert to their primal nature multiplied by IQ. Witness the letter opener carved out of a Japanese femur that FDR received-and asked for more! Or that girl on the cover of Time magazine, holding a Japanese skull that her Navy fiancee sent her. No nation is inherently righteous. But if you're hoping for a spontaneous uprising of the White Man against the oppressive govt and its Morlock minions-good luck with that. The balance of power will be the same as it was at Ruby Ridge for a LONG time yet.
Just because someone sent FDR a Jap bone letter opener does not make him Hitler or Tojo. They really existed on different moral planes and you are being obtuse if you don't recognize this. Of course during a war and in light of the terrible atrocities committed by the Japs, anti-Jap feelings ran high. To win a war you need to psych yourself up to hate and de-humanize the enemy. If the enemy is a full human being with wants and needs just like yours, how can you stab him in the gut with your bayonet and then twist? Frankly we need more of this now and less touch feely stuff where Obama makes speeches about how great the Iranian people are.
Likewise, in a karmic sense (and a real practical sense) Dresden WAS payback for the Germans had done. Putting aside who did what first (and in a war there is always a feeling that the other side escalated first and you are just retaliating) Bomber Harris very expressly said early in the war that the Germans were not going to be the only ones to commit atrocities against enemy cities and in this war (which was an existential war for Britain) Britain was not going to fight with its hands tied behind its back while the enemy had no ground rules (cf the "war on terror" where we are doing exactly that). Sow wind, reap whirlwind. If this offends our fine modern sensibilities, the only reason we still HAVE those sensibilities is because the Allies were willing to use any tactic, below or above the belt, to win the war. It's easy sanctimony to sit in a Starbucks today and decry what a savage war criminal FDR was with his bone letter opener - after Pearl Harbor and Bataan the perspective was very different from Roosevelt's wheelchair.
K
K,
I'm presuming that you are a war vet? Otherwise, your insistence that you know what it takes to win wars and Pattonesque sermonizing ring a bit hollow. I can tell you that I didn't have to dehumanize anybody to do my job in Iraq, and I sure as shit didn't commit atrocities. I was on the ground, too, not overseeing the war from an office. LeMay, Harris, Roosevelt and Churchill weren't stabbing anyone in the guts with bayonets. When I read about European warfare in the 18th century, I don't get the sense that those men dehumanized their enemies either. Now, to get a democracy to go to war, you might have to blow smoke up everyone's ass and convince them that the enemy is Lucifer incarnate. If anything, that's another strike against democracy.
Feelings ran high against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, which was hardly an atrocity. In Britain, feelings ran high against the Germans mostly due to the Germans kicking the living crap out of the British army in France, Norway, Greece and so on, not due to any atrocities the Germans committed in 1939-1940. If the British had concentrated their resources on building up an army and air force designed to fight the Germans on a tactical level, perhaps they would not have gotten their asses kicked. If they hadn' bombed German cities, the Germans would not have bombed theirs. Let's not twist the facts here and "put aside who did what first."
If the Germans had not committed the Holocaust, Allied conduct of the war would have been EXACTLY the same. Furthermore, had FDR and Churchill not been utter shitheads(better than Hitler, but not exponentially,) those millions of Ashkenazim could have lived. FDR and Roosevelt believed that Jews were a threat to their civilizations and a bacillum almost as much as Hitler did, and probably thought the Holocaust was overall a good thing. You need quotes?
As far as my sensibilities being enabled by the results of strategic bombing-I believe that on one hand, Germany would not have posed any more of an existential threat to America had America stayed out of the war than the Soviet Union did after 1945. On the other hand, had the US and Britain dedicated those huge resources to something more tactically applicable, the war would probably have ended a year or two earlier.
Regarding the tactics, hindsight is always 20/20. Apparently Harris was not privy to the Enigma decrypts which were double super secret (what good is intelligence that is kept so secret that no action can result from it, but that's another story) so he was not aware that targeted bombing was more effective than area bombing (not that the British with their crappy bombsights and night flights could target anything anyway). Maybe if they had told him he might have acted on the intelligence.
I won't even try to compete with your military credentials - you win on those. The polite 18th century type of war is not coming back. The Americans used guerilla tactics in the Revolution and refused to politely stand in ranks so the British could mow them down with volleys. Churchill (whom I admire even if you don't) said that democracy is the worst possible system, except for all the others.
At the time , Pearl Harbor WAS considered an atrocity because of the surprise attack before a declaration of war was delivered. Supposedly the Japanese meant to deliver the declaration 1st but the timing got messed up. Supposedly. Certainly there were plenty of Japanese atrocities beside Pearl Harbor, many aimed at Americans in the Philippines, not to mention millions of Chinese.
We can't redo history but I'm not convinced that the Germans would not have bombed British cities unless the British bombed theirs first. More revisionist history with an anti-British spin.
Roosevelt had what I would call "mixed feelings" about Jews - some of his closest confidants were Jews. There's a BIG moral (and legal) difference between not doing anything to stop a crime and committing a crime. Did R and C have snobby upper class anti-Semitic attitudes common to their time and class? Sure. Could Roosevelt and Churchill done a lot more to save the Jews? Absolutely, but that does not make them Hitler.
K
HaHa, the USA and the UK are in rapid decline and the Germans are back on top again. Sweet revenge.
Have fun living with the hundreds of millions of poor, violent, and stupid immigrants you Brits and Americans while we Germans enjoy our excellent quality of life.
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