A New "Fuhrer?"

On the other hand, any one who was an adult at the end of WWII is now 83 years or older and unlikely to have anything to do with current German society.

 

What a load of shit. Do you know anything about history?

Antisemitism was rampant the world over in the 1940s and before. What happened in Germany could just as easily happened in Russia, Greece, France, nearly every Eastern European country ... even England and the U.S.A. Do a little reading and find out how bigoted our own country was in those days ... and before.

Oh wait! I did happen in most of those countries! Either before the war -- the word pogrom, after all, comes from czarist Russia's systematic killing of Jews in the pre WWI era -- or certainly during it, where people in all of the Nazi-occupied nations very willingly helped the Nazis ship Jews to their deaths.

Here's an example. Salonika, the second-largest city in Greece, was a majority Sephardic Jew city before World War II. They lived in relative harmony during the Ottoman days, but when Salonika became part of Greece after World War I, they were harassed in much the same way Jews were in Germany in the interwar period.

When Germany invaded and occupied Greece in 1940, the other ethnic groups of Salonika -- one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the Eastern Mediterranean, being that it was/is a major port -- conspired to systematically drive the Jews out. Not only that, but all trace of any evidence that the Sephardic Jews lived there was also wiped out. Stones from one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in the world were used to create new sidewalks in Salonika. They are still there to this day.

The few Sephardic Jews who survived emigrated to Israel. Today, there are maybe a few hundred Sephardic Jews in Salonika, at most.

My point being that no ethnic group had a monopoly on discriminatory evil back then. If you want a more grotesque story, look up the Bucharest massacre in 1940.

Europe has mostly changed. The horror of total war will do that to a people. The Germans are no more a threat or racist than any other ethnic group is.

The groups I worry about are the ones who have never had to live with the consequences of war or massacre, and thus, don't fear them and run headlong into the same stupidity Europeans did 70 years ago.

Namely ... us.

 

We as a nation willingly fund China, a country that killed many more of its own post-1949, than Germany every did.

 

This discussion is reminding me of a movie that I'd seen a bunch of times as a teen. There was this early '80s movie, called "The Wave" which was required viewing every year for us in Hebrew School, and would frequently appear on those ABC Afterschool Specials. It was a little cheesy, but it was based on a true story.

This teacher was teaching this high school history class about the Holocaust, and came to the part where he said that most Germans had no clue, or didn't care, about what was going on with the Holocaust. One girl asked how that could have happened. The teacher admitted he was stumped.

The teacher thought a while, then developed a class project, where the kids would be divided into three groups by colored armbands as part of a national club. At first, nothing happened, kids just wore the armbands. Then one color started getting favors (no homework, front of the line in the cafeteria, etc.).

Then, word of this spread around, and soon, the whole school was participating.

Then another color started getting treated poorly (extra homework, no access to the library for assignments, etc.). The third color was essentially neutral, and kids could be rewarded and/or punished by moving to different colors based on how they were behaving.

Soon, cliques developed within the colors (the football player was hanging out with the nerd), and fights started breaking out. Parents started complaining, and the principal told the teacher he had to end the project. The teacher agreed, but told the principal to give him one more day.

The next day, the teacher announced that the whole school was going to meet the national project leader in an assembly. The favored kids were all excited, the other two groups unhappy. Kids meet in the auditorium, lights go down ... and a video of Hitler appears.

The teacher told the school that what happened was exactly how it occurred in the Holocaust, and that they should think for themselves, rather than just go along for the ride.

Supposedly, the teacher got fired after that, but I'm not sure.

 

In fact one of our major TV networks is devoted to it.

 

Baron, that sounds similar to the experiment conducted in this amazing documentary, "A Class Divided":

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/

(Seriously, watch it. It might look cheesy and outdated because it's 25 years old. But it's worth watching, trust me.)

 

I had the same thought as Buck. Usually I hear the Stanford Prison Experiment brought up in the same vein.

 

I've seen that before, and heard of other similar experiments. I've seen videos of similar things being done with adults, too.

But those experiments with adults lasted minutes, maybe hours. Not years. I don't buy the argument that most Germans had no idea what was going on. Maybe they didn't comprehend the full horror of the Holocaust, but they weren't clueless.

That said, holding the current German population responsible for it seems like a bit much.

 

It's not your argument to buy. It happened.

We in America close our eyes to a lot of people's circumstances.

 

You believe it happend. Bully for you. I do not. I believe people knew, then played innocent later because they couldn't face it. I'm not blaming the German people as a whole, but people just aren't that blind and stupid.

 

Do you ever go to Walmart?

 

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