cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3680700
Austria accuses this couple of a terrorist crime just for expressing solidarity for Palestinians
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3680700
Austria accuses this couple of a terrorist crime just for expressing solidarity for Palestinians
I don't know if this is true for Austria, but I've heard that for West Germany, they tried to atone for their guilt in the Holocaust by fully supporting Israel, and any criticism of this policy is looked at as antisemitism.
It's an artificial guilt especially in West Germany. If they had any guilt then they would not be cheerleading another genocide.
Exactly. Germany supports this genocide precisely because they learnt nothing from the Holocaust apart from how to run an 80 year PR campaign and assuage their own cultural guilt instead of addressing the root causes.
It's the liberal way of accommodating fascism
Germans have learned that the Holocaust was a 'dirty' thing and they are ashamed to have dirtied themselves and their home by committing it on european soil.
Now they focus on deportations, weapons exports and training foreign militants. The barbarians have joined the empire and become 'civilized'.
Honestly I think it has much less to do with their guilt from the holocaust, and way more to do with keeping fascism, white supremacy, and western settler-colonialism alive and well into the 21st century.
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The absolutely most charitable view is basically that, yes, but they've done so while never, ever truly addressing the underlying and material issues (basically every German institution has been riddled with unpunished Nazis allowed to hold onto their beliefs). But even if one takes that view, it's a strategy that has been pretty disastrous and counter-productive. This excellent article about how supposed Holocaust guilt as a national identity has become a twisted, toxic, and essentially racist tool of exclusion and whiteness is worth a read.
Personally I'm more cynical. I don't see most of Germany's supposed guilt and public awareness raising about the horrors of the Holocaust as much more than an 80 year PR campaign designed to reintegrate themselves with the white powers that were on the other side of the war and avoid being a pariah state. I think that the majority of Germans simply wanted to turn away from the horrors that they shared at least some small blame for and as a result turned a blind eye to the fact that German business, public institutions, and government was still riddled with unpunished, unrepentant fascists. And that those very fascists, with the defacto support of useful liberals as always, worked hard to disguise or rebrand white supremecy for the rest of the 20th century.
The Germans that did the Holocaust didn’t regret anything other than losing the war. The “culture of atonement” is a modern day invention. It’s revisionist history.
Hard agree.
A minor point of clarification: the former FRG allowed Nazis into every institution and basically let former Nazis be full participants in society. The former GDR was much, much more thorough in dealing with Nazis and did not let them anywhere near institutional power and influence.
Oh completely. One of the many reasons the wrong Germany won. I meant the FRG and German state since the wall came down.
AFAIK the Austrian way of dealing with the Holocaust is to tell themselves a story about how they were simply victims of the big bad Germans as well.