I’ve got a different take than you on the Germans, though. All of the older ones I’ve talked to, beginning in the early 1980s through the mid-1990s, were very well aware of why they suffered the way they did. These were men who actually fought, or women married to men who did. Most were repentant, a couple weren’t, but all knew damned well why the USAAF and RAF turned their cities into rubble. Now, that generation’s younger siblings–the ones who had some memories of the war but were too young to fight–seemed to me to be the ones that rationalized war into a kind of plague, as you said. They’re the ones who resented my presence as an American soldier in their country in a way that their older siblings didn’t, and who tried to make me believe that an outbreak of war in Europe would be my and my fellow soldiers’ fault. Expat, you live there now and seem to have a good grasp of local opinion. Care to weigh in?

The Washington ‘Elite’ hold world records for Massive Self-Regard based upon next to nothing.

We might add slavery to the list as well.

Yet I am not sure we could count on the WWII generation in Germany to be the ones to get it. Rationalizations have burrowed in very deep over there (as they do for all of us in this fallen world), and the older generation there has slipped into the thinking of War itself being the cause of their misery, which they know but those stupid Americans don’t, because they saw it and we didn’t. War has taken on the attributes of a plague, which descends on a people like an impersonal force, rather than the result of injustice and aggression. Something like that idea is common on the left here as well: “War is not the answer,” as if war were nothing but a random senselessness which descends on both parties of a conflict.

Funny that Germans should say that. War certainly solved one major problem that the rest of the world had with Germany. I doubt that the older generation that still remembers WW2 would say this.

Your description fits perfectly with the discussions here in Germany since several of their soldiers have been killed in Kundus. “We are supposed to be building schools and hospitals. Why don’t we negotiate with the Taliban. War never solved anything.” Given the general ignorance here about what is actually hapening, it makes me want to scream. This horrible need to be better, not just than their parents, but than the Amis is certainly a problem that cries for a competent therapist.

“If they aren’t really evil, then we aren’t obligated to do anything about confront it.

Which posits that people can’t be ‘evil’ because not only would its opposite ‘good’ have to exist but each would have to have a source.

Neither of which can exist, independent of humanity, without acceptance of the concept of objective reality.

Which post modernism specifically rejects.

Thus, Nietzsche’s “God is dead”.

“I’ve become increasingly convinced that liberalism is sustained by individual psychological and social factors rather than by any external argument or data.”

Absolutely. All ism’s of the left spring from spiritual rejection of God’s direction and the consequent arrested emotional development characterized by the child’s cry of protest, “But it’s not fair!”

Those on the far left invariably suffer from the delusion that they can do better than the rabble (those clinging to their guns & bibles) if only the recalcitrant, less ‘enlightened’ would get out of the way and let their betters rule over them.

Such as they are best characterized by Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ in which Lucifer states, “Better to rule in hell, than serve in Heaven”.