“Free Palestine from German guilt”
It was decades ago that I first noticed complaints coming from some of the German youths who’d been taught about what Germany did in the WWII Holocaust. They were fed up with hearing about it. “What’s it got to do with us?” they asked. They weren’t responsible for what their parents – and/or their grandparents and now even sometimes great-grandparents – did back then.
Maybe young people today feel that way about history in general.
Years ago I also started to see the complaints pile up in blog comments and MSM article comments, and not just from Germans. Why don’t the Jews stop whining already? We’re sick and tired of it. Sometimes it crossed the line into Holocaust denial. Sometimes the commenter said he or she wanted more Jews to be killed, they were such a blight on humanity.
The internet was very good at spreading this stuff around. I noticed very early in my internet career that searches for anything connected with Israel or Jews would turn up reams and reams of the most vicious anti-Semitic material, and that a person would have to wade through it to get to anything worthwhile. After a few years of that, the search engines managed to tweak the algorithms so that somehow the worst of it was filtered out. But Jew-hating is – among other things – catching.
So last December this phrase caught my eye in an article I read [emphasis mine]:
“Free Palestine from German guilt.” That’s the message on several posters for the pro-Palestinian protests that have been organized since October in cities such as Berlin. These messages are seen in places where there have been demonstrations: in other places, rallies have been banned out of concern that there would be calls in favor of Hamas. The police closely monitored the authorized protests and have gone so far as to remove posters — and arrest those carrying them — with the “quite neutral” slogan of “From the river to the sea, equality for all,” recalls Christa Waegemann, Middle East Regional Director of the NGO Media in Cooperation and Transition.
There is nothing neutral about that “river to the sea” slogan, of course. It’s a call for the obliteration of Israel, and the addition of the word “equality” doesn’t change that. But it’s the “free Palestine from German guilt” slogan that’s of special interest to me, expressing as it does German weariness with bearing the burden of its historical guilt and a desire to free itself by supporting Palestine and accusing Israel of genocidal crimes.
Does much of the rest of Europe have the same desire to cast off its own guilt? After all, in many countries there was quite a bit of cooperation with the Holocaust. What better way to unburden oneself of that history than to decide that Jews are evil, almost as bad as the Nazis themselves were? What a relief that must be.
I believe that the US’s different history is one of the main reasons that Jew-hatred has lagged behind in this country – the US doesn’t share that sense of Holocaust guilt. But as I said, anti-Semitism is catching, and in the US it has also been imported through large numbers of students and especially professors from Arab countries teaching our university students, as well as financial support from countries like Qatar.
Ali hassan salameh the black prince of munich was educated in germany so was mohammed atta i dont have to remind who that is the germans apparently except for the afd do
Unfortunately, this instance of Germans using current-day political stances to whitewash their country’s misdeeds in World War II is not uncommon. Recall when
Herta Däubler-Gmelin, then German’s Justice Minister, had her 15 minutes of fame when she compared George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, and called the U.S. justice system “lousy.” From Wikipedia:
It turns out that Herta’s criticism of the US and comparing Dubya to Adolf had an ulterior morive. Hans Gmelin, Herta Däubler-Gmelin’s father, the second-ranking Nazi bureaucrat in Slovakia, played a leading role in putting Slovakia’s Jews on the trains that took them to the death camps.
My Grandfather Was Executed as a WWII War Criminal. I Know Why Germany Still Has a Nazi Problem
The article goes on to say that many Germans, such as Herta, are reluctant to admit that their own relatives committed those crimes in WW2- it was, instead, “others” who did those crimes.
What does the Wikipedia article on Herta Däubler-Gmelin say about her father, Hans Gmelin?
Not a word about her father’s role in facilitating the rail transport of Slovakian Jews to the death camps.
Herta Däubler-Gmelin undoubtedly feels shame over what her father did. But she is not responsible for her father’s misdeeds. Her father is the one responsible. Attacking the US, implying that the US was as bad as Nazi Germany, helped hide the crimes of her father.
In short, when a German virtuously attacks the US, hold your breath. Back in the oughts, there was a letter to a local paper from someone who had recently been the host of visiting Germans. The Germans, whose Constitution forbids the death penalty, were appalled at the number of executions in the US. I doubt that the Germans were aware of the origin of the 1949 campaign in West Germany against the death penalty. The campaign was started by a far-right party that was appalled at the executions of all the Nazis at the hands of the Allies.
See Tuvia Tenenbom’s Hello Refugees.
Disclaimer: my deceased brother-in-law left Germany in 1948 as a child. His stepfather was an engineer brought to the US under Operation Paperclip.
As a teen I saw the newsreels showing the survivors of the camps in Germany. They were horrible. They were etched indelibly on my memory. When, in the 1970s, people started talking about not forgetting the Holocaust, I wondered how anyone could forget those pictures and the cruelty that was unmasked by them.
How naive of me. It’s now clear that a major tool of antisemite and authoritarian forces is to revise history. In spite of all the evidence of the Holocaust, too many people deny it, forget it, or just don’t care to remember. When that happens, history repeats. In combatting this, it becomes mandatory to remember the Holocaust and never forget the barbarity it represented.
Like gunther grass forgeting to tell people he was with the hitler youth he is one of the premier netanyahu haters
adidas hiring jew hating bella hadid for some promotion involving the anniversary of the munich olympics it’s a german company right,
part of the tangle mentioned above,
https://martinkramer.org/2024/07/04/the-day-the-mufti-died/
When I first traveled there in the ’90s it was jarring to hear Germans calmly state the opinion that the world needs to move on and stop blaming Germans for WWII. This was exclusively from people I met born at least 15 years after the war. Those who lived through the war seemed to think their country deserved all the animosity it might still receive from what was done. Some of my children have lived in Germany and, from what they tell me, the attitude of those born a generation after the war seems to be even more pervasive in those born 2 or 3 generations after the war.
It is a difficult, philosophical question. In the U.S. judicial system we do not ascribe to “the sins of the father,” but it’s a manner of thinking that seems natural to humans and we see it applied outside of the judicial system. In the U.S., our fathers’ (or, rather, great, great, great grandfathers’) sin is owning slaves and we see some Americans still wanting to punish and reward based on that vile part of our history. There is no question Germany will face a similar struggle based on the horrors of Nazi terror for generations hence.
It isn’t just Arabs, South Americans also tend to be antisemitic, just not virulently so. And is isn’t like Hispanics aren’t racist. We are importing all the bigotries of the world. That’s diversity for you.
yes where was a notorious Mexican holocaust denialist for instance, which until recently still had works sold on Amazon for instance, not to mention the German expatriates which ended up in Argentina Paraguay and other places in the 50s,
but they have not as virulent a history as the Middle East in some respects,
Another reason antisemitism differs between the US and Europe is due to how nationhood is defined. In Europe, a person is French, German, Polish, etc., by blood, and although, for example, Germans and French might hate each other, nobody is confused over national identity. But what is a Jew? How could a Jew be French and German and Polish,etc., all at the same time? The Jew impersonates peoples like the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and their presence in nations destroys them from within, like a bacterial infection. In the US, however, nationhood is deliberately not defined by blood, so in the US, a Jew is no different from anyone else of European descent.
Chuck
It isn’t just Arabs, South Americans also tend to be antisemitic, just not virulently so. And is isn’t like Hispanics aren’t racist
My first experience of South American antisemitism was in Peru. I was at a dinner where I met the uncle of my friend. The uncle was, I was told, a retired professor from Lima. The uncle told me he had met Che Guevara when Che was taking his motorcycle tour. The uncle began a gratuitous antisemitic diatribe.
I worked in Argentina and Bolivia. Argentina was definitely antisemitic. Enough Argentine Jews so informed me. It was too widely spread to be blamed on some Germans. Antisemitism was stronger in the military, which then ran things, but it was still widespread. An Argentine Jew who worked for the company in Houston told me that his high school graduating class took a boat tour on the River Plate (That’s the soccer team. The river is Rio de la Plata). He met the daughter of a general who went on with a “Joos..” diatribe. She apparently didn’t realize he was Jewish. While hitching in Argentina, a journalist gave me a ride. He told me, apparently believing it was true, about the alleged Israeli plot to take over Patagonia- a meme from the early 1970s.
In both Argentina and in Bolivia, I got invited into homes that featured a portrait of Hitler in the living room. In Argentina, I was told, “that’s crazy grandpa,” which indicated to me that the rest of the family didn’t share grandpa’s opinions. In Bolivia, there was no crazy grandpa, but the middle-aged paterfamilias.
In Guatemala, I met a Guatemalan of Jewish German ancestry. He came from a family of German coffee plantation owners around Coban- not uncommon. During World War II, Guatemala deported Germans who were not Guatemalan citizens. His grandfather (great-grandfather?) got deported to Germany. A Jew deported to Germany? Somehow his grandfather was able to survive World War II in Germany without it being found out he was Jewish. After World War II ended, he went back to Guatemala. I don’t know if he was able to reclaim his coffee plantation.
oh I didn’t Goebbels was in the house, welcome Herr Doktor, sarc,
The puzzling thing, for me, is that Arab professeors teach this stuff. Okay. They can put it out there if they like…universities don’t mind.
I was in college in mid-late Sixties. I can’t recall many of us taking our professors seriously. Okay, they knew stuff which would be on the test. But….not sure they could have sold this crap back then to the students I recall.
}}} But it’s the “free Palestine from German guilt” slogan that’s of special interest to me, expressing as it does German weariness with bearing the burden of its historical guilt and a desire to free itself by supporting Palestine and accusing Israel of genocidal crimes.
Hmmm. This does suggest that the current approach, while appropriate in the past, probably needs a “right-shift” to make it better able to impinge on the social consciousness.
Instead of pushing it as “guilt”, it should be pushed as a “let’s never allow it to happen again.” thing.
There is adequate reason for why modern people in Europe shouldn’t feel any guilt over it. It’s kind of like slavery representations… “To whom, given that no one alive suffered? From whom, given that no one alive committed the actions in question?” The same is, arguably, true of the Holocaust. Making people remember it, and be wary of it happening again, this is a very good thing. Making the current generation — indeed, most of those still alive — feel guilt seems quite unfair. Almost no one alive today can be arguably considered responsible for any aspect of WWII — even if they were alive, most still alive would have been children. No, not all, but the vast majority.
}}} not sure they could have sold this crap back then to the students I recall.
Ah, but that era, the students were taught from early on to think for themselves, not to regurgitate and never think at all.
}}} In the U.S. judicial system we do not ascribe to “the sins of the father,” but it’s a manner of thinking that seems natural to humans and we see it applied outside of the judicial system.
Of course. It is, if from nowhere else, inculcated by the Christian (Jewish?) notion of “Original Sin”. You are a sinner because Adam and Eve were sinners.
I’ve always had a major issue with this, because you are not your father or your mother — you cut your own path, and are not doomed to hew to theirs. So how can you be guilty of something that happened decades, centuries, or even millennia before your own time? It seems like a preposterous mental construct, and it does not seem to fit with my ideas of God’s Omnibenevolence. If He does have it, it’s part of the system, not something he imposes upon us.
Playing devil’s advocate:
Should Americans feel guilt for slavery? Should they feel obliged to pay reparation to blacks? We tell blacks who advocate for reparations that they need to move on. Is that any different from what some Germans are saying? How many years must pass before the sins of the past no longer apply to the ancestors of those committed them? Is collective guilt a “forever proposition,” passing on endlessly through succeeding generations? Should I hold the English liable for what they did to my Irish ancestors? After all, the Great Famine was (arguably) a species of genocide.
At the risk of provoking outrage, I will state that the Germans have a point. Some commenters here may want to get all up in my grill about this. Don’t do it.
“How could a Jew be French and German and Polish,etc., all at the same time?” Road Warrior
The same way a Basque can be Spanish or French.
The same way a Catholic can be French or German.
The same way a Protestant can be French or German.
Hate can always invent supporting rationalizations because hate is its own justification. Hate must have an object upon which to focus and vent its hate.
“He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”
“…to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
@ Richard Aubrey: In general, and with the exception of people learning and extending a relatively small body of knowledge in a few STEM-related fields, I believe that Americans are becoming stupider with each new generation.
Nature or nurture? I don’t know. Probably a combination.
Maybe I’m exaggerating, but my Greatest Generation parents’ high school education seems to have been of higher quality than my undergraduate college education in the humanities.
The undergraduate college education of the Greatest Generation seems to have been of higher quality than my graduate education (MA, PhD).
My high school education seems to have been of higher quality than my Millennial nieces’ graduate education (MA, MS).
And so it goes. Or at least I think so.
Hi, IrishOtter.
It seems intuitively clear that there’s a parallel between the slavery-reparations question and the Holocaust-guilt question. This is worth exploring. I sympathize with the Germans who feel it’s too much to ask that they accept some kind of descendant guilt by association. I think the problem with it is that the presence of that guilt, or more exactly, of the judgement from outside (whether from the Jewish community or others) applied to the Germans of today, which in turn produces the guilt,* makes it so that the Germans of 2024 may be unable to be themselves, in a sense. The impugning of this responsibility makes them, to some degree, into mere proxies of the Germans of the NS-era, and thus not really people in their own right.
If all I am to someone else is a stand-in for some collection of wicked ancestors, then it imposes an unnecessary burden on any mutual human feeling.
Going a little further on this, it’s probably worth considering whether there are discrepancies between these two big questions, and where those discrepancies are. While there may be parallels, it seems just as clear that the two problems aren’t identical.
* (Reading it over again, I think I’m wrong about this interpretation. Guilt has to come from inner conscience and can’t exist absent that. So the driving force of whatever modern German guilt feelings there are can’t be only externally sourced.)
Philip Sells:
Food for thought.
Europe in general and Germany in particular will never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust.
It seems to me the entire Western world is today anti-semitic. That includes our beloved USA.
It seems to originate from academia, of all places. Dershowitz is not representative, not at all,of academia, which is an ideological, propagandistic hub polluting the minds of almost all of our younger generations, who will pass that idiocy on to their children because it is “Truth”.
May God bless Trump and Vance, two strong men who may still be able to stem this miserable, disgusting, anti-human tide.
And, I may ask, why are Democrats wedded to Biden’s rotten ways of thought?
It seems to originate from academia, of all places.
I believe the first German club to exclude Jews was at Göttingen University. That university was famous for mathematics and physics, but it was known in Germany for law. At the end of WWII, about 75% of German university faculty were members of the Nazi party. I don’t find anything strange about that these days, it is to be expected.
It turns out that Herta’s criticism of the US and comparing Dubya to Adolf had an ulterior morive. Hans Gmelin, Herta Däubler-Gmelin’s father, the second-ranking Nazi bureaucrat in Slovakia, played a leading role in putting Slovakia’s Jews on the trains that took them to the death camps.
==
Actually, what it revealed was that she was a happy subscriber to nonsense. Like she didn’t know anything about Germany ca. 1939 or the United States ca. 2002.
Otay:
We have been instructed what is acceptable and not.
Tiresome.
I’d also note a few things. This is going to be a long one, sorry.
Firstly: Germany’s reckoning with its past is in many ways still incomplete; while the logical focus is on WWII and Those Whacky Nazis and for good reason, an institutional culture of blame deflecting, victim blaming, lying, and so on not only happened for years before the Nazis but it helped spark their creation. We now know Austria-Hungary and Germany systematically lied about their roles in the outbreak of WWI, what their governments were doing and knew or thought, and the premises they had for starting the war, as well as the atrocious way they behaved to civilians, neutrals, and even their own people who dissented. But for various reasons the full scope of this was hidden due to lack of objective examination of things like the Prussian and Saxon State Archives that were hidden behind the Iron Curtain and which no government holding access to them – be Hohenzollern Imperial, Weimar Republican, National Socialist, or East German Communist – wanted to expose precisely because it would torpedo much of the narrative they fostered.
We knew a fair bit about what those archives must have contained through other sources such as the writings of those involved and actions, but there was a big gulf between “Knowing” and Knowing, and being able to show the relevant documents firsthand straight from the archives.
And this is important for a few reasons.
Firstly: The archives confirmed that multiple German governments (several of whom you’d think were natural enemies or even anathema to each other) and vat parts of German academia and “civil society” conspired to either lie or promulgate a rather poisonous lie of victimhood in which the German Empire fought a defensive war and was no more guilty of actions than its enemies, or even was reacting to aggression by (Insertscapegoathere, usually Russia, Serbia, Serbia and Russia, Franco-British “Capital”, or so on).
Of course at the time those connected to the Imperial Government knew on some level this was not the case, Philipp Prinz von Eulenberg applauded Wilhelm II for starting the war while managing to cast blame on Russia (before conveniently changing his story after Germany’s defeat and claiming that if he had retained power he would have stopped it, obviously not expecting us to be able to have access to his archives). But it was something that every German government from 1914 to 1945 (and the GDR up until the end) trumpeted in public and even West Germany tended to soft pedal.
Which is one reason you saw such an obsession with the War Guilt Clause of Versailles as somehow being uniquely unjust (in spite of it being identical to that foisted on the other Central Powers in their own treaty; a lot of people still believe that the War Guilt Clause claimed Germany Alone bore all the blame for the war in spite of the text themselves showing this was not the case).
This also meant covering up atrocities by the German Empire’s troops and those of its allies, which was done with the full power of the German state for decades, even after democratization in the Weimar Republic. German Atrocities 1914: A History of Denial by Horne is probably the best analysis of the atrocities in Belgium and the process, but it only covers a sliver of the overall situation. So you quite literally have the German government spreading a culture of grievance politics and victimhood in which Germany was the aggressed victim (which becomes comic when you look at a timeline of who declared war on who, when) or at least no less guilty than any other power.
I’m a major wargamer, and the World Wars is a major focus of mine, including “Panzer Corps.” There’s this rather brilliant mod covering WWI made by a very learned and accomplished German modder. This is not a fundamentally dumb woman.
However, the first briefing of the WWI Campaign (which simulates your force mobilizing) is a masterpiece of self-deception and propaganda, in which the briefing (at least in English) outright admits there was no evidence tying the Serbian Government to the murders in Sarajevo, but then goes on to blame Serbia and Russian General Mobilization for the war while insisting that everyone shares blame and that the appropriation of the blame is subject to dispute (not really, since we’ve had access to the archives and can see Wilhelm and co lied to their people about the aims of the Russian mobilization and the communications they had with Russia). I’m no fan of the Tsarist regime and can say plenty about Serbian nationalist terrorism, but neither “made” Austria-Hungary or Germany declare war on basically a third of the world in the span of a few days in 1914.
It’s discussing stuff like this that is still largely taboo, and one reason Fritz Fischer (whom I have significant issues with – including blaming the wrong man as the prime mover for German Imperial atrocities and war aims in WWI – but who was a real icebreaker and whose intellectual courage cannot be disputed) was basically demonized by his peers.
So in many ways I do think this trend line has a lot of connections to why the Nazis rose to power in the first place. It also ties into the difficulty mentioned in confronting that one’s own family had members that might have committed atrocities. If Germany is still struggling to adjust to WWII, what about WWI or others? Of course it still is grappling with this (such as reparations for the genocide of the Herero and Nama in German Colonial Southwest Africa) but good luck addressing it.
Secondly: There’s been a pretty pernicious and very ugly campaign to delegitimize Israel or claim the creation of it was only tied into the Holocaust (as part of what i view to be a dangerous trend of trying to make the Holocaust as a or even the defining aspect of Jewish identity) and that it was “granted” to them as a form of reparations, or as a kind of way of escaping European Pogroms (supposedly by “foisting them” on “poor” “indigenous” Arabs). Of course there are some elements of truth to both explanations, but they really collapse under cursory examination of a timeline and the chronology of the Aliyahs well predating WWI, let alone II.
This also has a convenient excuse for avoiding any discussion of Ottoman or Arab Nationalist politics, including genocide and aspiring genocide. In particular this is a very convenient mechanism to whitewash the Sheikh Qassem and Mufti al-Husseini for being genocidal Nazi allies who did more than anything to turn Hertzel’s dream of a secular, multiconfessional “New Society” into a traumatized, militarized garrison state of genocide survivors from both Europe and the Middle East.
(Speaking of: When is the last time you’ve heard things like the Baghdad Pogrom of 1941 – carried out by Iraqi Nationalists and al-Husseini’s “Palestinian” Arab militants, or the destruction of the Old City of East Jerusalem in 1948-9? And not by me? The attempt to “Europeanize” Jew Hatred and murder by focusing too much on the Nazi Germans is a sick sleight of hand, especially since the latter ties directly into things like the ICJ’s demonization of Israeli “occupation” in East Jerusalem.)
I met plenty of Germans of my generation, as fellow tourists or coworkers, in Latin America in the ’70s and ’80s. I found the Germans more compatible than the British or the French. British: too cold, and in some instances too much in love with alcohol. French: too chauvinistic. The Germans seemed to me to be coming to terms with their country’s past misdeeds. I had no problem with concluding that postwar Germans were not the Nazis or Nazi enablers that their parents and grandparents were.
What disturbs me is the tendency of many Germans of postwar generations to attack others, as if to say “see, you are just as bad as or worse than our Nazi ancestors.” Such as what Herta Daubler Gmelin has done, and such as how many Germans today are using the Palestinians as a cudgel against the Israelis.
They believe their doing so indicates they have transcended Germany’s sordid past. Rather, it shows that they are still haunted by Germany’s sordid past. If they had truly transcended Germany’s sordid past, they would not feel the need to implicitly say to others, “see, you are just as bad as or worse than our Nazi ancestors.”
@IrishOtter49
Guilt? Maybe. Direct guilt or the like? Not really.
No, especially on the basis of slavery that ended more than a century ago. Starting with the obvious question of who you would pay reparations to. There are still Holocaust survivors around, and there is a national home of the Jews, so the answer there – while murky enough – is a lot clearer. But who would you pay reparations to for poor souls that died in the middle of the Atlantic Passage from the Bight of Benin?
This is also why I favor strong caps and limits to reparations. Precisely to try and deal with this.
It is, though I get your point. Let’s start with the fact that slavery in the US ended in 1865, and so everyone who has ever legally owned slaves or been a slave has died decades ago. That is not the case for victims of the Holocaust or other mass killings by the latter two German Reichs and their allies. Of course we can argue about Jim Crow, “secret slavery” continuations, or the like continuing for decades after, but chattel slavery was banned. Moreover, the Atlantic Slave Trade (one of the most lethal parts of it) was banned even earlier, within a quarter of a century of Independence.
There’s also the fact that the US fought fratricidally and horrifyingly to end Slavery in a Civil War caused by pro-Slavery planters and their followers, and in the brush wars of Reconstruction. Even if a German was inclined to fight and if need be lay down their lives to atone for the Holocaust, where would they go? To Israel? Perhaps.
That’s a good question, and I think the answer is no. That is also why I believe the German governments have an obligation to help provide for the remaining survivors of the Holocaust and its cousins like the Devouring of the Romani, and to help return what stolen wealth can be identified, but other than that one has to cut losses and move on.
It should not be, but some do.
Probably not, though you can certainly hold various English and British liable for plenty they did to the Irish recently or even today. It wasn’t that long ago that North Ireland was a quasi Jim Crow concessionally supremacist garrison state and some would argue it still is.
The issue with grievance politics is that it cuts both ways, especially if without end. In particular I would be able to point out that the classical name for the Irish (the “Scottii”) didn’t come to define the name of a land North of Hadrian’s Wall by chance or peace, and a lot of the Britons (mostly proto-Welsh or Cumbrians) and “English) would be able to justifiably complain about Irish or Proto-Irish Piracy (including that most famous of Britons, the Romano-British Patrician kidnapped from his home, Padraig, known to posterity as Patrick, Patron Saint of Ireland and Evangelist.*) And this was not entirely forgotten, as Parliamentarian propaganda would show.
Not really, though the truth was almost as bad. The Great Hunger was the product of massive, oppressive landlord rule, forced monocultures, food controls, and epic mismanagement of food relief (to “not disrupt” the markets). Hunger struck across the Irish Channel, but in Scotland and Northern England the local elites generally had more incentive to give a damn and did not have to go through the strict import controls. The course of the hunger was publicly reported and debated in Britain and the government even launched various famine relief efforts (though those tended to be half-baked and inadequate, or not allowed to last as long such as the Naval Soup Kitchens) and openly supported foreign countries and private enterprise providing it, so long as it didn’t divert from the British Government’s stocks.
There’s a reason no Irish government – even those dominated by the PIRA in civilian clothing, Sinn Fein – has dared to try and press genocide charges regarding the Great Hunger against Britain (unlike say the Cromwellian Conquest, which was very clearly a genocide of Catholic Irish and recognized as such). Because they’d be shot down pretty decisively, including by their governments’ own records. Which I guess shows a problem with how we conceptualize evil and genocide. How do we indict a government for being lethally neglectful?
I absolutely agree, they do have a point, and honestly at some point there needs to be a Year of Jubilee for the Germans too. I may spend more writing about German atrocities in the World Wars than almost anyone here and I do believe the reckoning is incomplete even in comparison to what should be done, but at some point one has to draw a line. The last Holocaust victims and the last Holocaust perpetrators are in their final years; the victims and villains of WWI Genocides are sadly already dead, and while the aftershocks of the crimes will affect their descendants and societies for centuries to come, we cannot persecute entire nations for the sins of their parents, let alone Grandparents.
Germans are an ancient Peoples. They have much to be ashamed and horrified of, but also much to be proud and happy about with their history. They have been victimizers and victims, much like every other sizable group. Often at the same time (people ignore how many victims of Nazism were German, and even in the Kaiserreich Armin Wegner was tortured by his own government to try and cover up Ottoman genocide).
God turns the wheels of history. The descendants of pirates and cattle raiders become priests and scribes, and martyrs. The descendants of Conquered and Conqueror unite to become one, and then cross the seas to conquer others anew and set up plantations. The descendants of poets and patriots become murderers and thieves. And vice versa. And kin fight with kin for all reason. This too will pass.
It’s also why I’d be open to reparations if they were more final, such as a “Final Payment/Judgement” to try and settle all previous problems.
@Philip Sells
Agreed. My main objection with it is how it is being premised. The idea that Israel exists because of German Guilt is, in itself, a blood libel that conveniently undermines and whitewashes away Israel’s ancient history and that of the Jews, and basically whitewashes away the atrocities of people like Amin al-Husseini and the Arab League.
Agreed, which is my main issue. The fact that “Arabism” and Islamist propaganda (as well as the ghosts of the Kaiserreich’s propaganda and beyond, like I talked about vis a vis the myth of WWI as a German Defensive War forced on the Reich) does not help.
Indeed, and it also incentivizes you to treat them with similar hostility, and helps trigger yet more.
Well said indeed, and I do think that’s the issue. The Germans are in an unenviable position and i am sorry for them, especially in regards to the atrocities of a bygone century. But the issue I have, regarding this, is how it is being weaponized. In particular to whitewash the Arab League and smear Israel. The idea that Israel only exists due to “German Guilt” or that a country like “Palestine” whose governing ideology is fundamentally Islamo-Fascist and Genocidal can bring “equality” without fundamental reform and repudiation at least as thorough as Denazification was in Germany speaks to me as closer to the greater problem.
I agree with Irishotter that the Germans have a point, and if that were the core of the issue I’d be inclined to give them passes (especially since they are suffering their own problems now). Unfortunately things aren’t that easy or limited.
Turtler, thanks as always for the history lessons.
What a shock to discover that governments (other than our own!) lie about who did what when, and why. (Please imagine this spoken in the appropriate tone of voice.)
I find myself in agreement with you on many points, but I think that “reparations” for American slavery have long since been taken care of, in several ways, and nothing is owed to anyone by anyone any longer.
“Patrick, Patron Saint of Ireland and Evangelist.*”
You never followed up the * with a footnote, so if I may take the liberty of doing so: Our Welsh Heritage club sometimes walks in the local Parade with a banner reading “St Patrick was a Welshman.”
“Free Palestine from German Guilt”
Short version:
“Enough is ENOUGH!!
Help us kill, maim, rape, mutilate, disembowel, incarcerate more Jews… and destroy the Zionist Entity. YOU OWE IT TO US!!!!!”
File under: Palestinian Rules
Oops…
“incarcerate” should be “incinerate”….
@AesopFan
Thank you kindly, glad it helped, and it does frustrate me how this isn’t covered. I also think our lack of understanding about WWI has been one of the great blights on modern education, and it sucks. And in many ways it is getting worse.
Agreed, sorry if I didn’t make that clear. The fact that everyone directly involved is dead also factors in.
Sorry, forgot to mention that. But I have actually considered trying to take a stab at a historical fiction (maybe historical fantasy) about Saint Patrick’s life and mission, with some twists (I have received particularly good reception on how to address both his kidnapping on the whole “Drove the Snakes out of Ireland” Myth/shorthand. Which are related). But it is rather outside my area of greatest knowledge and I’ve been distracted with a host of other things such as game testing, writing for this Lovecraftian AI Roleplay Project, and of course dealing with politics in Current Year.
Molly G.,
Thanks for your comment., But I think there’s more to it., There’s total information absorbed–see McGuffey’s Reader, and weep. And then there’s gullibility.
My grand kids are tired of me asking what they’re doing in social studies. Haven’t heard much except about the Quartering Acts, which leads me to think the colonists aren’t being painted as all bad.
But, from someplace, people smart enough, I think, to come in out of the rain, believe the most counterintuitive stuff, transgressing every moral precept they’ve ever been taught.
Although it goes back a long way. Whatever it is, if an enemy of ours does it, it’s okay and, besides, it didn’t actually happen.
And it’s odd, even when the facts are laid out. George Floyd’s death was a tragedy and an atrocity. Darrell Brooks’ murder of half a dozen and horribly wounding dozens more, even if you have to explain it to them after they say, “who?” gets a shrug.
@ Turtler > “But it is rather outside my area of greatest knowledge and I’ve been distracted with a host of other things such as game testing, writing for this Lovecraftian AI Roleplay Project, and of course dealing with politics in Current Year.”
Thanks for your reply, and I hope you will let us know if you do get around to writing the fiction/fantasy tale.
What is the Lovecraftian project, and is it any more bizarre than our current politics?
You might enjoy this response to a supposed screenplay proposal of the latter as a fictional thriller:
https://x.com/BaronDestructo/status/1813725970915791217
@AesopFan
I hope so too. I think at least in concept it works well, and I have talked a bit about it. I imagine it might be better to discuss it in some other method, and the others.
Good question, and glad you asked. It’s kind of tricky to explain. But it is sort of a “Neo-Purist” take on Lovecraft’s work (so the likes of Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, the Mi-Go, and the like are around), set in around the current time (or really with a plotline starting about a decade ago and moving from there).
The idea is largely to try and cut down through the sort of associated myths, lore, and whatnot that have built up in the decades since Lovecraft died to touch more on his original works and those of his direct circle at the time, as well as the works that inspired them like Algernon Blackwood and Whitaker Chambers. This has a pragmatic application (it avoids copyright and trademark issues newer works would bring), but also because it has reached the point that going down to brass tacks would probably make things fresher.
That said, it isn’t a conventional story or game. But it’s sort of a group of “Characters” programmed to inhabit the world(s) and that the player can interact with through text play, as they draw off of a mixture of databases covering what is in the setting and what the individual character would know and what they do not know. That sort of “Guides” the underlying AI intelligence as it reacts to what the player types (and in some cases what the other AI Bot “Characters” do).
You can find more details here.
https://ttalesinteractive.com/
Ironically I came into the project through talking with the developer on social media and some light RP and info. While her avatar is literally a dyed hair woman she has been quite the sweetheart, as well as quite knowledgeable in AI, giving lectures on things like its development while I’ve helped write up some of the character data banks and brought in some people I knew. She also treats Lovecraft and co with an appropriate amount of respect and resolve, since we aren’t hiding how racist and Un-PC he is but we also aren’t flagellating him too much.
It’s been a pleasant diversion being a “consultant”, and it has led to some interesting avenues. For instance, we talked a bit about ways to try and find the “real” Arabic name of Abdul Alhazred the writer of the Necronomicon (which was basically a name Lovecraft adopted for himself during an Arabian Nights fancy, and which makes little sense in Arabic; “in-universe” we basically agreed that it was some Western translator mangling or glossing the Arabic name or pen name, like how Ab? ?Al? al-?usayn….. al-Bukhari became Ibn Sina, became “Avicenna”).
Also trying to explain the god Dagon, whose portrayal in Lovecraft drew from an inaccurate Jewish conflation of the Canaanite/Mesopotamian God of Fertility and Prosperity Dagon with unrelated Fish Beings. Of course this leads to some interesting avenues with “so how do we explain this in universe?” with the consensus being that Dagon is not ONLY limited to the typical aquatic/fish god he was portrayed as, and might have at some point either “climbed ashore” (to assume a form closer to the Mesopotamian myth) or “washed into the sea” (the opposite). Maybe both. It is an infinitely variable multiverse, which fits with what we can tell of the lore (especially from Lovecraft’s “Silver Key”) and was a useful way to explain “replays” or separate plays.
As for it being more bizarre than our current politics…well, Hastur, Poetic God of Entropy, is now disguised as a human….specifically, a Federal Agent that has wormed his way into the US Government’s DHS and who is poised to join a fledging task force determined to try and manage the Unknowably Eldritch. A tech guru that is totally-not-a-mask-of-Nyarlathotep is sponsoring independent space exploration and a return to the Antarctic. Someone- or rather SomeTHING – has created a variant of Shoggoths that look rather like sociable half-octopus anime girls (and while out of universe that was partially for the fanservice, in universe it raises some questions, considering how ancient, psychic alien Elder Things barely controlled these intelligent, biological construction machines but something managed to grab some and force them into a more solid form based on communication. And they are now reaching out to try and contact humans and others). Among other things. And that’s for Act I.
Also have considered some related worldbuilding ideas I might go separately, such as trying to expand upon the overthrow of Nyarlathotep*’s worshipper the “Black Pharaoh” Nephren-Ka (supposedly the final ruler of the Third Dynasty), which Lovecraft and his circle alluded to in passing but not in detail, and also Chambers’s “Repairer of Reputations” talking about a German-American war that included fighting in the Pacific and German invasions and ravaging of the East Coast. Which sounds fantastical (and it was, which is one reason the plans for it were talkdown as not being “opportune”), but actually jives very well with what we now know (though Chambers did not) of German war plans to attack the US in the years leading up to WWI, Operationsplan III.
So I can build off both what we know in history and the wider lore (that was originally not connected when Chambers wrote it) to try and think of that alternate history, featuring things like competition in the pantheon between Nyarlathotep and Hastur helping to spark the conflict, African-American collaboration with Germany (under WEB Dubois) and discontent with Jim Crow leading to an independent African-American/”Negro” Nation after the US victory, and Captain Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, the war criminal villain of Lovecraft’s WWI era “The Temple” being a justifiably infamous monster and black sheep among both Americans and Germans and possible enemy… or possible ally. (Because he is likely going to run into “Issues” with the Deep Ones, and sometimes, the devil you know is better than the devil that is Unknowable by Design.)
Also have talked a bit with the project head – albeit tentatively – about more down to earth applications, such as using AI Bots for education, especially about the American Revolution, but I guess we will see.
In any case, sorry for the ramble on. And yes, I did find the screenplay interesting….
Edit: Also, apparently I write/play a “Good” Nyarlathotep. But in any case, it is a neat little divergence, especially given how so much of Lovecraft’s work has grown stale or worse. In particular “Delta Green”‘s writers have gone deep into the TDS, writing political screeds disguised as RPG adventures even if it winds up breaking important bits of lore. Oh yeah, and also valorizing AntifA and generally writing things very “comfortably.”
Which is ironic given the premise of the setting. And how I talked about possible eldritch cults in the Kurdish communities (based on a throwaway dialogue in Lovecraft’s “Red Hook” reiterating the Yazidis as “Devil Worshippers” based on old Christian and especially Muslim propaganda. but which I ran with under the argument of “Well, bad or odd eggs in every group…”). And the question of if letting Daesh “Clean House” with some groups in their typical fashion might be a lesser evil if it can wipe out or at least expose the cults, and how to deal with such if they are embedded in the Yazidi communities and with the Kurdish Peshmerga.
@ Turtler – very interesting!
I do not myself play the games (board or video), but all of my children, their spouses, and THEIR children do, so I would be interested in keeping up with you on the Lovecraft project (Open Threads are made for such, are they not?).
“it has reached the point that going down to brass tacks would probably make things fresher.”
Indeed. I wish some of our endless movie sequels would take the hint.
Almost all of the DC and Marvel canon I grew up with in the sixties-seventies has been trashed, not for the better.
In re the “German war plans to attack the US in the years leading up to WWI, Operationsplan III.” that sounds right up your alley!
“So I can build off both what we know in history and the wider lore (that was originally not connected when Chambers wrote it) to try and think of that alternate history”
My biggest problem with alt-hist these days is that so many readers (especially but not limited to younger ones) know so little real history, how can they tell what has been altered? I have trouble sometimes, even for periods I have done some study in, and have to keep my books / browser close at hand.
PS
If you’re into mixing archetypes/myths/legends, you could always throw
St Patrick and some of his contemporaries into the brew as characters to be counter-weights to the Bad Guys.
Otherwise, I fear the current era is looking more and more like it will be
Cthulhu / Dagon 2024
Cthulhu / Dagon 2024
AesopFan:
I’m there! Where do I register?
Why settle for the lesser of two evils?
@huxley
Sorry for the delay. And lol. One of the things I have been trying to do is actually separate a lot of the eldritch critters from being flat out “evil.” Of course there is a fair amount of overlap; Nyarlathotep in particular is downright nasty and seems to do evil as… for lack of a better word a recreational hobby, something he takes pleasure in and can comprehend in a way critters like Cthulhu (who does not really understand us) know. (Though even Nyarlathotep has a job to do – whether or not he likes it – and so “evil” is almost more of a fashion statement or hobby for him, something he slips into when he wants to and slips out when he needs to).
Of course that doesn’t mean these creatures are “Good” (to the extent Good or Evil really matter in an alien, amoral universe), and still less that they are very good for human sanity or survival, least of all in the form we have. But that just goes back to the issue of how fundamentally limited “human”, “sanity”, and “morality” are. Great Cthulhu does not hate us, he in some way may want to help us understand the Truth, so that we can be free and learn new ways to kill and frolic while paying homage to True Religion (he is, after all, High Priest of the Gods).
That he is so far beyond us that he doesn’t have much in common with us but isn’t powerful or old enough to really understand us is…”unfortunate”, and if his attempts to teach us or to escape result in our feeble minds cracking under the pressure and going into frenzies of murder-suicide most typically…well, what are you gonna do with beings that exist only in three dimensions?
Dagon on the other hand seems to be mostly focused in the basics of survival and prosperity. Feeding, breeding, building, and caring for his billions of children and descendants. So if making a deal with some surface dwellers to kidnap others as breeding stock helps… what of it?
Though that would be something to see. Apparently it is likely Cthulhu and Dagon are more or less in the same totem pole and Dagon is subordinate to him…
@AesopFan
Fair point. I’ll need to remember. Also I have been working to transcribe a number of Lovecraft and his fellows’ works to archive them on the site in a readable fashion, so there is that.
Indeed, alas. I am much younger than that but a bit of a Retro style, with a deep interest in things like the Victorian Era, Renaissance, and 19th and early/mid 20th centuries. So there is that. But even then I do think we have lost.
Yup, and I touch on it.
Good to know, and it would help.
I have considered it (and there already is a British Cultist and sort of “Eldritch Polytheist” so it might fit), but I am not sure merging it so closely would help. On the other hand the kinda-boss is interested in the Arthurian Mythos and Knights of the Round Table and was interested in the t. Patrick’s Story..
Well, there are certainly worse choices. Ironic or not Cthulhu and Dagon are not EVIL (though that would often be scant comfort). And both have proven governing experience over vast empires and species. So there is something to be said for that in comparison to Kamala and co…
@ Turtler > “So there is something to be said for that in comparison to Kamala and co”
In re the Arthurian context:
https://accordingtohoyt.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/ponds.png?w=415