Posted on 08/28/2014 3:47:25 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
In a recent column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, a German native discussed how his country has dealt with the guilt over the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust. He provided a lesson all Americans should learn.
Franziska Holzschuh is a reporter for the German daily newspaper Nurnberger Nachrichten and is on assignment with The Inquirer as part of the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship Program. His hometown is Nuremberg, where the initial laws singling out the Jews for persecution were passed and where the war crimes trials were held at the conclusion of World War II.
Mr. Holzschuh said that during his school years, he and his fellow German citizens were repeatedly exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust and taught about the responsibility Germany bears for allowing it to happen.
He wrote that from grade 7 until grade 13, discussing the German atrocities was part of the curriculum in both history and social studies. “We watched movies showing emaciated victims of concentration camps and piles of gold hammered out of the teeth of the murdered. We read autobiographies, and even spoke to a survivor of the Shoah.”
Acknowledging he accepts that neither he nor his parents did anything wrong, “World War II and the Holocaust forever will be part of our heritage and it defines my relationship with my country.” He says he would never profess that he loves his country and singing the national anthem makes him uncomfortable.
“Many people feel as I do. Although we are not guilty nor liable for what happened during the Nazi era, we believe we bear a lot of responsibility for what our country did,” he writes. “And we will for decades.”
The acknowledgement of that responsibility is the key to Mr. Hozschuh’s treatise. Among other things, his home city of Nuremburg has built the International Nuremburg Principals Academy “which is dedicated to enforcing peace through interdisciplinary research and the training of jurists, journalists, and human-rights activists.”
Too many Americans refuse to face up to the atrocities that marked so many periods in the history of this country. The most egregious horror – and perhaps the least discussed – is our treatment of the Native Americans, whose systematic slaughter over the years amounted to genocide. Some texts claim that a total of 5,000,000 to 114,000,000 were killed.
According to the Kahentinetha Horn of MNN Mohawk Nation News, “Unlike post-war Germany, North Americans refuse to acknowledge this genocide. Almost one and a quarter million Kanien'ke:haka (Mohawk) were killed off leaving us only a few thousand survivors.”
Indeed, the treatment of the Native American here in the United States provided a model for Hitler in his aspirations to eradicate the Jewish population in Europe. Lia Mandelbaum wrote in the Jewish Journal, “Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”
Bet you didn’t read that in your history books during school here in America.
The tragedy in Ferguson, MO, puts a spotlight on another group in the U.S. that has faced persecution and the threat of genocide for centuries, African-Americans. Teenager Michael Brown was shot at least six times by a Ferguson police officer, despite the fact the officer in question was in no imminent peril and it appeared as if Brown was trying to surrender.
Taken singly, Brown’s shooting is its own horror. But it is clear that one can’t view the atrocities suffered by our black citizens through the prism of a single incident. Journalist, writer, and photographer Adam Hudson reported in a recent article that “Police officers, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extrajudicially killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012, according to a recent study. This means a black person was killed by a security officer every 28 hours. The report notes that it's possible that the real number could be much higher.”
Daily Kos, a highly respected online newspaper, reports that “with stand-your-ground laws in 24 states, the number of blacks who are physically abused or murdered by cowboy civilians is expected to multiply every hour. In these same states, there has been a 360 percent increase in private citizens harassing black males without legal authority. Innocent blacks profiled, mistreated, and abused by civilians in jobs, housing, and healthcare mirrors the indiscriminate assassinations by Hitler’s Nazi brown shirts.”
“New conservative politicians [have] rebranded racism with the same rude and obnoxious behavior of the old south,” the same author writes. “In the new South, an innocent Trayvon Martin was killed under the ruse of vigilante justice.”
When one envisions “rude and obnoxious behavior,” the most prominent name that comes to mind is Rush Limbaugh, often branded as the unofficial leader of the Republican Party. Fox News, widely considered a wing of the Republican Party, “actively exploits the race angle by speculating that otherwise non-racial events are examples of racial hate crimes,” according to MediaMatters, an online blog that monitors how news is covered.
Until America begins to examine and accept the atrocities it has committed, the home-grown holocausts will continue.
In my novel, McCurry’s War, which takes place in the late 1960s, I describe a university study group whose mission it is to help heal the wounds once Germany is reunified and insure a Holocaust could never happen again. The group decides that a federal, cabinet-level human relations commission should be established to create educational programs to promote mutual respect for the views of others as well as understanding and tolerance. The group emphasizes the only way this could achieve any kind of success would be to create educational material for all age groups in the school system.
I recognize that with a Republican Party whose majority don’t believe in climate change, a majority of whom don’t believe in evolution, and whose leaders in Congress block action on civil rights and immigration reform, America is very unlikely to acknowledge its own holocausts. As a result, it is going to continue to lack moral authority in its pronouncements on the repressive regimes in Russia, Syria, North Korea and China. The Xinhua news service, virtually an arm of the Chinese government, published an op ed during the height of the military style crackdown on the protestors in Ferguson that stated, “Obviously, what the United States needs to do is to concentrate on solving its own problems rather than always pointing fingers at others.”
I am saddened by what America has become. I may still love this country, but I don’t like it very much. I am uncomfortable when pledging allegiance or singing America the Beautiful. However, my allegiance to what this country professes to stand for hasn’t waned. I am not about to “love it or leave it.” What I am going to do is to continue to do my part in working for change. And you, dear reader, must do your part. Let’s start the change this year by taking our protest to the polls on November 4 and vote these repressive Republicans out of office and begin our own healing process.
*******
Chuck Thompson is a former Middletown Township supervisor, journalist and marketing consultant. He has worked on a number of political campaigns and most recently was a team staging leader for the Obama campaign. He has published his first novel, McCurry’s War, which is based on his experience as a voice intercept operator in Berlin in the late ‘60s. Contact him at chuckthompson@comcast.net.
This was an estimate of what happened over the course of more than 400 years. Not say 4 or 5 years of final solution. However, as attrocious as it was, it’s not the same as what the nazis did. The Nazis’ mission wasn’t putting Jews on the reservation, it was to kill every last one.
Just another self loathing leftist asshat projecting his own self hate on the rest of us.
Different tribes were at war with each other.
The Sioux were more than happy to help the fed. gov. kill hundreds of Sac including women and children at the Battle Of Bad Axe in 1833 just down river from where I live. Many Indian tribes were peaceful, and many Indian tribes were fierce warriors....just like all the other peoples of the earth.
The difference between guilty feelings and true moral guilt is lost on too many, but these are mutually exclusive concepts, as feelings of guilt and the state of being legally or morally guilty before law rarely automatically go together.
Because the Left has a blind spot when it comes to moral guilt altogether, while at the same time it's practitioners trade almost exclusively in shame, the clear distinction is a challenge to their entire worldview.
This sounds like Rep-D Major Owens claim that 400,000,000 IIRC African slaves died on the trip over and that to this day sharks swam the slave trade routes looking for chum.
Comparing America to the Third Reich is a tired old leftist tool. Just like this jerk.
Oh, and if you reject the notion of `global warning’, then beware, infidel, fatwa is about to be pronounced on you.
Guess I’ll amble over to Whole Foods wearing my Vietnam vet cap & see if I can elicit angry stares from greying ponytails of either sex. This Kos creep sounds like he’s one of them.
They exist only in the fevered imaginations of leftist historians who constructed the myth of the progressive Indians living in huge cities. Of course, in reality the huge cities didn't exist, and there are no remains of over 100,000,000 Indians.
These leftist historians are kin to the afro-centrist "historians" who claim ancient Egypt was a black civilization from which the Greeks stole everything they knew.
Another fake but accurate meme. It’s the seriousness of the charge. It’s just another Rev Wright diatribe, another Barry Sotero dream to fulfill.
Lol. Freepers are the best and brightest!
If he wants to examine the idiocy of mindless idolatry and idiotic tolerance, all he has to do is look at the support for “O” as a Presidential candidate, as President and also as leader of the free world who daily and hourly breaks promises to allies, ignores lawlessness and himself is the primary PRACTIONER of political lawlessness!!!
Oh, that craaaaaaaaaazy shark hoax! If only the imaginations of the permanently aggrieved were put to GOOD use.
The estimate is obviously cooked - you’d have to be totally naïve not to believe that. I’m bloody well sick of Indians and their gullible running dogs crying about their less than stellar history - when they were viciously murdering each other, burning up the landscape and generally acting a lot less like a holocaust victim.
I do call it cooked, I also pointed out that this is far from anything close to a “Holocaust” event. 400 years is a long time for a real extermination campaign, if you read my post, I poibted out it’s rediculous compared to the one percent of that time frame spent really focusing on killing every last Jew by the virtue of the Final Solution 1941-1945. It’s far from a deliberate extermination campaign. Unjust and attrocious, but a far different magnitude.
LS - Any thoughts on who is primarily responsible for this bit of propaganda?
I don’t think it was atrocious. I always believed that Indians gave as good as they got. They were a typically indigenous people - brutal and backwards. Unlike a close friend of mine with a degree in American Studies - I do not believe they influenced the Constitution. (Actually, I think she secretly believes they wrote it.)
Can we get a barf alert on this article?
“Theft of land’’? It always surprises me that a people who proudly proclaimed to have no concept of ownership, ‘’owning’’ the land, water and sky, as it were, suddenly start acting as if they’ve been the victims of massive fraud and the land and water they never owned is/was ‘’theirs’’. What a crock.
I don't feel any guilt either. My ancestors were Scott's Irish/German, and immigrated well before WW1, but weren't even in this country during the time of the Indian “genocide”. I'd say that we are already healed.
I'll just mention that the Government totally disrupted the life in the Appalachian area supposedly for the benefit of the citizens living in less than perfect conditions, but actually because developers wanted their land and trees. By and large white folks IIRC. And don't forget that the Irish were facing a lot of discrimination.
A student once said to my husband, you are just punishing me cause I'm black. My husband told him, "I don't want to hear your complaints about white men and prejudice. The white man killed and scalped my ancestors. Get over it." Learn the past, but don't live there. What I say is: Live in the pressent, and do right. This will anger some people and astonish the rest. Can't remember who said some of that.
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