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.
Good point. In fact, the Indians thought they were pulling a fast one by trading the land for blankets and beads, etc.
They thought they were getting something for nothing since everyone knew that you didn’t own the land.
See our numbers, from the latest sources, in “A Patriot’s History of the United States.” This is tripe.
See our sidebar “Did Columbus Kill All the Indians” in our “Patriot’s History of the United States.” The number in the US/Mexico is now put at 15-40m (numbers vary wildly).
Long before Columbus landed, okay he didn’t get to the mainland... the native population was reduced by war and disease amongst themselves. Their population had been reduced from - maybe that many - to much much much less. They may have gone from a more advanced state to one of pretty primitive in a matter of 2 or 3 generations.
THEN the “white man” came....
Er, that’s 15-40m existing, total, in N and Central America
It’s standard leftist drivel. We cover this in our sidebar “Did Columbus Kill All the Indians” in “Patriot’s History of the United States” and my book “48 Liberal Lies” which has a chapter on this.
The German spoke of “decades” of responsibility for the Holocaust. We have had many decades since the end of the Civil War, and many decades since the Civil Rights Acts. I’d say enough decades have passed for everyone to stand on his own two feet. Racism persists, but not all of us are responsible for it. Go after those who actually practice racism.
Er.....I said north of the Rio grande.
Unfortunately, if you look at the sidebar in my book, most demographic historians and demographers don’ t make that distinction. Could be one that I missed. Most of them in their “North American” estimates include modern day Mexico.
I had a sociology prof. in college who was a hysterical (he thought the Bush I admin was trying to murder the Indians) advocate of immense Indian populations in the area of the present U.S. His "specialty" was/is N. American Indians, and he occasionally gets his articles printed in the local rag. He never presented any proof, and I've never seen any proof that Indian populations were any more than 2-3 million. No big cities, no huge stationary populations, no remains of millions of people.
I understand, but I’m telling you that even the numbers of the groups you mention have been steadily revised downward. My point is that TOTAL numbers have been moved downward decade by decade.
Thanks I just looked up your book and plan to buy it.
I won't disagree.
The Deerfield Massacre in the early 1600s showed they had fight in them; they just didn’t have the numbers. They played an active role before and throughout the Revolution (I’ve seen the site of the massacre at Ellenville NY where they joined with Tories); afterwards it was just a slow push westward for them...
There certainly is no justification for evicting them from it, even if they were just “borrowing it” from Mother Earth and Father Moon...
I’ve been to Deerfield and seen the burial mound there. Quite sad - beautiful country.
Dude, who in the hell said it was ‘’their’’ land? They migrated here from somewhere else too and they were hardly ‘’the happy children of the forest’’, ok? I’m sick of hearing what ‘’we’’ did to the Indians. Point of fact I didn’t do squat to them and in the long European emigration didn’t do them too bad at that.. The horse, firearms, iron and steel implements and casino gambling.
Did I miss the MEGA SUPER DOOPER BARF ALERT?
I didn’t do anything to them; it was “their land” by the fact that they were living on it, then forced off. Sort of you like if someone came onto your land and pushed you off (with extreme prejudice if necessary).
I have no illusions about what life was like in pre-Columbian America, and hardly presented it as “happy”.
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