It was I who quoted Churchill about the Nazis bringing on a dark age made more terrible by "the lights of perverted science." So there can be no disagreement between us about the fact that the Germans combined whatever was torturing their soul with technology.
It was I who said that the Holocaust "was the product of the German soul, of 20th century technology and science, or the fanaticism of Hitler and his henchmen. I suspect it was some combination of all three." I do not deny, therefore, in fact, I advanced the idea that there was something in the German soul at the time which contributed to the Holocaust.
I did not insinuate:
1) Are you attempting shake off my “German Soul” idea by demonstrating that other cultures were, “just as bad”?
2) Israel exerting “undue”? influence on US Foreign Policy.
3) Jews as the main disseminating force of world Communism.
I will object to your "German soul" idea if you want to extrapolate that into an ongoing inter-generational tendency that is carried in the DNA of Germans. If that is your argument you must explain why it is that Germans seem to lose that tendency when they take up American citizenship. Do they change the DNA like so much oil? Moreover, I caution that when you make that assertion you are playing with fire. That was the import of these remarks which were made in a different context than you place them:
"If we insist that "Germany as a nation bears this sin" do we not leave ourselves intellectually defenseless to saying that Jews as a group bear responsibility for the advance of communism? If we are going to draw these conclusions, these invidious distinctions based on race or ethnicity, where does logic make us stop? May I say that stereotypes which you use in irony such as, "those money grubbing Jews” become legitimate debating points?"
Is there something in the DNA of Jews that makes them…? Why is it intellectually and morally indefensible to make that generalization but perfectly proper to say that Germans have a distorted soul, Irish are drunks, French are lousy soldiers, Mexicans are lazy etc. Do you really want to go there? Does the cultural Revolution which killed tens of millions prove that the Chinese soul is given to vigilante-ism? Does the British importation of slaves into the Americas prove that they are given to slavery? Does the British Navy subsequently policing the slave trade on the high seas and on in land rivers prove that the British are not slavers? How do you generalize about a nation (never mind whether you're talking about an actual race) from a historical event? Does the fact that the Israelis have won a series of wars against great odds mean that they are a warlike race? In this context I observe that Jews played a prominent role in the rise of communism. The Frankfurt School was 100% Jewish; Cloward and Piven were Jews (I think); Saul Alinsky, mentor of Hillary Clinton and posthumous mentor of Barack Obama, was a Jew. Am I therefore now entitled to say that Jews have a communist soul?
As to the United States support of Israel: I believe that the United States should be guided by a rational sense of its national interest. If you argue that an alliance with democratic Israel advances the American national interest, that is an argument which counts for me. But the idea that America should support Israel because the Germans murdered Jews does not. That observation was made in the context of the latter generations of Germans not wanting to pay reparations for what their fathers and grandfathers did. Likewise, I want to know what America gets out of its relationship with Israel not whether Israel is our burden because of German crimes of a prior generation.
Finally, I am clear about the German war guilt and about German guilt for the Holocaust but I am not at all clear that we should vest the sins of the fathers onto the sons. I think the idea that we can define a national soul and carry guilt from generation to generation is very dangerous.
It is in this context I note that Olog-hai volunteered:
Germans do not want to celebrate the fact that they lost two world wars in a row. Let ‘em go celebrate cultural diversity and being flooded with Muslims over a beer. Yah! Yah! Ve von de var you know!
But immediately before your last intelligent reply I received this:
All I can say to that very propagandized response is for all to recall George Santayana’s maxim. Study of the past will clarify things very much.
It does not advance our understanding to resort to cryptic phrases which are pregnant with allusions to one of the monstrous crimes in the history of mankind. I think it is better to say it plainly.
