[quote]Schwarzfahrer wrote:
Really discussing with you guys is nigh impossible.
That I know South Park and you not says shit.
Why don’t you try to sound intelligent through arguments, not through always beating the same dead horse.
Germany is extremely thin skinned about “the war” and especially the “the jews”. Writing a book like that crap Goldhagen did and provoking a fuss means exactly this: zero.
The “premise” is: Germans were (are?) evil. The scientific authenticity even less eloquent. It was a holocaust-porno, something that was designed to provoke, comparable to youtube- documentions about how dumb Americans and Bush are and that he is their rightful president.
Writing such a “thoughtful” drivel, with the right connections and within the right position (both of which Goldhagen enjoyed), is just a cheap and effective commercial coup. Perhaps a more fitting example would be if Ahmadinejad wrote a “revealing” book about international semitism.
Antisemitism was enormously widespread, if you’d actually travel around Eurasia & Arabia and meet some older people, you’d be in for some mighty surprise. Jews in Germany are pretty comfortable and influential in Germany today, they don’t seem to share your thoughts.
Continuously beating the dead nazi-horse like you guys here do, is like I’d be accusing US of racism and writing about use of the widespread “n” word. Now that would be clever, right?
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So I guess you didn’t read the book. Thin-skinned? Seems that way. But why would you take my feeble comments so personally?
(You don’t know me, the extent of my education, or of my travels, or of my connection to Germany. Why presume? I do not presume, for example, that the few German Jews of your personal acquaintance would feel free in sharing their own stories, or their own honest views, with you, however comfortable and “influential” you may find them.)
This thread is about Congress, political convenience and manipulation, national amnesia, and the Armenian Genocide. Goldhagen’s book is tangentially of interest, because it argues that common folks do awful things, that they even volunteer for it; that the German Army was not innocent, and that people labor mightily to hide the past.
Whatever the merits of this particular book, it speaks to issue of genocides–Armenian, Rwandan, Cambodian, Darfur–and not to the interests of Germans alone. Genocide is not yet a “dead horse;” perhaps it is a horse you wish to be dead.
Now, then, where in this have I wronged you personally, or the German people? Thin skinned? History is not fate, so why should one feel trapped by it?