I agree - - those who are ignorant of history WILL repeat its mistakes. Hitler = Bush. Why is only those who ignore history cannot draw the appropriate parallels.
I make one admition here that may very well earn me more ire than I have already: the war in the East was a war of annihilation not because they were Russians but because they were Communists. We wanted them all dead - without hesitation. My family included. Chaos has only two direct offsprings in this world: Democracy and Communism. In World War I, we fought Imperial Russia - - its men were accorded the full honour of prisoners and treated as we expected done to our own. The Seconwas different - the whole of the east had been corrupted and do we launched a crusade to eradicate that one threat against the world should have united - - it did not and the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s were spent paying for that mistake.
I myself do love the Russians - -they are a proud, vigorpous people who have earned a place of honour on the world stage for endurance and survival. They are a resourceful and loving people, espeically Cossacks and Ukrainians - I have known no more universally friendly people In all my time. I hate Communists and have had to be held back by a friend from assaulting one on the streets of New York who had the audacity to be handing out a communist newspaper. More frightening, he was in his twenties and a total devotee.
I am aware that Karl Marx and Max Esseling were both germans - - both men reviled and hated and robbed of their status as true Germans - -hence why both had to flee to Switzerland.
I am not absorbed by my own history - -I honour it. I embrace it and I study it. I look to it for advice, councel, and wisdom. I see in it an aspiration to the purities of the best qualities the world had to offer and warnings against the worst horrors ever committed against fellow Man. I see in militaristic Prussian Nantionalism an earned rise from backwater status to contintenal super power that swept from its doors the most fiersome enemies in history, and I see in Nazisim the most terrible deeds ever committed in the name of the Fatherland.
I wish death upon all how hate without reason because of race, creed, origin or religion. I will not however, shirk from defending my ancestors and my fellows against the threats that seek to destroy it - -Communism, democracy, anarchy, and such.
Some would call Germans hypocrites, being paragons of honour on one hand yet butchers on another - -so I pose this question
during the tsunami, billions of dollars flowed to people who hated the United States, there was no shortage of fund drives and coprorate sponerships. But why, at that very same time, veterans of the American Army in its Vietnamese conflict, suffered on the streets, spurned by your Dept of Vet affairs, lacking medical attention food and clothing, most mad from the horrors of unbridaled war. Why is it America was willing to aide those who had never helped it rather than brining comfort to those who had bled for it?????
Hypocrasy??
[size=1]Requiem en Terra Pax[/size]