Which segued nicely with Hitler’s “lebensraum” to his east. Gotta have farmland for all those blue eyed Aryans busy exterminating everyone else.
Totally agree. Our family has a number of German families as friends, there’s a lot of back and forth socialization (one family arrives tomorrow, in fact, for a 10-day holiday with us), and we’ve learned that while the country is very in-your-face about never forgetting (billboards in high-density shopping areas listing the names of concentration camps, that sort of thing), on a personal level they are so ashamed that you end up having to stop conversations because they are visibly squirming with looks of pain on their faces.
As far as I know, Germany has handled this sort of national horror better than any country I know. The U.S. could learn a lot from it. I used to say that one way to offer reparations to African-Americans would be for the government to pay all the costs for genetic testing, records research, etc. to be able to give every descendant as full a family tree as possible, laterally as well as generationally (is that a word?), and show as locally as possible where in Africa their ancestors came from. Thanks to consumer DNA testing, that’s starting to happen, but on a piecemeal basis and the country is not footing the bill, or acknowledging how important it is to TRY to give back the family and the heritage that was lost.
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Funny (as in great) that you should say that this morning, since I just read this. Especially the part about reclaiming African heritage:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/14/do-you-want-to-be-free/
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Oh man, I’ve been working way too hard.
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