Europe and Revisionist History

[Annie]

Steyn:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/...2.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/01/25/ixportal.html

According to a poll by the University of Bielefeld, 62 per cent of Germans are "sick of all the harping on about German crimes against the Jews" - which is an unusually robust formulation for a multiple-choice questionnaire, but at least has the advantage of leaving us in no confusion as to how things stand in this week of panEuropean Holocaust "harping on". The old joke - that the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz - gets truer every week.
Motoreasy

I have some sympathy for that 62 per cent. Killing six million people is a moral stain on one's nation that surely ought to endure more than a couple of generations. But, on the other hand, almost everything else about the Germany of 60 years ago is gone - its great power status, its military machine, its aggressive nationalism, its need for lebens-raum. The past is another country, but rarely as foreign as the Third Reich. Why should Holocaust guilt be the only enforced link with an otherwise discarded heritage?

"Enforced" is the operative word. If most Germans don't feel guilty about the Holocaust, there's no point pretending they do. And that's the problem with all this week's Shoah business: it's largely a charade. The European establishment that has scheduled such lavish anniversary observances for this Thursday presides over a citizenry that, even if one discounts the synagogue-arsonists and cemetery-desecrators multiplying across the Continent, is either antipathetic to Jews, or "sick of all the harping on", or regards solemn Holocaust remembrance as a useful card to have in the hand of the slyer, suppler forms of anti-Semitism to which Europe is now prone.

From time to time, the late Diana Mosley used to tell me how "clever" she thought the Jews were. If you pressed her to expand on the remark, it usually meant how clever they were in always keeping "the thing" - the Holocaust, as she could never quite bring herself to say - in the public eye, unlike the millions killed in the name of Communism. This is a fair point, though not one most people are willing to entertain from a pal of Hitler. But "the thing" seems most useful these days to non-Jews as a means of demonstrating that the Israelis are new Nazis and the Palestinians their Jews. Iqbal Sacranie, secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has told the Home Secretary that his crowd will be boycotting Thursday's commemorations because it is racist and excludes any commemoration of the "holocaust" and "ongoing genocide" in Palestine.

Ah, well. He's just some canny Muslim opportunist, can't blame the chap for trying it on. But look at how my colleagues at The Spectator chose to mark the anniversary. They ran a reminiscence by Anthony Lipmann, the Anglican son of an Auschwitz survivor, which contained the following sentence: "When on 27 January I take my mother's arm - tattoo number A-25466 - I will think not just of the crematoria and the cattle trucks but of Darfur, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Jenin, Fallujah."

Jenin? Would that be the notorious 2002 "Jenin massacre"? There was no such thing, as I pointed out in this space at the time, when Robert Fisk and the rest of Fleet Street's gullible sob-sisters were going around weepin' an' a-wailin' about Palestinian mass graves and Israeli war crimes. Twenty-three Israelis were killed in fighting at the Jenin camp. Fifty-two Palestinians died, according to the Israelis. According to Arafat's official investigators, it was 56 Palestinians. Even if one accepts the higher figure, that means every single deceased Palestinian could have his own mass grave and there'd still be room to inter the collected works of Robert Fisk. Yet, despite the fact that the Jenin massacre is an obvious hallucination of Fleet Street's Palestine groupies, its rise to historical fact is unstoppable. To Lipmann, those 52-56 dead Palestinians weigh in the scales of history as heavy as six million Jews. And what's Fallujah doing bringing up the rear in his catalogue of horrors? In rounding up a few hundred head-hackers, the Yanks perpetrated another Auschwitz? These comparisons are so absurd as to barely qualify as "moral equivalence".

I'm not a Jew, though since September 11 I've been assumed to be one. Nor am I, philosophically, a Zionist. Had I been British foreign secretary, I doubt I would have issued the Balfour Declaration. Nor am I much interested in whose land was whose hundreds or thousands of years ago. The reality is that the nation states of the region all date back to the 1930s and 1940s: the only difference is that Israel, unlike Syria and Iraq, has made a go of it.

As for the notion that this or that people "deserve" a state, that's a dangerous post-modern concept of nationality and sovereignty. The United States doesn't exist because the colonists "deserved" a state, but because they went out and fought for one. Were the Palestinians to do that, they might succeed in pushing every last Jew into the sea, or they might win a less total victory, or they might be routed and have to flee to Damascus or Wolverhampton.

But, whatever the outcome, it's hard to see that they would be any less comprehensively a wrecked people than they are after spending three generations in "refugee" "camps" while their "cause" is managed by a malign if impeccably multilateral coalition of UN bureaucrats, cynical Arab dictators, celebrity terrorists and meddling Europeans whose Palestinian fetishisation seems most explicable as the perverse by-product of the suppression of their traditional anti-Semitism.

Americans and Europeans will never agree on this, and the demographic reality - the Islamisation of Europe - will only widen the chasm in the years ahead. But, if I were a European Jew, I would feel this week's observances bordered on cultural appropriation. The old defence against charges of anti-Semitism was: "But some of my best friends are Jewish." As the ancient hatreds rise again across the Continent, the political establishment's defence is: "But some of our best photo opportunities are Jewish."

 

[onedomino]

-
When she was 18 years old, Elwira Bauer wrote a children's book entitled "Trust No Fox on his Green Heath And No Jew on his Oath." In 1936, the book was published by Julius Streicher, who was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946. From the book:

The Führer’s Youth

http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/fuchs.htm

"The boys who are true Germans
To Hitler’s Youth belong.
They want to live for their Führer,
Their eyes are fixed on the future.
Bigger and stronger they have become.
The German Heritage is theirs.
The great and sacred Fatherland
Stands today as it ever stood.
From this picture may be seen,
Hitler Youth in splendid mien,
From smallest to the biggest boy.
All are husky, tough and strong.
They love their German Führer
And God in Heaven they fear.
But the Jews they must despise!
They’re not like these boys,
So Jews must just give way!

In far-off South is the country
Which cradled Jewish ancestry.
Let them go back there with wife and child
As quickly as they came! —
What a disgusting picture
Is shown by these Jews, so dirty and wild:
Abraham, Solomon,
Blumenfeld, Berinson,
Rebecca with little Jonathan,
Then Simon and also Aaron Kahn.
How they roll their eyes
As they march along."

If Germans last a million years longer than the death of the Third Reich, they should never forget one second of what happened during the period 1933-45.

By the way, didn't Harry look delightful in his Wehrmacht uniform?
-

 

[Annie]

onedomino, that was so illustrative of what is still going on in Europe, every day. This really belongs with the thread on anti-semitism. Excellent find.

 

[onedomino]

-

Inside the Heart of Darkness

By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust" (Vintage, 1997), is completing a book on genocide in our time.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldhagen24jan24,1,5539847.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions (might require registration)

As the world prepares to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz this week, four out of the five central questions of the Holocaust have pretty straightforward and settled answers.

Who did what?

The Nazis — together with a large number of ordinary Germans aided by collaborating Poles, French and others — persecuted, hounded and robbed the Jews of Europe and murdered 6 million of them, about a million of them gassed and burned at Auschwitz. One after another, the exculpatory myths — that ordinary Germans and the Swiss and the Catholic Church and the German Protestant churches and the people of occupied countries were coerced by external forces (Nazis, terror, etc.) to take part in the persecution — have been exposed as hollow.

Why did they do it?

Although other factors also contributed to their participation, the people persecuting, torturing and killing Jews were believing and willing executioners, in the grip of a profound anti-Semitism that held Jews to be the secular incarnation of the Antichrist and therefore necessary to extirpate. An immense amount of evidence unearthed in the last decade — most unavailable in English — has made this clear. Just two weeks ago, a German guard at Auschwitz confessed to the BBC the truth: that he thought back to his time in the camp with "joy." There was "always behind you the fact that the Jews are enemies…. A feeling of sympathy or empathy didn't come up. The children are not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood in them." Slaughtering Jews, he believed, was "right."

How do we judge?

The only right way to judge is according to the generally accepted legal and moral criteria of guilt and innocence. No excuses are or should be made for a man murdering a child today. No excuses should be made for the thousands of men who agreed to murder more than a million Jewish children. We should reject the empirical and moral fairy tales of apology, including "they did not know what they were doing" or "who are you to judge?"

What is the duty of repair?

After the fact, how do those in moral and legal debt repair the harm as best they can? In several ways: not only monetarily but according to simple principles that apply to all historical and contemporary crimes. Politically, those countries and institutions that contributed to the assault must support the postwar Jewish communities and their security. This encompasses all of Europe and Israel. Morally, they must tell the full truth about the past. They must fight the continuing effects of the harm, including the immense legacy of anti-Semitism, by actively educating people about its evils and prejudice of all kinds. They must transform those parts of themselves that led to the crimes so that they will never be the source of such evil again.

Germany and Germans, by and large, have done a good if imperfect job on all counts. Other countries and their people — France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Switzerland and others — continue with varying success to struggle with their past and their duties of repair. The Catholic Church and its clergy — obviously not responsible for the Holocaust but still deeply involved in many aspects of the persecution (including in some places the extermination process itself) — have done a poor job overall even though the church hierarchy has taken some significant steps toward establishing a more positive bearing and teachings about Jews. But the fifth central question is much more complicated:

What is the meaning?

This is not one question but many — a seemingly endless array of questions. What is the meaning of a person's death, of a person's murder? What is the meaning of a person's murder 6 million times over? What is the meaning when a person murders an infant he has never seen before?

Moving to communities, what does the Holocaust mean for the self-understanding of Germany, or of German culture, or of Germans? For the self-understanding of Jews, of their place in the world? For Israel and Israelis today? Moving to the rarified level of religion and philosophy, what is the meaning for people's understanding of God? How could God let such a thing happen?

The questions go on. Some see them as pressing; others don't. But Germany, and its democracy today — and by extension Europe — cannot be comprehended without reference to this past and its meaning. Germans have remade their society and politics with the horrors of Nazism in mind (though the recent resurgence of neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism is worrisome). Many Christian denominations have reoriented their theology in a more tolerant direction. Jews of many countries have drawn a panoply of conclusions about their place in the world, their own God and their need to be self-reliant. Non-Jews have reflected on the evils of anti-Semitism, and of racism generally. Survivors have sought to create a meaningful world after emerging from a place that, as one German physician at Auschwitz said, made Dante's inferno seem like a comedy.

Certain aspects of this past are still all but misunderstood, most important the critical question: What was the nature of Nazism? It was not just another fascist or totalitarian movement. The Nazis' destructiveness was not like that of other dictatorial or murderous regimes. True, for Hitler and his followers, Jews were an enemy before all others, the principal source of evil in the world. But the Nazis' destructiveness was of global scope. They sought to lay waste to Western civilization itself — Christianity included. Much of Europe and most of the rest of the world were to become a German-dominated slave plantation.

The Nazis were possessed of a vast destructiveness unrivaled in history. They viewed social and political conflicts and problems as racial and biological ones. Their reflexive solution was to slaughter people and to pulverize communities. Had the Germans won the war, they would have slaughtered tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions more around the world and enslaved the peoples of Poland, Ukraine, Russia and other countries. Auschwitz was the place most emblematic of the world that Hitler and the Germans were creating, a death factory embedded in vast slave production facilities. As we commemorate its liberation on Jan. 27, the people of Europe and the world should shudder at how close Hitler came to destroying civilization, to plunging the world into darkness that might have lasted his 1,000 years.

With the eventual passing of Auschwitz's survivors, the necessity of commemorating their liberation — and other peoples' liberations from other horrors around the world — will remain. Many people think that when the survivors pass away, the Holocaust will also fade from the public eye. I foresee the opposite. As the 20th century — with all its horrors and all its epochal progress — recedes, the Holocaust is likely to become ever more emblematic of the dark half of the century.

There is no other word that so immediately and thoroughly conjures up evil as Auschwitz.

-

 

[nosarcasm]

Daniel Goldhagen hates Germans. His oppinions are ridicilous, I saw
him in one of his book discussions when it came out.

While there will be always a level of anti semitism, it seems no
different then here in Idaho or in California.

While I lived in Germany I never knowingly met a Jew. When the right
wing kids talk about the Jews are the problem you can just wonder.
How can they be the problem when you never even met one.

But anti semitism is replaced with a dislike of foreigner that look different.
Unfortunatly it seems to be the human instinct to distrust people that
are different. The Us is definitly more tolerant in that area. Still there
is a movement to get rid of the Mexican illegal immigrants.

Having lived in several countries this racist nationalism that often
accompanies anti-semtism and other forms of race hatred is ridicilous.
They have no argument just hate.


Germans (if I may generalize here) in general are sick hearing of the holocaust. The government is very sensitive about the Jewish community and
it is your political death warrant when you speak out against them.

In general the younger generations feel that it is wrong to blame them for
the deeds of the grandparents. The idea of the Taetervolk is also rejected.
Germany is these days one of the most liberal countries on earth and the
anti-war movement has 70% support. So it is irritating to some
to be judged only by 1933-1945. Because things have changed alot
and the great majority is not anti semitic.

I understand that it is a sensitive topic for survivors of the holocaust and
their friends and family. They fear the revival of the fascism and
they wantto be able to blame all Germans for the misery they endured.

Fair enough imo, but also I understand the disconnect by many Germans
that feel they did not contribute to the holocaust and reject the responsibility.

I frankly was very shocked when I first learned about the holocaust
in 5th grade. My grandparents where watching out over me and
my grandpa and I were pretty close. HE used to tell me alot of
stories about the war but I never had heard anything about the
fate of the Jews or the Nazi dictatorship.

So I confronted them and asked them how they could that let happen.
In my mind I was shocked that it could happen where I live.

My grandpa said that he felt he could not stop the prosecutions of
Jews. He had Jewish business partners that had fled the country.

Both my grandparents claimed that they did not know about the
concentrations/death camps and when I asked them why
they never mentioned any of this to me they stated embaressment (Scham)
as the the reason.

I asked them, how could you not know that evil was going on.

In his answer my grandpa told me a story about his visit to the state
capital where he saw a man that got thrown
outside the 3rd level of a house while the police was standing
there watching. Thats why he said he felt that nothing could
be done to save Jews.

Not being a party member brought him the privilege to be drafted first
into the army.

All this rambling is just so you know some Germans do care about the
past.

Also not liking being called a perpetrator of the holocaust does not
mean this 62% do deny the holocaust or think it was not evil.

The real anti-semites I met deny the holocaust and think Hitler
was a great man. Given the history I never understood how
they got to that conclusion.

 

[onedomino]

-

Auschwitz

http://olympics.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=7455813

Thu Jan 27, 2005 01:09 PM ET
By Sabina Zawadzki and Wojciech Zurawski

OSWIECIM, Poland (Reuters) - Dusted by falling snow and surrounded by barbed wire, world leaders mourned the victims of the Holocaust on Thursday, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the biggest Nazi death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Vowing that the World War II atrocity must never be forgotten, the leaders and survivors lit candles in the ruins of the camp which claimed a fifth of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

"I was here naked as a young girl. I was 16. I am Israeli, I have a country, I have a flag. I have a president," Merka Shevach, who had not been scheduled to speak, told the ceremony.

Up to 1.5 million people died in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau, set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland as its most efficient killing machine in the "Final Solution," the genocide of European Jews.

Auschwitz was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945, by the advancing Soviet army whose stunned soldiers released 7,000 emaciated prisoners left behind as the Germans withdrew.

"The snow was falling like today, we were dressed in stripes and some of us had bare feet," Polish survivor Kazimierz Orlowski, 84, said.

Candles burned along the snow-covered tracks used during the war to take Jews and others in cattle trains to the camp.

A whistle, the sound of a stopping train and a door being flung open were played at the start of the ceremony in Birkenau, the camp's main extermination center, to symbolize the arrival of the Nazi victims.

Most were gassed to death on arrival. Those selected for slave labor were stripped and shaved, an identity number tattooed on an arm.

As darkness approached and snow kept falling, world leaders, survivors and European royalty lit candles at a monument to the victims. Huge flames burned in the background.

Gigantic searchlights lit up the gray winter sky behind the monument. Lights burned brightly alongside the tracks as did the candles left by some of the 5,000 participants.

"I am not here to talk about what happened. My only aim is to light a candle for my mother, whose ashes are who knows where in this camp," said Jan Wojciech Topolewski, a former prisoner whose mother died in Auschwitz.

"I want to say to all people around the world -- this should not happen again," said Anatoly Shapiro, the commander of the troops who first entered Auschwitz.

"I saw the faces of the people we liberated -- they went through hell," he told an earlier ceremony in the southern Polish city of Krakow, some 70 km (44 miles) from Auschwitz.

VICTIMS, PERPETRATORS AND LIBERATORS

Among the more than 30 heads of state attending the ceremonies were the presidents of Israel, Germany and Russia, representing the victims, the perpetrators and the liberators.

"The story of the camps reminds us that evil is real and must be called by its name and confronted," Vice President Dick Cheney said.

"We are reminded that anti-Semitism may begin with words but rarely stops with words and the message of intolerance and hatred must be opposed before it turns into acts of horror."

The guilt many European nations still feel at either complicity or indifference during the Holocaust has prompted fresh vows of "never again" from their leaders.

But such assurances come against a background of resurging anti-Semitism in Europe, recent mass killings in Africa and Bosnia and the fading memory of the horrors as the war-scarred generation passes away.

Jewish leaders urged Europeans not to erase the history of Auschwitz from their conscience and resist "new anti-Semitism," on the rise in response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"We fear anti-Semitism. We fear Holocaust denial, we fear a distorted approach by the youth of Europe," Israeli President Moshe Katsav said.

President Jacques Chirac, the first French leader to acknowledge France's complicity in the Holocaust, said the European Union would stand united to counter anti-Semitism.

"Evil is embodied in this place, tearing at our hearts and burning our consciences for eternity," he said.

Set up in 1940 by the occupying Nazis, Auschwitz was initially a labor camp for Polish prisoners but grew into a death factory for European Jews shipped there from around Europe. At its peak the camp could hold 400,000 people. More than one million Jews were killed but Gypsies, Poles and Russians also died. Hundreds were subjected to medical experiments by Nazi doctors testing theories of Aryan supremacy. (Additional reporting by Ron Popeski, Caren Bohan, Wojciech Moskwa and Natalia Reiter)

-

 

[Avatar4321]

We must never forget what happened hear. When we forget we are doomed to repeat it. Sad thing is I think we will repeat it and WW2 will look like a walk on the beach compared.

 

[dilloduck]

We must never forget what happened hear. When we forget we are doomed to repeat it. Sad thing is I think we will repeat it and WW2 will look like a walk on the beach compared.

Agreed but the "hows" and the "whys" seem to get lost in the horror of the event itself. Unfortunately, I fear that most people today wouldn't be able to recognize the start of another holocaust until it's too late. Dafur, for example.
HOLOCAUST DOES NOT ONLY PERTAIN TO RELIGION OR RACE !

 

[theim]

Now come on guys. Germans and Europeans were not to blame for the holocaust. It was Hitler. He had that Hypno-Coin he bought at the department store. The whole continent was helpless.

 

[Annie]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050128/wl_nm/sudan_darfur_dc_7

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) - The Sudanese air force bombed a town in western Sudan this week killing or wounding 100 people and forcing thousands to flee, a U.N. spokeswoman said on Friday.


AFP
Slideshow: Sudan's Darfur Conflict




An African Union (AU) source said earlier that Sudanese officials had prevented AU monitors from investigating the death and damage caused by the aerial bombing. The attack violated a shaky cease-fire with rebels which AU observers are monitoring.


U.N. spokeswoman Radhia Achouri quoted the AU as saying Sudan's air force had bombed the town of Shangil Tobaya, near el-Fasher, capital of North Darfur, on Wednesday.


"(The African Union) said there are around 100 casualties. They are not talking about a specific death toll," she told Reuters in Cairo by telephone from Khartoum.


United Nations (news - web sites) Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) was "deeply disturbed" by the attack, his spokesman Fred Eckhard said.


"This is the latest in a series of grave cease-fire violations that have resulted in a large number of civilian casualties, the displacement of thousands of people, and severe access restrictions for relief workers," Eckhard said.


"The secretary-general calls on the government of Sudan and the rebel movements in Darfur immediately to comply fully with their commitments under the cease-fire agreement and all relevant Security Council resolutions," Eckhard said.


There have been close to 100 confirmed cease-fire violations since late last year.


The African Union source, who declined to be named, said violence in Darfur seemed to be intensifying.


SITUATION WORSENING


"The Darfur situation is getting very serious. All AU reports indicate that the situation in Darfur has been worsening since the beginning of January," the source told Reuters at the organization's headquarters in Addis Ababa. "AU observers in Darfur were denied access to investigate the death and damage caused by aerial bombings," the source added.


Sources in Sudan's aid community said on Thursday the government had bombed al-Malam village on the border between North and South Darfur, where the government says rebels killed dozens of people this week. The rebels deny the charges.


European Union (news - web sites) foreign policy chief Javier Solana said he was shocked by reports of the bombing of another village, named Rahad Kabolong, in North Darfur, saying it was one of the worst violations of the cease-fire signed last April.


He said the bombing ran counter to assurances he had received from Sudanese Vice-President Ali Osman Taha that Khartoum was committed to a peaceful resolution of the conflict.


"The high representative condemns this attack in the strongest terms and reiterates that the evolution of EU-Sudan relations will depend on the actual delivery of the commitments made by the Government of Sudan, not only on its public statements," said a statement issued by Solana's spokeswoman.


After years of tribal conflict over scarce resources in arid Darfur, two main rebel groups took up arms accusing Khartoum of neglect and of using Janjaweed militia to loot and burn non-Arab villages.


Khartoum admits arming some militias to fight the rebels but denies any links to the Janjaweed, calling them outlaws. (Additional reporting by Tom Perry in Cairo)

Don't you worry, since Koffi is 'deeply concerned' I'm sure they will get together to pass another resolution, as soon as the UN saves those ravaged by the Tsunamis and oh yea, the UN gets the Iraqi vote finished.

 

[dilloduck]

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050128/wl_nm/sudan_darfur_dc_7



Don't you worry, since Koffi is 'deeply concerned' I'm sure they will get together to pass another resolution, as soon as the UN saves those ravaged by the Tsunamis and oh yea, the UN gets the Iraqi vote finished.

ahhhhhhhhhh the paper tiger growls :sausage:

 

[Annie]

ahhhhhhhhhh the paper tiger growls :sausage:

Ah, even on paper no more than a mew.

 

[dilloduck]

Ah, even on paper no more than a mew.

papyrus pussy???

 

[Annie]

papyrus pussy???

LOL You win!

 

[dilloduck]

LOL You win!

weeeeeee haaaaaaa----first time ever--!!!

 

[Tepton]

a nation who is responisble for the death of millions of native americans, a nation who held slaves and who discriminated blacks should be careful when accusing other nations of racism......

 

[dilloduck]

a nation who is responisble for the death of millions of native americans, a nation who held slaves and who discriminated blacks should be careful when accusing other nations of racism......

since this nation has dealt with the after effects for decades, this nation is exactly the one who should be able to recognize it and offer solutions

 

[Said1]

a nation who is responisble for the death of millions of native americans, a nation who held slaves and who discriminated blacks should be careful when accusing other nations of racism......

Hmm.....interesting, care to continue?

 

[CSM]

a nation who is responisble for the death of millions of native americans, a nation who held slaves and who discriminated blacks should be careful when accusing other nations of racism......

FRESH MEAT!!!!!

 

[Tepton]

i live in germany and i too hate it to be held responsible for the death of millions of jews. members of my family were imprisoned only because they did not join the nazi organisations or because they were members of political parties. i was born more than 40 years after ww2. why should i feel guilty?
why should all the people who were born after the war feel guilty?
just because we are germans? wouldn't that be discrimination too? to brand a whole nation because of the actions of their ancestors?
think about it...