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Many countries have done terrible things and then lost wars and empires. How many of them unambiguously and thoroughly confronted their past, memorialised it, s
by m_fayer 9y ago
Many countries have done terrible things and then lost wars and empires. How many of them unambiguously and thoroughly confronted their past, memorialised it, sought to make amends with their victims, and then built an entire state centered on protecting those principles whose violation was their business a few decades ago. It's practically unheard of.
- badpun 9y agoThe amends with victims are, at least in case of Polish people, more of an excuse than anything else. For example - my grandma’s father was bestially exploited and murdered in Auschwitz, leaving her without a father at the age of nine. Moreover, Germans closed the school around the same time, which left her uneducated for life. Add years of stress and malnutrition (hunger) as a child on top of that. If US government did such thing to its citizen, the damages awarded in court would be astronomical. Meanwhile, my granda got exactly $0 from the German government. And there are millions of people like her. So, when I hear about Germans making amends, I call it more a propaganda in action than anything else.