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I 100% agree with you. As a Polish-American, Leopold II is what I lean on when someone tries to pretend Europe has clean hands from atrocities... which I've per

I 100% agree with you. As a Polish-American, Leopold II is what I lean on when someone tries to pretend Europe has clean hands from atrocities... which I've personally met here in the US. They seem to act like the US invented atrocities. But I disagree with you on the other spectrum. Mostly how the argument is presented. "If only those nasty Europeans never existed, the world would be at peace". Yea, no. Every civilization, whether Asian, Persian, African, Pacific Islands, pre-European native Americans and everyone else I missed were perfectly cool with destroying some other tribe/clan/city. Hell, Hawaiians were a very warrior centric culture before Cook arrived. We suck as humans. Doesn't matter where you were born, you suck because you're a human. No one's hands are clean. Pointing at one culture as the cause of the world's problems doesn't solve much and just spins the wheels of hate and war some more. And hey, dont get me wrong, when Merkel has negative things to say about how Poland and the US conducts themselves, the first thing I always think of, "Really chancellor kraut?". It is laughable when Brussels or Berlin or London or DC wants to take the moral high road. However, at some point we have to cut our losses and just quit being douches to each other or we are forever doomed to repeat the bad parts to history.

antibuddy 6y ago
> No one's hands are clean. My hands are clean. I washed them. On a more serious note tho, I particularly don't like the mixing of people and time. For example: There is no point in accusing German people for the war crimes of WWII when they were born decades later. It does make a bit more sense when you look at current (war) crimes of your country (or collective in general) tho, but the extent to which you are to blame is probably still very very low (but not zero) and gets lower the bigger the collective is, if you have (close to) no political power.

antibuddy 6y ago

> No one's hands are clean. My hands are clean. I washed them. On a more serious note tho, I particularly don't like the mixing of people and time. For example: There is no point in accusing German people for the war crimes of WWII when they were born decades later. It does make a bit more sense when you look at current (war) crimes of your country (or collective in general) tho, but the extent to which you are to blame is probably still very very low (but not zero) and gets lower the bigger the collective is, if you have (close to) no political power.