Why is it that so many women choose to stay with their whife-beating spouse? Even in western countries where divorce is accepted and health-personell and the police are begging them to move out, where there are organizations who help them out with housing and new life?
We like to portray ourselves and mankind as proud, freedom-loving beings capable of making up our opinion on "right" and "wrong" - and following that opinion whatever the cost. That is only a part of our personality, we are also part sheep...My point was rather that we choose to focus on the (few) brave men who fought our suppressors, rather than the many who aided them in e.g. deporting jews, or the military who was proven utterly incompetent (and, frequently among higher ranking officers, traitors) during the swift German campaign. In 1945, silly 18-year old girls who had fallen in love with German soldiers were subject to severe state and private punishment, while grown-up merchants who had become rich supplying the Germans with stuff they needed to do their thing were often unpunished. The English liked to blow-up, bury or sink infra-structure and supplies used by the Germans - no doubt in order to sell us the same things afterwards: my grandfather dug up dumped aircraft engines from the river-bed to use as spare-parts in his wood shop, my family still have an old radial engine block used as a garden table support.
We cherry-pick those parts of history that makes ourselves, our ancestors, our leaders and our nation look good. We down-play other parts of history. I am sure that the US does the same thing (or so I am told by friends who went to US schools for a year). I will never have the intimate knowledge of the feeling during WW2 as those who experienced it had. But I believe that distance makes it easier to second-guess the "truths" established right after the war. This can be a good or a bad thing. I don't like those who make a career pretending that the German death camps never existed. But I think it is interesting to hear that the US internmented 110.000 Japanese-Americans (not to compare the conditions of American to German interment-camps in any way).
-h
“1. Why is it that so many women choose to stay with their whife-beating spouse? Even in western countries where divorce is accepted and health-personell and the police are begging them to move out, where there are organizations who help them out with housing and new life?
2. We cherry-pick those parts of history that makes ourselves, our ancestors, our leaders and our nation look good. We down-play other parts of history. I am sure that the US does the same thing (or so I am told by friends who went to US schools for a year).
3. I will never have the intimate knowledge of the feeling during WW2 as those who experienced it had. But I believe that distance makes it easier to
second-guess the "truths" established right after the war. This can be a good or a bad thing. I don't like those who make a career pretending that the German death camps never existed.
4. But I think it is interesting to hear that the US internmented 110.000 Japanese-Americans (not to compare the conditions of American to German interment-camps in any way).
-h”
1. That’s a question nobody seems capable of answering well. I suspect that it’s because some of them grew up in similar environments and think it normal (for them). Others are incapable of doing anything for themselves – and that’s not only the women. Generations of ignorance and of living in an underclass produce such mindsets, I’m certain. If it occurs in higher social circles, I’d wager that it comes down to the financial advantages to putting up with the ‘arrangement’.
2. I’m sure you are right; it’s part of every country’s programme to accentuate the positive, though whether positive or negative depends on whose point of view.
3. That’s a fatal flaw. Second-guessing would now have had me a rich man wirth a mega-yacht, a home in Monaco and a island in the Bahamas. Photographically speaking, it’s also why I have such a downer on critiques: anyone can do critique: how good you are at doing it all depends on how flowery your command of language.
4. I think that the U.S. version wasn’t equivalent to the Nazi one, as you write, so why make the point? If there was a reason to put Japanese-origined people aside I’d say it was possibly not without cause: if you look at countries such as our own in Europe, you soon realise that immigrant peoples remain such by choice: they simply don’t want to accept the guest culture. Why else do Americans seem to identify themselves as Irish-American, Italian-American and so forth? Why is Spanish now more widely spoken that English in the U.S.A.? This has been raised before and contested, but the conception remains. Britain and France face this dilemma too: what happens here if/when a real, broad Christian v. Islamist war becomes reality in the world? It happened some hundreds of years ago and history does tend to repeat itself, especially with so many pushing for it, but then the ‘enemy’ didn’t live next door…
Rob C