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Some ridiculous stories.
BTW — Steven Ceballes, you are an asshole. I hope someone gets the police to raid your house for false charges, so you can get a taste of your own medicine.
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I’m sorry, but FUCK Germany. They lost the war, but still held on to a lot of their oppression. And since gay rights wasn’t popular in 1941, THOSE people remained in prison for years.. decades… Fuck Germany.
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TVChannelsFree.com — I wonder how well this works? I don’t believe in streaming, but still… Might check this out sometime.
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I decided flickr should have a black background, and not white. My TV auto-adjusts to various brightness levels, and thus the white is preventing me from seeing the deeper shadows as much. “Flickr Shades”, on this page, meets my need.
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It seems like this would be a worthy safety measure for any car or bicycle. 1 roll is a bit expensive at $1/foot, but with 2 rolls the cost comes down a bit. It would make sense to buy 2 and split with a friend. I think I want some for Christmas!
May 27, 2008
May 27, 2008 at 3:34 PM
Clint, I do hope that you’re aware that I’m not only half German, but also a German citizen?
May 27, 2008 at 3:43 PM
Knowing somebody from a country doesn’t affect how I feel about its people. These are the people who stood by and voted for Hitler, murdered half my family, and still (apparently) oppressed other people even 15+ years past the war. And the neo-nazi movement has been growing steadily in germany over the last 10 years.
I’ve met republican christians that I like. Doesn’t mean I wont say “fuck republican christians”. If you can’t understand the difference between a broad statement, and a statement directed against you personally … Then my blog may be too harsh for your sensitivity level.
May 27, 2008 at 3:51 PM
I never said I took it personally.
May 27, 2008 at 3:53 PM
If you didn’t take it personally, why did you ask a question about you, personally?
May 27, 2008 at 4:30 PM
I was merely pointing it out. It was a rhetorical question.
May 27, 2008 at 4:42 PM
I was also meant to be tongue-in-cheek sarcastic. I understand your comment is about the German government’s stance, and not Germans in general.
May 27, 2008 at 5:06 PM
Heh — I go into defensive stance very easily! But to put things in perspective — find me any group of people.. And I’m sure I’ll find 1 out of 100 people in it that I absolutely adore.
May 29, 2008 at 12:27 PM
shut the fuck up,
i’m german, and yes there are some nazis but we do stuff against them… But there are a lot nazis in america and u dont do shit about them… you dont even care about them…
so please shut your freakin nazi mouth
May 29, 2008 at 1:10 PM
@#8:
If you’d read the rest of my blog, you’d see that I actually care a lot more about the fascists in American than in Germany. But, y’know what? Kill a bunch of my relatives, and I’m gonna say something.
May 29, 2008 at 6:54 PM
Clint, if you do the math, you do realize that anyone who had any direct (or even indirect) impact on what happened to your relatives are most likely dead of old age by now, or will soon be? Anybody who had any say in electing Hitler to office(in 1933) would have been born around 1915(making them at least 95 by now. And even giving you the benefit of the doubt, assuming a 15 year old was a hitler youth at the end of the war, that would still place them at 78 years old.
I’m not exactly a big believer in the mentality of “The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons”.
And when it comes to nazis, modern day Germany probably has one of the strictest anti-nazi laws in the world.
May 29, 2008 at 6:56 PM
And yes, I realize I missed a closing parentheses. Well, now I do.
May 29, 2008 at 7:08 PM
))
Actually, there are plenty of people still holding onto the illegal spoils of war, up to and including the Bush Family (See Prescott Bush’s indictment under the Trading With The Enemy act).
There’s lawsuits still in progress over returning looted goods. Children of parents are affected, and a few German children are basking in wealth that was not theirs.
Ideas don’t just die when the physical bodies that participated in a war die.
Cultures’ responsibility doesn’t reach a magic cut-off point.
Germany has some of the most strigent anti-nazi laws BECAUSE they are quite necessary. Hitler youth is on a rise — Here too, unfortunately. (It was just last year that a group of armed neo-nazis assaulted New Jersey pro-immigration protestors — and had the police side WITH them, in a frightening manner. Original link is dead.)
If these ideas had died at the same time as the people who fought for them, I might be more inclined to believe you.
Furthermore, it is more important to remember what happened now, than ever — And that is what this new memorial helps to do.
It is important that the world remembers what happens, and that it doesn’t get swept under the rug in the same way that many Chinese don’t know about the Tiannamen Square Massacre.
After all teachers in some areas are already not teaching the Holocaust for fear of offending Muslims, so case in point right there.
You can deny a teaching a history lesson, but a monument serves as a reminder of the terrible things that were done. And they weren’t done by individuals — I assume you know all about the Milgrim experiments, and that people are quite willing to go to extreme lengths if the establishment compels them to do such.
And that’s a big part of why I am anti-conformity, anti-tradition, anti-society, anti-organized religion, and anti-establishment — both the Milgrim (I hope that’s the right one, I blogged them recently) experiments, the Holocaust, and my Grandfather’s Cult all show that most human beings are simply tools to be used by those with actual wills. I propose that people get some backbone and free will, but until then — The world is what it is.
The culture that created the machine that killed 12 million jews is a continuum; it doesn’t die and get born anew when a peace treaty or new constitution is written. Ideas stay for hundreds of years; many ideas engrained in our 1776 American culture still survive [barely] to this day.
Fascism is no different.
Just as there are plenty of people here who would love to lynch a black person, but knows those days are over (so some of them become cops) — There are plenty of people in Germany [and everywhere else] who would love kill a Jew due to cultural hate passed down on them.
Ideas don’t die. If they did, they might not need to build a memorial so late in history that nobody directly affected is likely to be alive.
May 29, 2008 at 7:29 PM
I don’t disagree with the sentiments in your last comment one bit. You’re right in that ideas don’t neccesarilily die with the death of the body. And there are some people that still profit from the spoils of war.
However, I went to the German School here for 13 years. And one thing I can tell you is all the Germans I met did not have the fascist mentality. Nor did anyone want to forget what happened or brush it under the rug, but rather that we should not be blamed for what our ancestors did.
Fascism is a world wide problem, but its not just confined to Germany.
As far as the rising trend of neo-nazism amongst youth in Germany, that is more of a socio-economic issue than a cultural issue. If you do any research on it, you will find that it is disproportionately MUCH higher(by about a factor of 10 to 1) in what used to be East Germany, which after the war then proceeded to get shit on by the Russians.
It’s the equivalent of taking 2 twins and separating them at birth, and given the same cultural heritage(pre WWII), exposing them to different environmental conditions. The results appear to be very different, so you can’t really say that the original mentality is what’s at work here.
And yes, as a kid I was often called a Nazi by American children simply for being German.
May 29, 2008 at 7:37 PM
Well that sucks, but, y’know… Unless you’re a white male with no discernible actual culture of your own, you’re pretty much fucked.
Though I have hung out with German friends whose grandfathers served in the war, and we have joked about how “your grandfather killed my family” and such….
Obviously when dealing with an individual face to face, individually, the individual is what is considered.
and yea… I remember the people in West Germany with their “I want my wall back” shirts. Funny, ironic, disturbing, and poignant all at the same time. I am sure socio-economics comes into it. Though I blame that more for creating the violence (poverty->crime->violence->vicious cycle), and less for directing it at a particular group. But it’s impossible to really KNOW….
May 29, 2008 at 10:28 PM
Me thinks WordPress had a hiccup here. :)
And just FYI:
In the German school we WERE taught about the holocaust. But yes, I have heard of some cultures(not in Germany), trying to erase the holocaust from the history books. Which is just wrong. It happened, and anyone in denial is an idiot.
Also, I’m pretty sure my grandparents weren’t Nazis, but I’ll never know for sure as unfortunately I’ll never get the opportunity to ask them.