Well, speaking for myself I felt The Berlin Wall was a good thing. Germany basically made two attempts to take over the world, and had developed some truely frightening technology which we were in the process of divvying up with the Russians. Contrary to the Hollywood version, the Nazis were not some tiny minority within Germany, that somehow still managed to be omnipresent, and there was the issue of Germany's international influance and the alliances it managed to pull together both before and during the war, and the rather ambigious nature of some of the allies who were as much fair weather friends as anything. Simply put, I pretty much feel that keeping Germany split in half forever and never letting it regain it's feet would have been appropriate. As things stand now, I consider Germany's rapid recovery into a world power, especially economically, so quickly after the wall went down rather frightening. I don't care how much remorse they might claim for the World Wars, I personally do not trust them as a nation, and probably never will. As it is, I kind of depressingly notice that for every case of them removing all the Swatstikas from "Lego Indiana Jones" out of shame, it seems that someone manages to find some really "rocking" German Death Metal and innocently queries "wow man, why are the Germans so much better at this than everyone else?". Of course I am a militant at heart. While we should have let Germany re-unite eventually, the 80s were too soon (one of the few things I disagreed with Reagan on). I think we needed to keep them divided a few human generations at least, at least until nobody born during the baby boom after the war was still alive at any rate. Yes, it was mean, it divided families, it damaged their culture, etc... but that's kind of the point as far as I'm concerned. We should have waited for Germany to be broken before we pulled the wall down, shattered enough where this kind of immediate recovery wasn't going to happen. I know the reasons for the wall with the USSR, and what was said publically, but to me the idea was to ensure Germany would never be powerful again after two global wars. Right now Germany might not have a military like it did before, but economically speaking it's an absolute beast, and there are more kinds of power than military, I don't like Germany having any kind of weight in global affairs, at all.HellbirdIV said:While I'm always in favour of telling african-americans to get over themselves and stop acting like all whites everywhere are responsible for slavery, there's a pretty fundamental flaw to your argument;Therumancer said:Bla bla white-supremacist diatribe
Two wrongs don't make a right. No amount of previous injustices ever mitigate the evil of a later one. Would you argue the Berlin Wall wasn't too bad because, after all, they were only Germans?
... Also, "black egyptian slavemaster"? Egypt was never a "black" nation. Great Zimbabwe is the greatest "black african" empire to exist, Egypt was inhabited at first by north africans (what we today would consider ethnically Semitic or Persian) and later by Greco-Europeans (Cleopatra was Greek) and today by Arabs.
Also, yes, I do believe that previous injustices do mitigate further ones. There is a point where you just have to get over it though. In the context of this discussion I think that QQing about slavery in the US is a problem because not only is it over with, but the guys who did it also ended slavery. We were also probably some of the nicest (comparitively speaking) slave owners ever. We could have justified keeping slavery alive forever by way of payback and being the most astronomically cruel bastards ever by way of payback and we would have just been square... we didn't though, we ended it, and have been trying to end it on a global scale. That's why it pisses me off when people want to continue to harp on this like it's somehow relevent, when even at it's worst it's nothing compare to crap going on right now in other parts of the world.
See, also the complaints about American slavery fuel the counter cultures which are holding back minorities in the US. Adding validity to "hey, your owed for how badly wronged your people were" which hardly speeds assimilation into mainstream culture.
Simply put, this isn't a forgotten issue, so there should be no real reason to throw it out there. Just let it take it's place as a historical footnote and move on.