Comment by computerthings

>Let's just accept that as face value: and then we found out, and decided this must NEVER EVER happen again. Not "not more than in one of three generations". And that requires teaching each new generation everything of what happened there.

Let's just accept that as face value, these events become less relevant to each passing generation, and you don't rightfully get to decide what your great(x20) grandchildren are concerned with. How many people in Mongolia do you think are mourning the atrocities of Ghengis Khan? Whether you believe it or not, the Holocaust will reach a point of irrelevance, just like basically every bad deed done under the sun.

>If you don't have the stamina and intellectual honesty for that, there's the exit.

Honestly, dragging up the past and applying labels to people when they don't deserve it is not going to prevent any atrocity. It's going to create bad blood between groups of people who otherwise would have no issue.

>It's not a negative thing to teach, just like it's not negative to teach Americans about slavery. That is what happened, you cannot change it. And you cannot have dignity while denying the truth, period. Not ever.

So, apart from "telling the truth" tactfully in a way that does not create improper appearances, I think disabusing yourself of your own dignity over things that a small percentage of the population of the country who happened to look like you generations ago is a bad thing. Do you believe children are responsible for the evils of their parents? If you don't believe that, then why do believe everyone who looks a certain way in a country is responsible for what other people who look like them did many years before? Demanding undeserved shame and even monetary consideration from people who have done nothing wrong is a good way to make yourself one of the most hated people in the world.

>If you use electricity, is that also "dredging up inventions from the past"? It's not negative to know what happened, and where this mindless identification with "sides" and slogans can lead to. It's a discovery we made and will keep, considering the price it came with.

It's not up to you what lessons anyone else in the distant future will learn. As for "sides" it seems to me that some people are quick to label anyone else they disagree with a tiny mustache man, which trivializes the German tragedy and totally qualifies as "mindless identification" and othering of everyone else. As in, "If you're not with us on immigration, you're literally a Nazi, and we don't talk to Nazis." So the lesson is not really learned now is it? Except when Jewish people literally enter the conversation, it makes no sense, and it is often used to shut down legitimate criticism of people who happen to be Jewish.

>Now that's quite the trick: teaching about how propaganda and peer pressure enabled persecution at such giant scale might "inspire people who don't know each other to hate each other"? How so? Who exactly would be hated, by whom, by Germans learning about and staying aware of German history?

How so? Are you kidding? It seems to me that on the surface, white German people are hated as a whole by at least a notable minority of every other group of Germans. Jewish Germans will be suspicious of non-Jewish Germans, especially nationalists.

To give you a non-German example of how dwelling on the past can be unhealthy, I return to the US. In the US it has become fashionable to associate racism with patriotism, as if you can't love this country without being a racist, simply because some people in its distant past used slave labor before (labor from both whites and blacks, and a practice which was common at the time). There are many examples of people who don't know each other getting into awful situations with other people who they don't know, all because of historical baggage that they were taught about people who look a certain way. I take it you have been privileged to avoid any such situations in your life, but they do happen. Why should a white person in 2025 be afraid to look a black compatriot in the eye because of misdeeds of OTHER white people hundreds of years before he was born? Why should a black person view any given white person with suspicion or even disdain, except for having been told that people who look like him (and were in truth VERY different people, living in VERY different times) did something against some other black people in the past?

>>Some cultures just don't work well together and can't be mixed, like oil and water.

>What cultures are you talking about? What is "the" German culture, what cultures are compatible with it, based on what properties, and what cultures aren't, based on what properties?

For the Germans? That would be the cultures of many of the Muslim immigrants who want a Muslim theocracy to enforce Sharia Law and burkas for all women, for example, compared to the culture of the natives. Basically all Western cultures are incompatible with that yet our overlords keep trying to push people together with incompatible cultures that have never lived together and have no desire to live together. I think they want to tear down any unity that can exist in any country, so that people are too distracted with each other to notice how they're getting screwed.

>What is "the" German culture, what cultures are compatible with it, based on what properties, and what cultures aren't, based on what properties? Because I only ever hear the generic adjective as if it means something, from people who want to somehow be "proud to be German", but then barely speak the language and are, time and time again, either unaware or dismissive of the history.

I don't know because I'm not German, but every group of people has its own customs. I imagine that Germans identify with many of the Western values of liberalism and democracy, have their own cultural habits, food preferences (including consumption of pork and alcohol), valuing hard work and precision in engineering, etc. There is a lot to the country and its people besides unfortunate events in the early 20th century. Up until recent decades it was also almost entirely white ethnic Germans living there. Why aren't they allowed to be proud of their culture, and to simply (and rarely) denounce awful things that they had nothing to do with, and for whose benefit should they hang their heads in constant shame?

America is a far more diverse place than Germany with a much shorter history and I think it would be foolish to insinuate that Americans don't have a culture or anything to be proud of, because of any of the unfortunate things that some Americans did in the past.

Your question becomes far more ludicrous if you substitute anything else for "German." What does it mean to be proud to be anything? Black, white, Chinese, Indian, American, British, Nigerian, Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, tall, handsome, etc.... It is a little bit silly to be proud of something that is purely circumstantial, especially when it comes to culture, but it makes about as much sense as being proud of your own family. That is, you are part of your family and your family is a part of you (to the extent that you want either of these things to be the case).