Comment by ahf8Aithaex7Nai
7 days ago
I am German. My government does not acknowledge the tragedy that has been unfolding in Gaza since the Hamas attack in October 2023. It’s absurd. Since then, Jewish people in Berlin who were demonstrating alongside Palestinians against the war in Gaza have been beaten down by the German police. In 2021, Esther Bejarano, the last survivor of the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra, passed away in Hamburg. Whenever she commented on the culture of remembrance, the media was eager to report on it. Whenever she commented on the situation of the Palestinians, it was not reported in the media. People sometimes ask how it was possible that the vast majority of so-called ordinary people in this country back then could simply tolerate these crimes against Jews and look the other way. Now that should be clear to everyone. The Max Planck Institute in Rostock estimates that well over 100,000 people have been killed in Gaza. But nobody here gives a damn (at least not publicly). We’re even supplying weapons there. Everyone acts as if they’ve forgotten what was written in German newspapers about the current Israeli government when it took office, and as if there were no connection to what’s happening in Gaza right now. I am deeply and profoundly disappointed in the elected officials and public servants of my country. They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
I live in DE too, it's terrifying. I didn't realize the extent of the armaments shipped to Israel from Germany until recently.
The Israeli navy ships were built in German shipyards and subsidized 30%...
It's terrifying everywhere, really shines a light on the insane levels of propaganda we live under. I don't really know what can be done about it, it's really just hard to wrap my head around living in a country that so explicitly and directly supports an ethnostate and their active genocide.
Germany has a lot of very strange political formations. The anti-german antifa is very curious and close to this topic.
I find this bewildering. Im not German. Im not Israeli.
Yet I have known that Israel sails German subs (the best in the world) since.... the Greek financial crisis (the subs were part of the scandal) ? Certainly since the mid 2010s.
Why is this?
I guess they feel guilty about previous generations gassing the jews.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
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> They have learned nothing from the atrocities committed by their grandfathers.
No no, they have learned from them. That's why they are the biggest backers of these new atrocities on the whole continent - they learned exactly how it's done.
Same thing in Austria, everyone in mainstream politics basically ignores the topic and when pressured parrot something like "Israel has the right to defend itself" or "It is very complicated"
Repression against students and demonstrators is happening regularly
> Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra
Is this something from the post-war or did that really exist?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_Orchestra_of_Auschwi...
“The Germans wanted a propaganda tool for [SS] visitors and camp newsreels and a tool to boost camp morale.”
There were also several men’s orchestras.
Interesting, I imagine the propaganda was also used for the German public, because they had no idea they were death camps.
Israel would doubtless keep its genocide a secret if it could, but there's just so much evidence created by smartphones. This is actually an example of how technology is making the world a massively better place--it's so much harder to genocide without creating tons of evidence.
The last time I was in Berlin (2018), I was actually somewhat shocked by the amount of antisemitic graffiti that I saw just about everywhere (especially on lamp posts). Especially given the strictness of the laws against such speech.
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What does that have to do with the subject of this thread at all? Christians are also terrible to gay people, and European societies have only very recently (in the last two to three decades) become somewhat more tolerant.
In the context of Israel-Palestine, this issue is only raised in order to somehow justify Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, a la "They deserve it because they're not as enlightened as we are."
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Wait until you hear Muslims in Europe can be openly gay.
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The parent comment is just anti-Muslim hate. It has nothing to do with the topic.
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It's even more insidious, I know activists in your country and they not only abhor the current support for Israel's genocide but they are terrified of their activism being criminalized under anti-nazi laws. How ironic.
i am honestly puzzled as to why germans, with all the educations they have received during decades, are letting this rock as is. or maybe disillusioned would be a better term...
While I agree with you on the case of Esther Bejerano (a recent example from public broadcasting shows that her own communist beliefs and support for BDS are seemingly 'censored' [0]), I find the general situation complicated. Although it should be easy for any half intellectual being to contextualize the recent Israeli aggression by mentioning October 7, like you did, this is often not done. At the same time I think that the coverage of likely Israeli war crimes also happens in German media and I think nobody is looking away. Still Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place. I feel, that Germany, has quite some problems like many other countries to find it's role in a world where particularly the UN is failing and international law/human rights seem not enforcable.
[0] https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/koepfe/Esther-Bejarano-Das-Erb...
> Germany is the reason why the whole mess exists in the first place.
I think this is the most unfair thing about it; Germany might be the reason, but it’s not Germans paying the consequences. It’s not 70k dead Germans, but 70k dead Palestinians (a Semitic people).
I can understand thefeeling of wanting to make amends for their crimes, but they are making amends by now allowing a whole new genocide to occur, against a completely unrelated people.
The tragedy in Gaza, the tragedy in Srebrenica, the tragedy in Rwanda? Genocide is the word.
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There is a difference between war and extermination.
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>and unfortunately for us the palestinians political leadership has brought us all into this scenario
Simply not true. The plan from the start was to take over the area for jews, see Ben Gurions private letters. Netanyahu has supported Hamas to make sure that Palestine couldn't be politically united to be able to continue taking over the west bank. The power balance has since long been tipped to one side that is engineering the situation.
> The plan from the start was to take over the area for jews
This is true.
But denying Palestinians of any agency or fault is wrong. They made mistakes too. And if it’s wrong for Netanyahu to support Hamas, isn’t it just as wrong for any Palestinian to support them too?
"We must seek agreement and understanding with the Arab people only through the Arab worker, and only an alliance of Jewish and Arab workers will establish and maintain an alliance of the Jewish and Arab peoples in Palestine"
That's a Ben Gurion quote, who was a socialist and believed in shared class struggle of Jews and Arabs. The rest of your comment is influenced by other lack of nuance
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Every single person is a product of their circumstances. If you personally were to grow up in either country, the neural network in your brain would be trained with a way different set of data compared to what you experienced, and you would be a different person.
I don't have sympathy or hated for either side, this is just a byproduct of being human.
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Germany is cucked, what Hitler did was outrageous and destroyed any rational ability for generations - and yes while I am heavily critical of Israel and the demonstrably true supremacy and nepotism they have created outside of Israel, I am strongly against the "rounding up of Anne Franks". Germany must now tread the difficult tightrope between standing up for themselves and going full-on loony right, and every time they fall they simply reset to loony left. This is why the establishment just puts their head in the sand.