Gaza is a dress rehearsal for violence that threatens workers and the oppressed everywhere.

On 12 January, the day commemorating the 1904 revolt of the Herero people against German colonialism, Olaf Scholz’s government announced that it would intervene in the International Court of Justice to oppose South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel. The move sparked widespread indignation.

The following day, the Namibian presidency published a forceful statement condemning the decision.

“On Namibian soil, Germany committed the first genocide of the 20th century,” the statement said. “In light of Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history, President Hage G. Geingob expresses deep concern with the shocking decision.”

It is worth dwelling on the word “inability.” Many who condemned Germany’s decision accused it of “failure.”

Germany, they argued, has a sacred responsibility to humanity for its role in World War II. It has failed in that responsibility.

But if Germany’s decision is a failure, then its actions are an aberration, a deviation from some expected historic norm.

“Failure” substitutes open complicity with omission. It replaces the systemic with the particular.

Instead, Germany’s position demonstrates that, despite the horrors that German imperialism has inflicted on humanity in the 20th century, the German ruling class has been able to preserve fascism’s ideological and material basis.

Rather than a “failure,” then, German policy represents a remarkable success. It testifies to the great resilience of the colonial mentality.

And it makes clear that moral condemnation – or, worse still, self-designated “guilt” – is an inadequate framework by which to establish accountability for the crimes of imperial and colonial domination.

read more: https://electronicintifada.net/content/germany-backs-netanyahu-same-reason-it-created-hitler/44166

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
    115·
    10 months ago

    The problem here is that there was no intent to cause a famine at all, and neither was a specific group (like Ukrainians) specifically targeted for starvation once it was there. This isn’t some fringe opinion, this is the opinion of mainstream Western historians like Davies and Wheatcroft that actually research this stuff.

    Putting the Holodomor (not a genocide) on the same level as the Holocaust (textbook genocide) is therefore relativizing the Holocaust. This was and is used to whitewash Nazis (and collaborators) and their crimes as basically a form of “self-defense” or liberation. This was already actual Nazi propaganda used by the Nazis, and is now state-sponsored propaganda used in e.g. the Baltic states to rehabilitate actual Holocaust perpetrators.

    In May 2012, the foreign minister of Lithuania (left) honored Prof. Snyder in the week during which his government was reburying with full honors the 1941 Nazi puppet prime minister. The foreign minister is known for his antisemitic outbursts, his Hitler-Stalin “moustache comparison” and his defense of the Nazi’s reburial on the floor the nation’s parliament. The event has been seen as part of a wider pattern of high officials honoring western dignitaries who seem to be supporting — or can be presented as favoring — one or more components of Baltic revisionist history.

    Timothy Snyder is the “double genocide” historian and author.

    In July 2012, the Lithuanian foreign minister explained how Professor Snyder’s Bloodlands will be utilized during Lithuania’s (rotating) EU presidency in 2013, as part of a wider “Double Genocide offensive” in the EU. The use of Bloodlands for the nationalist narrative had earlier been proposed or explained by professors Saulius Sužiedėlis and Egidijus Aleksandravičius. Earlier (ab)use of ‘Bloodlands’ included a September 2011 book event held at the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry where passages were misquoted to defame Jewish partisan veterans.

    https://defendinghistory.com/30081/30081