Thursday, September 08, 2011
She had it coming
The continued justification and support of the brutal ethnic cleansing of ethnic Germans from Central Europe by people who would never condone such crimes against other white people such as Jews is just unbelievable. Their claim is that most Germans supported Hitler therefore all ethnic Germans in what is now Poland and the Czech Republic including anti-Nazis, women, children, the infirm without exception deserved to be forcibly expelled from their ancestral homelands and die of material deprivation. I know that I am an extremely small minority in thinking that the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Central Europe after World War II had no moral justification what so ever and that collective punishment is always wrong. I am well aware that most American academics in the blogosphere think that caring about the human rights of ethnic Germans in 1945 is "perverse." But, I still maintain that human rights should be for everyone regardless of ethnicity, race or religion and that includes stigmatized groups such as Germans, Arabs, and Muslims not just groups that have powerful political lobbies in the US.
All those "reasons" you list are the standard excuses all perpetrators of genocide use: "it was their own fault," "they committed crimes too," "they supported genocides themselves," etc. The Russians are using all these rationalizations against the Circassians, too.
ReplyDeleteSadly, some Armenians are using a similar argument against the Circassians, claiming (falsely) that they were major participants in the Armenian genocide, and therefore(?) their claims are somehow less legitimate.
Without a doubt, forced deportation of civilians is always wrong. The "scholars" in the blogosphere who claim the Germans who were deported somehow "deserved it" really need to read some of the scholarship on genocide and come to a reasoned position, rather than rely on stereotypes and broad generalizations. You're right, though, there is a group who try to undermine every claim of genocide, using questionable (or outright falsified) data.
Walt:
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. Yes the method is no different than other rationalizations. But, the difference is that there are no Holocaust deniers teaching History and English in US universities. There are evidently a lot of people who deny other genocides working in those positions.