|
« A Danish spectre
Main The Tories' nervous breakdown » |
October 03, 2003
Europe's victim culture
Jewish Chronicle, 3 October 2003 One of the most widespread and disturbing assumptions of our age is that if people suffer from any disadvantage, privation or adversity, they must by definition be victims of someone else. Well, sometimes they are, but sometimes they aren’t. Bad experiences happen to people for many reasons, not least that they may have brought such hardships upon themselves. One of the most widespread and disturbing assumptions of our age is that if people suffer from any disadvantage, privation or adversity, they must by definition be victims of someone else. Well, sometimes they are, but sometimes they aren’t. Bad experiences happen to people for many reasons, not least that they may have brought such hardships upon themselves. The assumption of victimhood effectively denies personal responsibility for one’s actions. The result is an ugly, dishonest and manipulative victim culture, in which any group that feels aggrieved can pose as victims, while real victims -- sometimes their own -- either go ignored or find themselves accused of being victimisers, in a pernicious moral inversion. Just such a victim culture appears to be under creation in Germany. Its president, Johannes Rau, has not only accused Britain and the Allies of forcing the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945, when former German territories were handed to neighbours in the post-war reconstruction of Europe but has also likened the plight of those Germans -- the Vertriebenen -- to the suffering of the Jews, and said their experiences were part of a ‘historic constellation’ that included the Holocaust. President Rau’s outburst follows controversy over a German proposal to build a memorial to the Vertriebenen in Berlin right next to the Holocaust memorial now under construction. This has provoked protests by Poles and Czechs, who, mindful of the suffering of their populations under Nazi rule, say this risks casting the executioner in the role of victim. Of course, it is a truism that wars create casualties am-ong civilian populations. Of course, there is often rough justice in the aftermath of war. And, of course, on an individual level, not all Germans were guilty of wrongdoing. But they did elect a government that attempted genocide and world domination, and which did invade Poland and Czechoslovakia. True, Britain’s policy of appeasement under Neville Chamberlain was shameful. But to suggest, as did President Rau, this means Britain should share responsibility for Nazi atrocities, is preposterous. And to equate the plight of displaced Germans with the suffering of Jews murdered by their regime is grotesque. This is, of course, but the latest example of German historical revisionism, a process in which certain historians have systematically tried to present the German people as victims of the Nazis, no less than the people they persecuted. This attempt to impose moral equivalence is to deny the significance of the Holocaust and gradually erase German responsibility. This despicable process is obviously rooted in a particular historical experience. Victim culture, however, is a more pervasive Western phenomenon. This is largely be-cause of the West’s worship of the individual, which has bestowed upon people’s subjective views the power to trump every other consideration. As a result, self-definition has become an incontestable right. So groups defining themselves as victims, however specious the claim, are able to exert moral blackmail upon everyone else in order to insist that their ‘rights’ must take precedence. Onto this cult of subjectivity the ideological left has spatchcocked its own belief that the capitalist West is always the oppressor, and the developing world always its victim. As a result, the West can never be a victim, while the Third World can do no wrong, even if it engages in acts of terror against the West. This lethal combination has resulted in two consequences of huge significance for Jews. The first is that Jews can never be afforded the status of victims, since as all leftists know, they invented Western capitalism and are therefore by definition the oppressor class. So any attempt at self-defence by Jews is re-classified automatically as aggression. Hence the vilification of Israel. The second is that the story the Palestinians have told -- that they are the victims of Jewish oppression (and indeed, that the Jews have become the Nazis and the Palestinians the Jews), so that Arab terror is simply legitimate self-defence -- has been unquestioningly swallowed in Britain and Europe. Of course, not all Palestinians support terror. And of course they are indeed victims, not of the Jews but of the Arab despotisms which refused them a state of their own and then kept them in squalor as pawns in the attempt to destroy Israel. This, though, is not acknowledged by Britain and Europe. As a result, the calumny that there is a global Jewish conspiracy against the Arab and Muslim world -- in the face of which terrorism is justified, or understandable -- has effectively been endorsed by Britain and Europe. This is why the Palestinian cause has become radical chic, the acme of victim culture, not only provoking widespread support in Britain but now, in addition, finding a disturbing echo in Germany's own attempt to deny responsibility for its past. Posted by melanie at October 3, 2003
Comments
I would like to mention that the German myth of German victimhood has had serious consequences for Europe and the International Community, culminating in the Second World War, and contributing to the German involvement in the First World War. I do not know, of course, if the fact of Soviet domination of, and the split of Germany into, two nations from 1945 until this past decade has anything to do with the fact that Europe has been spared another bloody attempt by Germany of European domination through military means, but I cannot entirely discount this either. This period of German unity has only been with us since around 1990, not nearly enough time for them to organize themselves for another run at murdering all the Jews in the world or brutally conquering the rest of Europe. Given enough time to convince themselves of their victimhood, and regain their economic and military power, I would not be at all surprised to see the Germans making another attempt at both these things in another thirty years. Posted by: Ken Besig at October 7, 2003 06:47 PMYour points about villification of the Jews (a form of anti-bourgeoise anti-semitism that started, perhaps,with the French writers Stendhal and Flaubert)and the real oppressors of the Palestinians are quite accurate. However, the crucial challenge is how to get our fellow travelers on the left to realize their logical fallacies and inherent prejudices so that Israel and world Jewry can be saved from this Great Existential Distress (ie the threat of another gathering wave of ridicule... discrimination... persecution...annihiliation! Some 20th century detritis, reminders, upon which something promising can be built: "Man has not yet begun to think," (yes, Martin, let us all realize the irony); "The dialectic of Enlightenment is but the tautology of reason. We are all its victims." Let us be humble; and let us be persistent! The world needs people who can both think and feel, are generous in their empathy and courageous in their common sense. (So, Leo Strauss is 40% right. Karl Marx does at least as well!) Posted by: Steven Karmi at October 9, 2003 05:12 AMYou should recall tha Chancellor Bruening's Government in 1930 had a "Minister for the Occupied Territories", ie those areas of the Reich transferred to Poland, Czechoslovakia etc at Versailles. With this in mind, Polish anger at the way the CSU has sponsored the 'victimhood' claims of the Vertriebenen since 1945 (an hereditary status btw) has been magnified by the fund set up to push legal claims; and the role of this group in demanding a memorial in Berlin. I am quite willing to sympathise with individual suffering caused by these events in 1945, and there was much, but not to accept 'group rights'. It was after all Konrad Henlein in Sudetenland and the Danzig Nazis who caused the whole mess. After all in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact the USSR got 180.000 km2 ofeastern Poland, and at Yalta was allowed to keep it compensating Poland in the West. The Germans had seized 100.000 km2 western Poland, expelled Poles in 1939 by killing them and seizing their homes to move in German families...ie. Lebensraum.....in 1945, people were brought from eastern Poland where the Russians had kept their booty and re-settled in the west of Poland as the Germans and Volksdeutsche were expelled. How could one expect the Czechs to treat kindly with the Sudeten Germans after what they had done ? All in all, the Cold War meant Germany got off fairly lightly considering what had been done across Central Europe and Ukraine. Johannes Rau is one of the worst Presidents of Germany, and they are feeding a myth from the Left of Germans as victims; bombed in Hamburg and Cologne unnecessarily; forgetting that Rotterdam and Warsaw were the first cities bombed heavily; and that 'total war' was a German phrase as was the verb 'koventrieren' = to do a Coventry. Individuals were victims, and each act of suffering is to be appraised, but not 'collective guilt'in reverse. One of the very good things about Szpilman's book "The Pianist" is that it shows individuals at their best and worst. Time to tell those who would resurrect the war to go away; Germany does not need to remind the world of the destruction of Poland, Czechosloakia, Hungary, Ukraine and it cannot afford to pay to make good the damage....so they should stop stirring this witches' brew. Posted by: Peter Williamson at October 9, 2003 10:46 AMTypical anti-German propaganda again. Why do you hate the Germans so much, Mel? Have you ever spoken to a German whose family was ethnically cleansed from Eastern Europe? Posted by: jose at October 15, 2003 01:00 PMIt is historically incorrect to depict the expulsion of the Germans of Eastern Europe as an "ethnical cleansing" (a Croation word from the 1990s), because the term implies that there had been peaceful coexistence up to the beginning of the expulsion. Yet the Germans of Eastern Europe had decided their fate by their harboring of terrorism in the run-up to WWII. After Munich, the question hadn't been whether there would be an expulsion but just who would be expelled. According to how WWII played out, the answer turned out to be a boomerang, although the Soviets, Czech and Poles largely didn't retaliate but instead gave everybody a chance to leave and later compensated those who could prove to be Antifascists. I'm sick of being accused of national self-hatred for acknowledging these basic facts. Jose, if you have another opportunity to such a chat, please don't forget again to ask your German partner to come out with his experiences from the years before the expulsion. Most of the comments on this site make me sick. - Fact is that 15 M Germans were expelled from their homelands in the then entirely German regions of Silesia, Pommerania, Eastern Brandenburg, East Prussia and other German 'islands' in Eastern Europe. About 3M of them died. It was the biggest ethnic cleansing in World history. No one was ever 'compensated' and no one ever received an official apology from Poland or any other country. If there are undivided rights of all people then of course this was a crime and of course this was ethnic cleansing - Anyone questioning this is going down a very dangerous path in suggesting that certain human rights don't apply to certain groups of people! - Or do you honestly believe in collective guilt? - The largest vote the stupid Nazis ever got was 33% - in a country stiffled by the conditions of the Versaille Treaty with 6M unemployed. - Just accept the facts! Posted by: Dr Thomas Fischer at December 18, 2003 02:10 PMSHUT UP ABOUT THIS VICTIM CULTURE. Unthinking rubbish from MP. No matter what a victim does she supports the abuser. If you fight back you are bamed if you dont fight back you are balmed. She is obviously someone who gets turned on by bullies, so allways supports bullies with any manipulative contradictory argument she can think of. I bet she is allways understanding of bullies, but never understanding of victims. Posted by: Rory at December 28, 2003 01:30 PM
S. Rossi Geneve, Switzerland Posted by: Silvio Rossi at January 10, 2004 10:11 PMI agree with Rossi, (but of course know that I am a "NAZI" and frothing "anti-semite" because I dare to compare the suffering of Germans...and also Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Hungarians, etc. with what my local AMERICAN newspaper anointed as the "martyred six million"). Mr. Peter Williamson (above) for example, speaks of those pesky Sudeten Germans' quest for self-determination as promised by our World Saviour Wilson (one of the main reasons the Germans agreed to an armistice the first time around) ending the 2nd war getting probably what he sees as their "just desserts". On the subject of who initiated "terror bombing" and/or embraced it with glee (be advised: I'm aware of the actual time frame, dates of Rotterdam, circumstances on the ground, accepted conduct by both sides of "siege tactics", RAF scatter bombing during the six months before the German offensive in the West, as well Guernica: the actual death toll, when Picasso actually DREW up his little propaganda piece...)...and let me understand this: Pete is comparing something like Rotterdam, with 800 dead, mainly the result of a fire in a part of the city which wasn't dealt with quick enough by the fire brigades, and ....DRESDEN???? According to Guinness 135,000 dead in a two-and-a-half day, three-pronged pre-planned assault??? Pete? Are you completely 'round the fucking bend, old man? If this is an example of your moral balances...you are whack. The killing, targeting of non-combatants is wrong. No matter who does it. Or for what purpose. I understand that the Benes Decrees authorizing the killing and expulsion of Germans are still on the books in the Czech state. Hmmm. Maybe targeting pesky people is OK, as Pete thinks. Fucking hypocrite. Posted by: Forrester at January 31, 2004 01:09 AMA good friend can tell you what is the matter with you in a minute. He may not seem such a good friend after telling. Posted by: Automobile Loan at February 1, 2004 10:31 AMDear Melanie Phillips, I am amazed that you have so much hate and venom for your own civilization (western) and third world and Germans. Jigar Posted by: JIGAR SHAH at February 8, 2004 08:18 AM |
