Germany needs to reexamine its reflective support, in expiation of the Holocaust, for everything the Israeli government does. From Patrick Lawrence at unz.com:
The Case of Germany and Israel
The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Germany. Thomas Wolf, http://www.foto-tw.de, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Many years ago, another time and place, I had a German friend who hailed from Hamburg. Christophe was a cultivated sort—well-read, impressive art on the walls of his apartment. I remember how inordinately fond he was of his collection of those elegant, sought-after pipes made by Peterson of Dublin.
It was a year or so into our friendship when Christophe began talking about the war, the Reich, the camps, and the albatross of guilt that was part of what it meant to be German in the world as it was after 1945.
You occasionally hear this kind of thing from Germans, or at least I have over the years. I always cringe inwardly when a German friend or acquaintance talks in this manner about the burden of… what shall I call it? … Germanness. It is as if they overlook politics and history in favor of the insidious fallacy of what is called the national character argument: Germans did what they did in the 1930s and 1940s because that is who Germans are and that is what Germans do. Christophe was in his mid–40s—born, then, in the 1960s—and there he was bearing the anguishing psychological weight of an inescapable guilt.
I was fond enough of Christophe eventually to confront him about this, whatever the risk of embarrassment. In time, and after I had thought through the sadness I felt as I listened to my friend’s self-flagellations, our conversation led to a distinction I have not since forgotten.
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