mai said:
Oh boy, this guilt imposing attitude in Germany is just sad. My point is Pilsudski, Poland in general and a lot of other figurants were as much of an assholes as everyone else, they're nobody's victims except of their ambitions, or rather lack of power to fullfil them. Want to play with big boys? Take responsibility. And as usual they ended up being "partitioned" for a... 6th time, right? :D Instead of taking part in "partitioning" of somebody else like Czechoslovakia, which they did, or any other neighbour at the time, as they hoped. Do British even bother with guilt about, say, people of India? Like artificial famine of 1943 in Bengal that killed 3,5M (according to Gosha), that usually blamed on nature or Japanese. The fact wouldn't even have been brought to attention of English-speaking scientific community if not for Enlgish-speaking authors from India. Rarely this even cross the mind of average British. Why should you? |
I wouldn't say self-imposed guilt. I feel no guilt personally: I wasn't born in WWII and did nothing wrong. I feel also, that my country - the CURRENT german republic - is not guilty of that. But as a successor of the old german state my country has some responsibility for what happened. That means for instance, that as a german I'm ashamed about Erika Steinbach, who voted in parliament against the Oder-Neiße-line and the fact, that she was elected in the parliament in the first place. I'm as a german feel it is wrong to support totalitarian regimes like Saudi-Arabia with tanks from germany. And so on.
And I think the same feeling of responsibility is in place for England and it's ex-colonies.
