Me: > Your English is also good enough to know that I didn't do that - I said > "European bigots" <> "All European[s] are bigots."
Jeroen: However, you make such sweeping generalisations about Europeans that the distinction is easily lost. Me again: Not really. Only if you want to read it that way. > > France was almost as enthusiastic about killing its Jews as Germany > > was. Every country in Europe was, save Britain, of course. That is oversimplifying the matter. Europe was under German occupation, which means the Germans were in charge. Was the Dutch government "enthusiastic about killing Jews"? No, because their was no real Dutch government present. When Germany invaded The Netherlands, the government went into exile in Great Britain. What subsequently passed for government in the country was nothing but a Nazi collaborator put in place by the Nazis. Your argument that every country in Europe was enthusiastic about killing Jews is therefore false and nothing but yet another sweeping generalisation. Me: Ah yes, you poor innocents. There's no history of anti-semitism in Europe. Nothing happened from 1940-5 that any of us should be concerned about, right Jeroen? You see, Jeroen, some of us believe that there are things that there are _no excuse_ for doing. Helping in the murder of millions of people - there is no excuse for that. Just because you're under occupation doesn't make it okay. Look at the Russians or the Serbs. They were occupied too. But they _fought_, even after the occupation. Big difference from what we saw in Western Europe. The Nazi collaborator governments had considerable freedom of action - like Vichy France. None of them made any effort to save their Jews. The people of Western Europe could have fought to protect their Jews - and themselves too, of course. Even under occupation they could have tried. But they didn't. Usually they helped, from what we can tell. Alberto: > Also, even if there were individuals in each country that liked the > killing, there were also individuals who opposed the killing, even in > Germany or Poland or France. Gautam: > And yes, no one is denying that there were individuals who opposed the > killing. Oskar Schindler was a Nazi party member in good standing, for > goodness sake. The point is that the vast mass of the population of > these countries not only did nothing - they participated with some > eagerness. The Vichy France government, for example, _helped_ the > Germans round up France's Jews and shipped them off to death camps. The help from the French government was inexusable, but it is not evidence that the *vast mass* of the European population helped the Germans. As in any war, there were a number of citizens who collaborated with the Nazis, but most people were not. (If the vast majority had been collaborators, Europe would probably still be ruled by the Germans.) If the US were occupied by Canada to rid the Northern American continent from, say, the Asian population, would the vast majority of American civilians actively fight against the Canadians? I doubt it. Some of them would join the resistance movement and some would collaborate with Canada, but most people would simply try to stay alive. Maybe you would gladly try to get near whoever the Canadians put in charge and then blow yourself (and him/her) up, but most people would not. For someone who calls himself a political scientist, your views lack a lot of nuance. Jeroen Me: Well, for someone who discusses topics like this incessantly, your views show a vast degree of ignorance, so we'll call it even. Why would you possibly think that Europe would still be ruled by Germans if the vast majority of citizens had been collaborators? I'm not saying they were - they weren't, it was just that in the particular case of the extermination of the Jews, they didn't give a damn - but even if they were, it was British and Canadian and American soldiers who freed Western Europe, and Soviet soldiers who ejected the Germans from Eastern Europe, only to enslave it in turn. There were no resistance movements of any military significance in Western Europe. That's not my judgment - it's John Keegan's. If the US were attacked by Canada (or anyone else) well, first, we wouldn't roll over and give up the way every Western European country did, so that would be a big difference right there. But if we lost and were occupied would we fight tooth and nail? Yes, there's little doubt in my mind that we would. During the Revolutionary War American farmers turned New England and the South into a hornet's nest to eject the British - I doubt that we would do less to defeat someone else. But what's really going on is fairly obvious, to my mind. The _very same countries_ that happily appeased Hitler in the 1930s, who were willing to feed everyone else to the Nazis in a desperate attempt to avoid actually having to fight for themselves - they're doing it again. Western Europe appeased the Germans, and now Western Europe is appeasing the Arabs. In the 1930s first it sold out the German Jews, then the Sudetenland, then Austria, the Czechoslovakia. Now it's Israel. No difference. Both times the enemy wanted to exterminate Jews. But most of Western Europe didn't care about that in the 1930s, and it doesn't care about that today. The anti-Semitism we're seeing is largely a product, I think, of the need to justify in your own minds the sacrifice of Israel. Europeans have got to convince themselves that the Jews _deserve_ what is happening to them. And so you focus endlessly on the plight of the Palestinians while making excuses for suicide bombers. The European press fabricates wholesale tales of massacres in Jenin, and then never even bothers to retract them when the truth that no such thing happened is revealed. We, who live with Jews every day of our lives, know that they're real people too. We can't do that. Europeans _killed_ all their Jews. How many do you know, Jeroen? Are there as many Jews in all of the Netherlands as there are in, say, Boston? As many in all of Western Europe as there are in New York? I doubt it. Western Europe has no major Jewish communities because all of the members of the ones that used to thrive there are dead. You seem unwilling to take any risks for anyone else. You have variously suggested that the Netherlands should be reluctant to aid the US in Afghanistan for fear of terrorist retaliation, and that it is legitimate to restrict Jewish freedom of speech to protect people against terrorists. Americans have a word for views like that. The sad thing is that so many of your countrymen seem to feel the same way. Gautam
