Friday, May 22, 2009

Obama's Dresden Visit An Apology?

I thought Seven Tenets of Liberalism was a bit over the top with Number One being "Self Loathing – Liberals hate the West. The West is always WRONG (unless it’s white Europeans aligning themselves against the United States). But then I ran into this item: Obama to apologize to Germany for WWII. Atlas Shrugs blog cites John Rosenthal:

"The symbolic significance of a visit to Dresden by the American president — especially one undertaken in connection with a D-Day commemoration in France — may be missed by some Americans, but it is absolutely unmistakable for the German public. For Germans, Dresden is the symbol bar none of German suffering at the hands of the Allies."
If Obama really apologizes to Germany over Allied WWII actions during a D-Day, Obama's Apology Tour will Officially Jump the Shark.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

no one (except of some Nazis) expect or even want an apology. The bombing of Dresden was caused by a war started by Germans and finally it came back to where it satrted. On the other hand the question why the downtown area and not the huge military objects in the north of Dresden has been bombed (by the Britsh)is still to answer. The few American bombers have focused on the main railway station and tracks.

Henri from Dresden, Germany

Torsten said...

As Germany's city with the relatively most high-tech workers, most villa quarters and a breathtaking sourrouning with Saxon Switzerland, wine towns and 300 castles around Dresden and the more or less nearly completely rebuilt downtown, in Saxony where much more beer is drunken per head than in Bavaria Dresden is just so much over the top and also over a past 65 years ago. Germany lost world war number one very unluckily, with only newspapers and radio our ancestors were just Hitler voters and bad soldiers but not necessarily bad people in their heart. Everything was wrong in this war and we, not personally, in most cases also not our grandfathers, started it. I am sure Dresden was militarically not remarkably important weeks before the end, though with Europe's most camera plants and a often fanatic end-victory population like everywhere in Germany. The fire-bombing against city -quaters did in most cases not destroy the fanatism, often it made even more fanatic, but so many years later it's easy to know. With finding the death camps - what is the enemy expected to do in a total war like this ?

Kit said...

Here is a proposal to try and understand the situation better. Have a look: http://www.globalfm.com/id;1/action;showpage/page_type;detail/page_id;131/

Anonymous said...

"If Obama really apologizes to Germany over Allied WWII actions during a D-Day, Obama's Apology Tour will Officially Jump the Shark."

So what? Even though the US waged a morally jsutified war on nazism, it doesn't mean they were incapable of committing immoral or even criminal actions themselves. Denying this leaves them open to the charge of hipocrisy, to say the least.

Admitting this would improve their overall moral stance, advocate conciliation and impede the cause of the extreme right, rather than jumping the shark. In a nutshell: It would be right thing to do.