• cynar@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They went aggressive defense, after the effects of WW2. They built an impressive machine to both keep themselves safe (by all means necessary) and hunt down Nazis who fled into hiding.

    Unfortunately, they ran out of targets, on the nazi front, and really pissed off their neighbours. Rather than risk de-escalating, they’ve gone all-in.

    The intergenerational changeover, and the political games that entailed lead to the current situation.

    Stare too long into the abyss, and the abyss will stare back into you.

    • masquenox@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      and hunt down Nazis who fled into hiding.

      Give it a break. One of Israel’s staunchest allies since the start was West Germany - which enthusiastically co-operated with Israel while Israel was fully aware that it’s intelligence services were jam-packed with nazis. Israel only hunted the nazis that were convenient to hunt.

      Birds of a feather and all that.

      • cynar@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        The ones working for west Germany, as well as America weren’t hiding, they were useful. Their targets were the one who were useless alive for anything other than getting revenge against.

        The key is they had a good excuse to build a highly effective surveillance and infiltration system. It also was/is skilled at getting their hands dirty on foreign soil, while keeping the mess contained. At the time, they have a worthy target. As time went on, the number of targets dropped. The system in place was then turned to other uses.

        • masquenox@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          did West Germany still have laws prosecuting Jews and other minorities after the war?

          Funny you should mention that…

          After the war, discrimination against Roma continued all over Europe. The courts in the Federal Republic of Germany determined that all measures taken against Roma before 1943 were legitimate official measures against persons committing criminal acts, not the result of policy driven by racial prejudice. This decision effectively closed the door to restitution for thousands of Roma victims, who had been incarcerated, forcibly sterilized, and deported out of Germany for no specific crime. The postwar police authorities took over the research files of the Nazi regime, including the registry of Roma who had resided in the Greater German Reich, and police harassment and discrimination continued.

          Only in late 1965 did the West German compensation law explicitly acknowledge that the acts of persecution that took place before 1943 were racially motivated, creating eligibility for most Roma to apply for compensation for their suffering and loss under the Nazi regime. By this time, many of those who became eligible had already died. In March 1982 Federal Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, formally stated that German Roma had been victims of genocide.

          I guess it’s true what they say… underneath the liberal 1st world pretensions it’s still the same old Europe.

          Let’s be clear on one thing… the nazis were not some “aberration” - the predatory and parasitic socio-economic systems that enabled and nurtured them is still very much alive and kicking in (so-called) “western civilization.”

            • masquenox@lemmy.world
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              11 months ago

              It did take a long time for Germany to come to terms with their past.

              Have they?

              Germany is still controlled by the same kind of capitalists that funded the nazis to protect them from working-class revolt. Germany is still controlled by the same kind of politicians that gave up power to the nazis out of political expediency. Germany went from being a fascist state to enabling another pretty darn obvious one - Israel.

              No, I think Germany has no more “come to terms with it’s past” than any other colonizer state.

              But even so, that hasn’t really got to do with Germany somehow influencing Israeli

              Germany aiding and abetting a genocidal white supremacist settler-colonial state has got nothing to do with this?

              Nothing at all, eh?

                • masquenox@lemmy.world
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                  11 months ago

                  overreaching and attribution bias that make my eyes roll everytime.

                  Roll your eyes until they’re doing somersaults, Clyde… capitalism doesn’t cease working the way it works just because you find it’s thoroughly predicted outcomes inconvenient for the fairy tale you wish you were existing in.

                  They accepted refugees en masse, second to Sweden.

                  Are you referring to this, Clyde?

                  Gee… how is that whole “see no fascism, hear no fascism, speak no fascism” thing working out for you?

                  Israel did not start as a fascist state

                  Riiiiight… white supremacist settler-colonialism and fascism are totally not so intimately and indelibly linked that it’s almost impossible to tell where one starts and the other ends, eh Clyde?

                  It’s not as if the uber-examples of fascist states we have were all frustrated colonizers, or the fact that the most prolific sponsor of fascist terrorism in world history also happens to be the world’s most prolific neocolonialist.

                  Yep… pure coincidence all round, Clyde.

                  Israel is still far from being a fascist

                  Right… they can’t be fascist if you so desperately want them to be the “good guys,” right?

                  But Hamas derailed that at the last minute with their attack.

                  Oh, of course… it’s all the Palestinians’ fault, right? And if Jewish people would just have stopped with their nasty “Jewish-Bolshevism” Hitler wouldn’t have been forced into perpetrating the Holocaust, right?

                  What else do you have for me, apologist?

                  I suggest you read on Umberto Eco’s 14 characteristics of fascism instead of just throwing labels.

                  Oh, I’m very familiar with Eco’s little list - it’s a perfectly flawed and dangerous misunderstanding of what fascism really is. But liberals love it because Eco treats fascism as some kind of aberration to liberals’ precious little classical liberal nation-state - which is why people like you cannot recognize it when it is literally staring you in the face.

                  So, Germany gave aid to Israel before the invasion of Gaza

                  Sooooo… Germany gave aid to a white supremacist settler-colonialist state before said white supremacist settler-colonialist state did the very thing white supremacist settler-colonialist states always do?

                  Slavoj Zizek

                  Could you actually quote somebody less irrelevant?

    • pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.cafe
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      11 months ago

      The trick is to wait until the abyss stares back, and to smile at it.

      EDIT: My bad, I thought this was from another Israel Palestine thread I roped myself into.

      I feel bad for everyone involved though.