Israel Forced To Apologise To Japan Over Offensive Hiroshima Comments

[dairydog91]

37. And at the time of WWII, many Germans justified their own country's invasion.

After all, they'd just seen Russia collapse into a bloody civil war and emerge into a Communist juggernaut, which had launched military efforts as far as Poland. They'd seen their own country dismembered by the League of Nations. They'd seen Germany hit the skids with its own revolution, with tanks roaring through the streets and gun battles aplenty. They'd heard propaganda, some of it true, about Germanic people being abused by the governments of the countries that had absorbed them. They'd heard stories about how Germany had almost won the war and had been betrayed at the last moments by striking unions, scheming Jews, and cowardly generals. They lived in a country, a continent, where Jews had been regarded as nefarious "others" for hundreds and even thousands of years. Some, including a couple of my distant relatives, went to war viewing themselves as the protectors of not just Germany, but all of Western Europe, from an ill-defined Judeo-Bolshevik-Asian menace. You can even read the autobiography of the man who built and operated Auschwitz, if you're so inclined. He thought, pretty much to the second the noose snapped his neck, that what he'd done had been for the good of his country. So I guess, in the end, I think that what the conquerors actually DID is what matters, not what they thought they were doing or why they thought their actions were justified.