No better than them

[Louis VI the Fat]

I will shed a tear for the Germans. Of course the treatment of the Germans was wrong. It was a bloody disgrace.

One doesn't have to choose sides, or to belittle the suffering of one side, or to pick a side that was more wrong, or less wrong. Nor to agree with neo-nazi revisionists that all violence was equal, nor to agree with communists apologists about historical necessities.

One can simply denounce hypernationalism, choose to abhor all totalitarian violence, and strife for a peaceful, democratic Europe that never again will have to endure this.


To quote my favourite German poet Schiller, trying to connect form with content:

Joy! Schöner Götterfunken! Fille de l'Élysée!
Intoxicated with your fire, heavenly one, we tread thy sanctuary
Tes charmes relient, was der Mode Schwert geteilt
All men become brothers, wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.




(note to self: rewrite Schiller into a multilingual whole whilst retaining metrum, a semblance of rhyme and the integrity of the flow of the language. )

Nazi Germany was expansionist, the eastern European states with smaller German populations were not

I'm afraid they were. Poland was feasting on the flesh of Czechoslovakia together with Germany in 1938. The Hungarians and Bulgarians were perennial irredentists. Apart from Czechoslovakia, none of the Eastern European states were democracies.

And never mind Stalin, who never did not have the conquest of as much of Europe as possible in mind.