(December 22, 2014 at 11:45 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote:(December 21, 2014 at 1:24 pm)Nope Wrote: The US has a bad track record of accepting that some of its past actions were crappy. I know people who still defend slavery.
From what I have been told, Germany has done a pretty good job of accepting its responsibility for what happened in WW2
This charge is not against the American people. It is against a specific administration that engaged in activities that it didn't openly share with the public. Cheney and the rest of his gang should stand trial but they won't.
In my fourth year of studying German in high school, we read German history books that detailed the rise of Nazism, how it happened, took an unflinching look at what happened and the terrible results for everyone in the world.
Germany has done an admirable job owning what happened. They've put us to shame considering we have yet to come to terms with our sins, including slavery, segregation and the genocide of Native Americans. Consider that there is only one nation I can think of that has used all three forms of WMD (chemical, biological and nuclear) not only in war but on civilian targets.
The one you want as a police detective is a truly repentant former criminal now working for law and order. Germany is not only qualified to lead the way on international law against crimes of war, aggression and against humanity, they are supremely qualified.
My deepest regret as an American is that clearly justice will have to be forced upon us. We don't seem to have the political will to do what is right and arrest these war criminals ourselves.
By the way, it can happen anywhere. Eternal vigilance is always required. The direction my country has taken in the last 12 years is unsettling in context to what I studied. I'm not saying we're about to open concentration camps tomorrow but we've unarguably taken some steps on the road to fascism.
I wish I could like your post a thousand times over Deist.
