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Comment by Whistling Shrimp

Is there no end to this madness? Must the hatreds and recriminations continue on for indefinite numbers of generations? Essentially everyone who fought that war, who benefited from it in one way or another or who was a tragic victim caught in the middle of things is DEAD, in most cases LONG DEAD. If you were a 25 year old grunt in the Wehrmacht or the Red Army when Admiral Doenitz surrendered to the Allies, you are now a centenarian! If you were a 15 year old kid, you are now a ripe 90 and most of your contemporaries are pushing up daisies.

There is basically no one left alive who is entitled to a personal apology or material reparations. Leave the ethnic and nationalist hatreds to die along with the now lifeless bodies of all those who were swept up in the conflict, hardly any out of choice. The living did not perpetrate this. The living are not responsible for issuing apologies or purported “reparations” to their fellow contemporaries who themselves did nothing to accrue such benefits. By the same token extant Americans do not owe reparations to modern day African-Americans or Native Americans, though we do owe them equal rights and opportunities.

No matter who or what you are, whether Jew, Pole, Russian, Lithuanian, or German, you and your issue have had 75 years to make a life for yourselves on your own terms in a free world, nominally at peace. Your life was not made utter Scheiss because you or your cousins did not inherit some piece of artwork you claim your great great uncle had confiscated by the Nazis, the mafia, the partisans, some gleaner or was simply eaten by a goat.

Knock off the incessant kvetching and, most importantly, stop escalating the brinksmanship with the United States, using it as leverage to wheedle ever more concessions from Russia or Germany, which is guaranteed, some day, to precipitate the NEXT world war. I aim these last remarks most notably at the countries that have collectively gone off the rails with their revanchism after the end of Cold War I. Instead of enjoying the fruits of what was meant to be a new peace, they, along with the United States did nothing but conspire to rekindle Cold War II, of which the world is now in the deepest of throes with no clear path to sanity.

I am living proof that it is possible for the world’s “McCoy’s and Hatfield’s” to bury the hatchet, leave behind the darkest bits of history and live only in the present for the future. I was born right after the war. My father’s side was entirely ethnic Kashubian* from Pomerania (Pomorze) (dating back as far as one could genealogically track into the 1600’s). My mother’s side was ethnic German from Far Pomerania (Vorpommern). What made it work, I guess (before the United States itself became immersed in current identity politics), was that in post WWII America nobody ever seemed to care what your background was or where your family was from. Needless to say, the warm afterglow following WWII did not last, even here, when those who could profit through society’s dissension crawled out of the woodwork. I suspect the egalitarian mythos is what initially attracted the Saker to the United States. I think he knows better now.

Come on, people. Show some common sense. Let’s start fighting to solve our many problems, immediate and potential, posed by the forces of nature as a unified species, instead of fighting one another, especially over a past that cannot be changed one iota.

[*Kashubians were among the original inhabitants of the Baltic coast known as Pomerania. They were neither German nor Polish. Like the Polabians, Veleti, Sorbs, and the Wends they were a Slavic tribe with their own language and culture.]