The "Good Germans" among today’s Americans
Oct 14th, 2007 by Paul Moor
To my fellow codgers, the phrase “good Germans” has specific overtones from the 1930s and ’40s, referring to those uncountable but numerous purportedly “good Germans” who emphatically did not elect the Nazis into power but, to quote one source verbatim, did “nothing … while Hitler destroyed Europe and murdered 6,000,000 Jews, and 5,000,000 Poles, Russians, Communists, homosexuals, and other ‘non-Aryans’ in his death camps. They denied, or accepted and approved, or said they didn’t know, or (justifiably for many) feared punishment or death in Hitler’s dictatorship….”
On an Internet-age impulse this morning, I yielded to the impetus sparked by Frank Rich’s Op-Ed contribution in today’s New York Times and submitted the two-word phrase “good Germans” to www.Google.com - which in an eye’s merest twinkling knocked me flat with “about 66,300″ hits on that term - all of which you can wade your own way through by clicking here.
I cordially recommend that to any historically minded visitor interested in comparing those sincerely good - but passive - Germans with all the similarly intentionally good Americans now, in frighteningly similar fashion, passively accepting the present administration’s chipping away at the very foundations of the historic American tradition of democracy that became the envy of much of the world due to a brilliant Constitution that marked a change in all world history.
But since Frank Rich’s column this morning galvanized me to the extent it did - especially since I proudly claim ownership of an opulent certificate from the administration of the city-state of Berlin (which I’ve made arrangements to have suitably framed for hanging in a prominent place in my Berlin apartment), dated August 16th, 2007, proclaiming me a citizen of the Federal Republic of Germany - let’s concentrate for the moment on Frank Rich’s column.
He immediately clobbers us with this sledgehammer lead: “‘Bush lies’ doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s time to confront the darker reality that we are lying to ourselves.”
Got that now? Rich continues:
“Ten days ago The Times unearthed yet another round of secret Department of Justice memos countenancing [sic!] torture. President Bush gave his standard response: ‘This government does not torture people.’ Of course, it all depends on what the meaning of ‘torture’ is. The whole point of these memos is to repeatedly recalibrate the definition so Mr. Bush can keep pleading innocent.
“By any legal standards except those rubber-stamped by Alberto Gonzales, we are practicing torture, and we have known we are doing so ever since photographic proof emerged from Abu Ghraib more than three years ago. As Andrew Sullivan, once a Bush cheerleader, observed last weekend in The Sunday Times of London, America’s ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques have a grotesque provenance: ‘Verschärfte Vernehmung, enhanced or intensified interrogation, was the exact term innovated by the Gestapo to describe what became known as the ‘third degree.’ It left no marks. It included hypothermia, stress positions, and long-time sleep deprivation.”
For those insufficiently versed in modern German history, GeStaPo abbreviates Geheime Staatspolizei, one of Hitler’s two most effective instruments of terror (the other: the SS, which among other accomplishments ran Nazi Germany’s vast multi-national ramification of concentration and extermination camps) which, thanks to previous organization exemplifying the phrase “German efficiency”, had Germany figuratively but paralytically by the balls within mere days after his appointment to the Chancellorship by the aristocratic, hysterically anti-Socialist President Paul von Hindenburg.
But since I’ve made Frank Rich’s entire column easily available to anyone who simply clicks here, let me turn you over to the courageous author of this powerhouse piece of top-quality journalism.
