Why do Germans think that having committed the Holocaust gives them special privileges to speak about Jews?

As a German: Because we have a lot of Holocaust memorials and are taught a lot about it in school, we love jerking each other off about how much we've learned from our past as opposed to say, Japan, who deny the atrocities they've committed to this day.

But of course, all the changes and improvements are completely superficial and meaningless. We are a neoliberal hellhole and maybe the most pathetically loyal US client state in all of Europe, which is saying a lot. Our political parties will performatively decline engaging with the fascist AfD, but still implement all their same policies because we are a capitalist nation in decline.

Germans think because their newscasters speak in a monotonous, boring voice, that what they're being presented is completely unbiased and nothing but the truth. They really do believe themselves to be the adults in the room. Trump derangement syndrome is also huge in Germany, our equivalents of Bill Maher or whatever still make fun of him, the president of a foreign country who hasn't been in office for over 3 years, while self-fellating over how much better our democracy is because instead of 2 identical parties, we have 5.

Germans think they're the most reasonable, objective and intellectual people in the West while blindly following whatever the current US propaganda campaign says, so completely deluded, ignorant and pathetically loyal that we will happily shoot ourselves in the leg to serve American interests.

I fucking hate this country. I hate its self-aggrandizing, pseudo-repentant, pathetic ass-kissing of Israel. I hate how everyone in this country is a staunch defender of the status quo, how everyone loves to dunk on America with a less-than-surface level understanding of why America is the way it is and complete ignorance about how we're on the exact same track but maybe 3 years behind. Even our "left" loves Israel because there is not a single person in this country who understands literally anything, it's all fucking vibes. Israel could literally come out tomorrow like "We have decided to rebrand the war against Hamas as "Holocaust 2"" and we would lick their assholes for it.

Germans are probably the dumbest, most ignorant and at the same time most self-important people on this godforsaken planet. The dumbest American is 10x more curious about the world than the smartest German. If the US told us to, we would happily exterminate the Jews again, our news would tell us that the Jews started it and that would be enough for the average German to feel proud and righteous about it.

not sure if it directly answers your question but have to pass on this from @the_kid@hexbear.net in the news mega

Bad Memory: Germany is acclaimed for its efforts to atone for the Holocaust. But its method of repudiating the past has become a tool of exclusion.

excerpt

Sometime in the 2000s, a group of mostly Turkish women from an immigrant group called Neighborhood Mothers began meeting in the Neukölln district of Berlin to learn about the Holocaust. Their history lessons were part of a program facilitated by members of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, a Christian organization dedicated to German atonement for the Shoah. The Neighborhood Mothers were terrified by what they learned in these sessions. “How could a society turn so fanatical?” a group member named Nazmiye later recalled thinking. “We began to ask ourselves if they could do such a thing to us as well . . . whether we would find ourselves in the same position as the Jews.” But when they expressed this fear on a church visit organized by the program, their German hosts became apoplectic. “They told us to go back to our countries if this is how we think,” Nazmiye said. The session was abruptly ended and the women were asked to leave.

There are a number of anecdotes like this in anthropologist Esra Özyürek’s Subcontractors of Guilt, a recently published study of the array of German Holocaust education programs dedicated to integrating Arab and Muslim immigrant communities into the country’s ethos of responsibility and atonement for Nazi crimes. As Özyürek shows, those who pass through these programs often draw connections their guides do not intend—to nativist violence in contemporary Germany, or to the bloody circumstances they fled in Syria, Turkey, and Palestine. For many Germans, the anxieties these historical encounters stoke for migrants are, in Özyürek’s words, the “wrong emotions.” One German guide who leads concentration camp tours recalled being “irritated” by members of immigrant tour groups voicing the fear that “they will be sent there next.” “There was a sense that they didn’t belong here, and that they should not be engaging with the German past,” the guide said. To be really German, they were supposed to play the part of repentant perpetrators, not potential victims.

This expectation has become the basis for what scholars Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz have called the “migrant double bind.” In this paradigm, the core of contemporary “Germanness” is found in a certain sensitivity to antisemitism, conferred through a direct, likely familial relationship to the Third Reich. Migrants and racialized minorities are expected to assume the perpetrators’ legacy; when they fail, this is taken as a sign that they do not really belong in Germany. In other words, in a paradox typical of the upside-down dynamics surrounding Jews, Arabs, and Germans in contemporary Germany, a questionably conceived anti-antisemitism has become the mechanism for keeping Germanness Aryan.

really great article if you want to understand the German brain-type

It is absolutely the most galling shit and every imperial core lib does it.

"Yes we did some horrible things in the past, but we've learned not to which makes us wiser than everyone else"

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Germans project and believe an image of themselves as being a self-critical society that acknowledges the evil of their Nazi past and has now moved past it.

At the same time, they barely even understand who the Nazis were and how they came to power and who beat them into submission so they think it's just being racist and having swastikas.

As such, they're still pretty fash even though they don't know it and feel they have special brownie points to lecture everyone else about what counts as racist or Nazi even though they're idiots.

Cause they've learned thats the only bad thing they did

It's so pervasive there are people who describe themselves as anarchists and zionists as if those things are possibly compatible. And there are a lot of them especially online.

https://novaramedia.com/2023/12/11/whats-up-with-germanys-pro-israel-left/

I think we can all agree that the world would be better off if the German speaking peoples were still scattered across a thousand tiny states called like the Grand Archbishopric of Pissdrinken

Here's a whole podcast with some good resource/analysis in the links.

Edit: Also a lot of Norman Finkelstein's "The Holocaust industry" goes into the issue with German reparations, the maleable definition of "holocaust survivor," and how "Establishment" organizations largely funnelled the funds to pro-Israel organizations.

I was once in Jordan with a bunch of them - they accused everything of antisemitism. After seeing a pic of an Israeli soldier in nazi garb eating children (EDIT: Yeah, that one was antisemitic, they saw it everywhere though, with a generalized contempt for these arabs not having the noble german guilt to bear), they commented on how antisemitic that was and the swastika being drawn the wrong way around and I bursted out "Glad we are here to show them how it's done" and I still think that is the best summary of german thought I can give

Because in the typical euroid fashion, they still believe they have superior opinions.

German libs seem to be the only ones in the West truly enjoying supporting Israel's genocide. They're totally convinced that supporting Israeli murder of Palestinians makes them clever/moral good boys who are just better than everyone else. Everyone else is sheepish about it or just doesn't want to talk about it, but the Germans watch their media blatantly propagandizing them to support this crime against humanity and eat it up like Uncle Sam dripped some lard over their kibble this morning. It really encapsulates everything that is sick and wrong in the German political consciousness. They've really got a lot going for them as a society, as loathe as many of us here are to admit it, but it makes them so damned arrogant and blind to their ideological domination.

Cause that's how cracker chauvinism works. When you do a lot of heinous shit, you arent guilty. You've simply become an expert.

I'm suddenly very tempted to ask German libs if they condemn the Warsaw Rising.

Because its literally illegal to support Palestine in Germany. It got written in law decades ago so now every political party must support Israel. Who is going to articulate to them the reality? Online foreigners? Thats just people who never had to face their antisemitism.

The only time you should ever hear a German's opinion on genocide is if you want to know how to conduct one.

KKKrackers think they have authority on every subject

Do they? If they're not German Jews, that's fucked up

Trying to make themselves feel better probably

There's no right-wing politics in germany. That is to say, of course there is - lots of it - but nobody would ever proudly proclaim it like elsewhere, because it carries the immediate association with being a nazi, which is widely disregarded. And THAT is to say, it is widely disregarded to be considered a nazi, not so much doing nazi stuff.

This seems to shift the overton window into the fucking 4th dimension as nobody can admit to being a right-winger anymore.

EDIT: The conclusion to the entire idea of being maybe sort of close to the nazis, ideologically, is that most people can have horrible shitty political opinions but convince themselves that's actually progressive, and you get this crap

Offloading guilt + "to catch a murderer you need to hire a murderer" logic. Really fucked up.

Because they're crackers.

vee hev tou protekt te joos in Israel vrom te eevil muslims!

Edit: But seriously, Germans are entirely obsessed with the idea of Israel absolving them of criticism. Germans in Europe are seen as brash, obnoxious know-it-alls who think everything in Germany is better. Superficially they are an extremely obnoxious people who should (and need) to tamper down their voice and brashness. Under the hood however they are extremely insecure and have the need to compensate the failures of modern Germany and their ancestors with moral bombasticism. Israel is a perfect surface to project their supposed moral superiority. After all, aren't they nobely supporting the Jewish cause by their uncritical support of Israel? How could Germany be antisemitic if they are taking the morally superior stance of protecting jews from scum Muslims?

Pretty sure it's the same mentality as you see other places.

"I was a Nazi, so I get to tell you what is a Nazi, why they became a Nazi, why..." whatever else. Like when right wingers "become reformed" (they just mean they watch different YouTube videos but with the same overall themes) so they get to police "the left" on what is beneficial towards our goals and such. And their discord logs always leak and it's always full of the most colorful and unsurprising racist and homophobic slurs you can think of. But they know better and we should listen to them because they've "been there" or whatever.

If you came from such a background and just suddenly became aware that racism is bad I do not value your criticism of "from the river to the sea" chants or the name "black lives matter" for a movement. I don't care, the people who are oppressed and suffering don't care, the only ones who care are the liberals, which these "reformed right wingers" always still are. If they were actually radicalized to the left they'd not be saying the above dipshittery.

There's probably some fancy psychological term for people who realize they were wrong to some degree, change their opinions, but still remain overly critical of the opinion they claim to have changed to.

I have to imagine there's a lot of that going on with Germans broadly. "I truly understand this because my grandfather did it." As if an outsider can't... read? There's a lot of weird shit tied up in it and on the subject of Israel Germany is so incredibly wrong that it's almost shocking. All I can think is "you motherfuckers learned NOTHING!" There takeaway doesn't seem to be "genocide is bad" but rather "genocide is bad... depending on who is doing it."

There's probably some guilt element tied up in it and some level of "fear" that as a German they can NEVER speak out against Israel because people will immediately go "German accent? Nazi." which might have some truth to it, but they aren't beating the stereotype by openly supporting another genocide now.

ake nuance-cookery, bootlicking, both-sideism, and "akshually" 101 philosophy wannabe-majors and you got a complacent and unaware populace. In germanys underfunded and class-segregated education system historic revisionism and pop-lib history is widespread. Its countryside is controlled by American-founded CDU country lords. German society is also still conservative and regressive. The lower class of german society is very effectively sidelined, I know it from my father, who doesn't speak up or criticizes his bosses because of a sense of "Oh they are more qualified than me". Its a very weird hierarchal structure.

To alleviate some people's fears here, the hardcore pro-zionism is widespread amongst the higher chambers of german society, especially the "highly educated" section. I come from working-class surroundings and most of the people there are not that extreme, they also are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. But just like with most countries, its the voice of the upper-class English-speaking "techie" population that gets amplified

Firsthand experience of course!

Why do Germans think that having committed the Holocaust gives them special privileges to speak about Jews?

A lmayo is speaking. It's time to (not) listen

because they are members of the west which means their opinions are valued and they only have the best takes.

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