Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, one of the few Dutchmen that has anything between his legs, has written that the Netherlands should issue a formal apology to their Jews whom they helped along to the German death camps during Nazi occupation in World War II (and to those survivors). It seems reasonable to me because there are still survivors of the Holocaust as well as surviving perpetrators. The issue specifically addresses the lack of attention paid by the Dutch government in exile (in Britain) about the plight of the Dutch Jews. Yet, the current government seems not to be so inclined.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/wilders-dutch-government-should-apologize-for-passive-attitude-to-wwii-deportation-of-jews/2012/01/04/gIQAyPJ6ZP_story.html
Here is a report on the attitudes of the Dutch about the idea of a formal apology (Jewish Press).
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/time-for-the-dutch-to-finally-fess-up/2012/01/11/
Accordingly, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte sees no reason to apologize (Dutch News NL).
http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2012/01/no_apology_for_wwii_government.php
Another reason why I think an apology is relevant is because Dutch Jews in the Netherlands are once again being subjected to anti-Semitism to the point, they are advised not to wear Jewish garb on the streets.
Of course, this raises the question about whether the American government should issue a formal apology to African-Americans for slavery. Personally, I have no strong opinions about that unless the apology would bear legal implications as to descendants of slaves and descendants of those who owned slaves (in a certain part of the US). Of course, both slaves and slave owners are long dead, beyond help and beyond punishment.
What is important to Americans and Europeans is that slavery and the Holocaust be fully acknowledged. In the case of Europe, anti-Semitism is not only alive, but acting out. The shameful truth is that every country that the Germans occupied (with the exception of Denmark) cooperated in the Holocaust and in some cases, with great relish. In the case of the Netherlands, it was Dutch officials and Dutch police who helped round up the Jews and put them on the trains to the death camps.
But the Dutch are more concerned with not alienating their Muslim immigrants or Arab countries that might interpret it as a sign of sympathy for Israel. So they remain defiantly silent as they continue to boast that they are the most tolerant country in the world.
What they really are is the most screwed up country in Europe.
A nimble dance Gary, in which you manage to evade the implications of anything you said for any arguably parallel situation.
ReplyDeleteTraditional European anti-Semitism began when Christianity became the Official Religion of the Roman Empire. Constantine wanted The Church to unify his empire for him, and authorized the first persecution of heretics. If it was OK to slaughter Donatists, how could they not slaughter Jews? And so they did, for the next 16 centuries, not with perfect consistency, fortunately.
Modern anti-Semitism is not of European origin, but does occur in Europe, because people who resent the massive subsidy of the State of Israel by Jews elsewhere in the world reside in some numbers in Europe. The thinking, which dates at least back to King Abdullah's written message to the western press in 1947, is that Israel would be a pushover if not for the money supplied by world Jewry. Like most comforting syllogisms, that has some basis, but is probably not wholly accurate. I suspect Israel would have managed anyway, at greater cost.
It seems a stretch that a Dutch government in exile, which had lost all effective military or police control of its conquered territory, should apologize for what an occupying army was doing on its territory.
Nor do the contemporary incidents you refer to derive from Nazi ideology. They just don't, no matter where the Grand Mufti spent the war. He and Hitler both considered each other useful idiots, as indeed they were.
Finally, as to slavery. Your argument is that persecution of Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland was somehow facilitated by the laws of the Dutch state. That is debatable, but it is NOT debatable that enslavement in the USA was indeed facilitated, indeed made possible, by legislative enactments. The Supreme Court of Mississippi said as much in 1813. So IF apologies are in order, the USA apologizing for slavery is front and center.
However, I tend to agree that apologies for acts committed by persons long dead are a dead letter. If the practices being condemned no longer happen, no apology is necessary. If they continue, no apology means anything.
What arguably is owed to descendants of freed slaves is compensation for several generations in which capital accumulation was severely restrained, but the restitution, if any, would have to enhance capital, not provide spending money. The money, of course, is owed by the existing accumulations of capital that have documented benefit from enslavement or Jim Crow, NOT by anyone classifiable as "white." That would be not unlike who owed compensation to heirs of Jewish depositors whose accounts disappeared when they were taken off to Auschwitz.
Siarlys,
ReplyDeleteWithout excusing centuries old slaughter, can we concentrate on what is happening today? Who the Hell were the Donatists, anyway?
The Dutch situation has two facets; one was what the Dutch authorities not in exile were doing in collaborating with the Germans in hunting down the Jews. Second is the apparent or alleged lack of interest on the part of the Queen and the govt in exile as to the actions against Jews. If people involved are still living or survivors, what is wrong with an apology.
As to reparations today to descendants of slaves that's a sticky wicket 150 years after the end of slavery. If you can justify payments now, you will have to justify payments in another 150 years. Then how do you decide who is a descendant of slaves? Should Obama get a payout? What about those descended from Jamaica and the Caribbean? What about mixed-race folks? Do you want to go back to measuring people's blood? A fair, colorblind society is what we owe them and everybody else.
Gary, is there anything behind your eyes or between your ears to PROCESS what you see and hear???
ReplyDeleteIf you don't know who the Donatists were, you have no business ranting about anti-Semitism. I don't know a lot about them either, but I do know that they were a Christian sect deemed heretical by the councils of bishops assembled by Constantine under orders to set forth a definition of orthodox Christianity, and that once persecution of Donatists began, persecution of Jews soon followed. What exactly they believed is as irrelevant to me as it would be to the First Amendment.
Whatever Dutch authorities remained in Holland were no doubt collaborating, because they would have been shot if they didn't. Further, their own government was overseas. Probably, those most willing to collaborate were the only ones left in Holland who were not underground. Perhaps they, as individuals, owe apologies, but hopefully, the most wilfully complicit of them faced firing squads in 1945.
The government in exile had as much chance of influencing Nazi policy as the Communist Party of Northern California had in 1976 of influencing the government of South Africa to end apartheid.
As balancing the costs and benefits of slavery to various groups, I have already made clear that what might reasonably be corrected is an imbalance in intergenerational accumulation of capital, not payment of checks to individuals, nor responsibility of any given "race" to any other as a group. That might be done once, not repeatedly, in the very nature of the way I defined the problem.