| “ | The Germans decided that discomfort could make them stronger by creating guardrails against a returning evil. |
Michele Norris describes how Germany faces its Nazi past, as a model for how America could face slavery. It turns out they have a long word for it, Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung,
an abstract, polysyllabic way of saying, ‘We have to do something about the Nazis.’
V24g took awhile to get started, and it’s messy and imperfect, but it’s real. Norris lists many examples. One:
Cadets training to become police officers in Berlin take 2½ years of training that includes Holocaust history and a field trip to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Her source:
“[P]olice fatally shot 11 people and injured 34 while on duty in 2018, according to statistics compiled by the German Police Academy in Münster.
… “In Minnesota alone, where Mr. Floyd was killed, police fatally shot 13 people.”
And on the 40th anniversary of the end of WW2, West German President von Weizsäcker, son of a chief Nazi diplomat, said:
We need to look truth straight in the eye. …anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Whoever refuses to remember the inhumanity is prone to new risk of infection.
Thanks to Laura for finding and sharing this piece.