[Kiwiwriter]

(Colonel Gubbins @ Dec 1 2005, 06:56 PM) [post=42368]To ask another type of question. Would you expect the German survivors of dresden to forgive the RAF pilots who dropped thousands of tons of bombs which whipped up the three day firestrom and killed 30,000 inhabitants mostly civilians and foreign labourers? Its an interesting point I had not thought of. A friend of mine has a German mother and a British father. His dad was a tommie and his mother a secretary working for the Wehrmacht. Family album is interesting with UK family life and pictures of grandparents and relatives in german uniforms at Christmas in occupied Holland. How is that reconcilable. As everyone said it has to be personal.
My grandfather was shot in the shoulder at Dunkirk by a machine gunner, almost 3 years in hospitals and recovering. He never talked much about it, and did not mention forgiveness.
As to the Japanese. We here in the western cultures cannot possibly imagine their culture and way of life as it was in the 1940's, remember that those pf their officers would likely have been educated in a tradition in the 1900's, by people who's outlook would have been from the 1870's. It is not easy to understand at all, never mind reconcile or forgive. Each must have their own way. How do all those 3rd reich re-enactors reconcile themselves to the side of the hoby they chose?
Kind regards
Matt Gibbs
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As far as the Dresden issue goes, the total dead seems to have been 24,000, and the survivors are in the same position as the victims of other city-bustings, such as Hamburg, Essen, and Nuremberg....or London, Coventry, and Warsaw. In any case, this year's ceremonies marking the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden were noted for both attempts at reconciliation (the Duke of Kent represented the UK) and noisy appearances by neo-Nazis who proclaimed Dresden the "true" atrocity of World War II, and not the Hoocaust.

The Third Reich re-enactors are an interesting bunch. I don't know much about them, and I'm often amazed anybody wants to re-enact as an SS unit. They probably have a lot of problems fending off wannabes who think that by dressing up as a Landser and fighting sham battles on weekends, they are helping to restore Adolf Hitler's good name and Nazism as a viable political system. I do know that a similar problem is endemic to Confederate re-enactors.

I said earlier on this thread that forgiveness has to be personal. Official forgiveness is often created and done by politicians, but for political reasons. When Bill Clinton expressed regrets for the ghastly Tuskegee experiments of the 1930s, he was expressing regret for the acts of a governmental system, but not for the persons who had committed the acts -- they are all dead or ancient. Systems by definition are not human, and forgiveness is a humanity...so it must come from one human to another.

Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks' dramatic refusal to shift her seat in a Montgomery city bus. She died just before that, and at one of the services honoring her in Montgomery, today's mayor of the city talked about how he had been asked about the City issuing an official pardon for her convicted offense of 1955 of violating the segregation laws (and presumably refunding her $10 fine).

The mayor had an interesting answer. "We should not be forgiving her," he said. "We should be asking her for forgiveness." It took me a moment to realize what he was saying...that Rosa Parks did not need a pardon from the City of Montgomery. It was the City of Montgomery that had created and perpetuated an amazing civic and moral wrong, and the city should be apologizing to Rosa Parks for putting her through that ordeal.

And one might say that the $10 was repaid by the fact that the route of that bus is now "Rosa Parks Boulevard," so the city must have spent more than $10 to put up all the new street signs.