Vichy France clearly exhibited the French support for the Nazis. There wasn't much struggle, neither against German political control nor the Nazi "civil rights" policies.
I plan on seeing the exhibit about those times at the New York Public Library during this summer's visit, G-d willing.
As I've written many times, no country in Europe or the rest of the world, including the United States, has the right to take the moral high ground against Israel. No country fought Nazi Germany because of its racist anti-Semitic and anti-minority policies. The countries which opposed and militarily fought them did it only for their own survival or other security reasons.
All and all, nothing has really changed in the past seventy years. No country has apologized for their passivity and acquiescence to Nazi policies. The United Nations, established just after World War Two ended, is a hot bed of anti-Semitic (Jewish/Israel) ideology, as we just saw at Durban II.
Because of France's quick willingness to be part of the Nazi German Empire, it was saved from physical destruction. The New York Exhibit tries to analyze its moral state. Let's see what we can learn from the past, if people are willing.
5 comments:
A wonderful, insightful and well articulated post.
Barack Obama backed out of Durban II at the last minute because he thought attending would be bad publicity for him. Not that he was morally repulsed by the Iranian presidents Nazi-style comments and lies about Israel.
It's all the more disturbing coming as close as it did to Yom HaShoah. With the exception of Israel Shoah commemorations and memorials in most other nations including the US are a farce. They provide an opportunity for self-serving politicians and religous leaders to fax philosophical about humanity and morality and tolerance.
Me? I recall a famous poem that someone wrote during the US Civil Rights era about little black girls who died when their church was torched. He called the poem a refusal to mourn. Mourn being public displays of mourning which may or may not be sincere. The poem writer wanted to remain angry about what happened. He wanted to remain outraged and horrified.
He didn't want the public's horror over the tragedy to dissolve into an "aw, how sad" attitude.
If I were to give a Shoah display at a museum I would take photos of Sderot, Ashkelon, Gush Katif and other places in Israel hit by Islamic terrorism and in the case of Gush Katif the ethnic cleansing of 8,000 Jews.
I'd switch the modern photos to black and white and then, when people said the anticipated "never again" I show color photos of Israel today and state firmly to anyone viewing the display "Hypocrites. It IS happening again."
In my fantasy their jaws would drop in horror and they'd repent from their policies of indifference and anti-Israeli bias.
I wanted to post something on the Shoah on my blog and didn't know what to write. Instead, I wrote a post on how Christian missionaries are going into Israeli neighborhoods, harassing Orthodox Jews and posting them on You Tube.
If you're interested, I named the post The Burden of Civilization is Upon Us.
Long comment, I know. Thank you for listening:)
oops. I meant wax philosophical not fax.
Keli, great idea. Please add the link in a comment.
Hi. Here's the link to my post about the burden of civilization:
http://keliata.blogspot.com/2009/04/burden-of-civilization-is-upon-us.html
I was pleased and surprised to see how it was rated on J Blog--at last check a score of 80 and all of the ratings were 5.
Thanks, very impressive. jblog has been rating me very low for quite a while. I have to ignore it.
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