LogFAQs > #949387855

ElatedVenusaur posted...

Still, it must be said the Germans are handling things pretty well, particularly compared to other nations with dark pasts.

That's quite true. But I believe it's only because Germany's total defeat represented perhaps the most catastrophic failure of any leader or ideology in the 20th century.

I think it's significant that when the Ottoman Empire laid down its arms in 1918 and Constantinople was placed under military occupation by the British, for several months afterward Turkish newspapers and parliamentarians openly acknowledged the enormity of what had happened to the Armenians, condemned the genocide, and demanded full investigations and swift trials. But when Turkish nationalist resistance hardened and the nationalists eventually won the ensuing war, the wind blew from a very different direction -- and the new Republic built a wall of silence and denial around the Armenian genocide that has stood to this very day. It's often the losers, not the winners, who learn the real lessons; and the nationalists could rightly claim to have won.

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Incinerate