mardi 20 novembre 2018

Since Hitler was defeated in 1945, there has been a tendency to say "goodbye to all that" (Sean McMeekin)


Sean McMeekin, historien américain:
"Since Hitler was defeated in 1945, there has been a tendency to say "goodbye to all that", as if the exposure of the Nazi death camps truly taught the world "a lesson it will never forget"*. And yet the toxic self-pitying disease which gave rise to Nazism is still abroad in the world, if no longer prevalent in Germany itself. At its most glaringly obvious, the syndrome manifests itself in common Arab anti-Semitism, with Israel blamed for every evil which has occurred in the Middle East in modern times. But there is a subtler version of the virus coursing through the veins of the West, such as the fashionable Third Worldist autocritique which decries every sin of European imperialism while absolving the world's most wicked post-colonial regimes of responsibility for their crimes."

* This phrase appears, for example, on the back jack cover of Joachim Fest's Hitler
Sean McMeekin, The Berlin-Baghdad Express, The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power, Alan Lane, 2010, p. 366. (Le train Berlin-Bagdad… au cœur de la stratégie allemande en 1914-1918), par Bernard Cazes @ Futuribles)

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