Deutsche Taeter Sind Keine Opfer

In today's Jungle World, there is a fascinating and very enlightened interview with Martin Rooney, Wayne's uncle. Unfortunately it's in German and I'm too lazy and don't have enough time to translate it all. I will however translate some of my favourite bits. Bear in mind that this guy is a professor of Germanistics and philosophy, and has lived since 1973 in Bremen.

JW: Recently in Germany, people have been more interested in remembering the German victims of British bombers during World War II.

MR: ...I pointed out that the boomerang that Germany launched at the time came back to Germany with vehemence. The people primarily responsible for all the deaths during the air bombings were Hitler and his party. They started the war with the enthusiastic backing of the German populace - and continued it right up to their self-destruction.

JW: The British [Lancaster] flying bombs are regarded in the minds of the Germans as particularly malicious and criminal.

MR: I always ask people what the difference is between destroying a town from the air or from the ground? The English and Americans destroyed 162 German cities. Hitler's Wehrmacht razed over 18000 towns and cities in Soviet Union to the ground. This comparison has to be seen!

[To Note: In 2003, Martin Rooney was awarded the German Villa-Ichon Bremen Peace Prize for his work in highlighting the Genocide of the Armenians by the Turks. Later, he spole out criticising the German peace movement in the wake of the Iraq war, and his prize was taken off him.] This is what he said:

MR: I have never in my life seen as one-sided a peace demo as the one in Berlin at the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003. No peace movement is as anti-american, anti-israeli and pro-palestinian as the German peace movement.

In Germany, during the Iraq war, the government exploited anti-americanism for its own ends. And where anti-americanism rages, anti-semitism is not far behind.

Wayne Rooney, do it again!