John Havelock: Germany's Past Has Led to a More Equal Present
[John Havelock is a former Alaska attorney general and served as director of Legal Studies for the University of Alaska.]
For Americans, history is casual reminiscence. History is smash in your face for those who live along the Elbe. An Icelandic volcanic explosion extended the pleasures of a vacation cruise on this major German river, lending more time to ponder why Europeans differ so from Americans in character, economics and politics.
The Elbe flows through what was recently called the German Democratic Republic, an undemocratic, impoverished Soviet satellite containing an embattled island called West Berlin. Then The Wall came down. Then the GDR collapsed. Soon after, West Germany committed vast sums to the rehabilitation of its East German addition, far more than we spent through the Marshall Plan to rehabilitate West Germany after World War II.
In a controversial strike in the last six months of that war, British and American bombers conducted a massive bombing raid on Dresden, a city of little military significance. The bombing was so intense that it started a "fire storm" that consumed the entire city and tens of thousands of people with it.
The bombing was followed by the Soviet invasion from the East, bringing with it rape and pillage by the Soviet army, a wholesale removal of all industrial machinery and the installation of a satellite police state....
Read entire article at Anchorage Daily News
For Americans, history is casual reminiscence. History is smash in your face for those who live along the Elbe. An Icelandic volcanic explosion extended the pleasures of a vacation cruise on this major German river, lending more time to ponder why Europeans differ so from Americans in character, economics and politics.
The Elbe flows through what was recently called the German Democratic Republic, an undemocratic, impoverished Soviet satellite containing an embattled island called West Berlin. Then The Wall came down. Then the GDR collapsed. Soon after, West Germany committed vast sums to the rehabilitation of its East German addition, far more than we spent through the Marshall Plan to rehabilitate West Germany after World War II.
In a controversial strike in the last six months of that war, British and American bombers conducted a massive bombing raid on Dresden, a city of little military significance. The bombing was so intense that it started a "fire storm" that consumed the entire city and tens of thousands of people with it.
The bombing was followed by the Soviet invasion from the East, bringing with it rape and pillage by the Soviet army, a wholesale removal of all industrial machinery and the installation of a satellite police state....