Namibian President Hage G. Geingob blasted Germany on Saturday for defending Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, pointing to the genocide Germany itself perpetrated on Namibians in the early 1900s.
While I disagree with the German and Israeli governments, “you did genocide too” is not an argument for anything. You will be hard pressed to find a country that never participated in one and the current situation hardly compares to randomly invading and colonizing a country not even on the same continent as your own.
There are plenty of arguments you can find against the Israeli and my own Government, no need to resort to populist speeches.
“you did genocide too” is not an argument for anything
Actually that’s not the argument.
The argument is: first recognize all your genocides, before attempting to defend one.
We recognize the genocide against hereros and Namas as genocide though. We even started paying reparations recently finally.
Which would still be a stupid argument, because these two alleged genocides are very different in nature, scale and also completely unrelated. I disagree that that’s the argument tho.
From the article posted here:
“The German government is yet to fully atone for the genocide it committed on Namibian soil,” Geingob’s office said on social media.
“In light of Germany’s inability to draw lessons from its horrific history, President Geingob expresses deep concern with the shocking decision communicated by [Germany] … in which it rejected the morally upright indictment brought forward by South Africa before the ICJ that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” Geingob’s office said.
Yes, thank you, I’ve read the article.
Slovenians never commited genocide.
I don’t think it’s that hard to find a genocide free nation. Shared experiences make up your culture and that informs your politics.
Germany would likely be on the right side of history if they had incinerated millions of men women and children.
Germany was defending Israel …
Well, Germany is kind of in a tough spot here…
Only because the Holocaust was always framed as “that horrible thing that happened to the Jews that we need to prevent from ever happening again to Jews” instead of “that horrible thing that happened to people (some of which were Jews) and we need to prevent that from happening to any people ever again”.
One if our own making. If we stopped defending genocide we wouldn’t be here.
Genocide in Namibia is not the genocide Germany is known for
Because most people just don’t know about it.
The point was that German relations with genocide are not restricted to holocaust, and their justification of supporting current genocide by the past genocide is straight up hypocritical and their argument completely falls apart.
