Generational Dynamics World View

[beechnut79]

(11-03-2019, 11:18 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: The people most vulnerable to persecution are all-too-often people who by any reasonable standard are 'model majorities' -- people identifiably different, but successful. That irks the Hell out of those of the anti-human, anti-capitalist forms of capitalism. Think of Jews in Spain before Jews got the choice to flee with nothing or convert and keep their property -- but be monitored for any lapses into old Jewish ways of life (in Spain, such could include failure to eat pork(pork of course violates Kosher dietary laws), keeping seven-fold candelabras, using unleavened bread on Easter Sunday, giving their children Hebrew names such as "Abraham" and "Sarah" (not always a strictly-Jewish practice -- see Puritan-era New England and of course Mennonites), or having secretive meetings on Saturday or known Jewish holidays.  

German Jews had no chance to convert. (If anything, I can see one thing that would have solved all the moral problems of the German and Austrian peoples between 1933 and 1945  -- Judaism!) Indeed, I once had an extended conflict with a neo-Nazi who attributed all sorts of vices, none of them particularly Jewish, to me. So I am a smart liberal with a German-sounding surname and I hate Nazis. I also had strawberry-blond hair at one time, which he could not see but I didn't tell him about. In the end I told him the following:

1. he is not the first to use antisemitic slurs against me; practically any German surname. is potentially a "Jewish" surname.
2. what he says about Jews is completely wrong with my experience. Most obviously Jews are not particularly greedy and materialistic, and if they succeed at something it is not out of a lust for ostentatious indulgence.
3. Even if the smears are false because I am not Jewish, they still hurt. Many German-Americans have experienced such.
4. The vast majority of Germans and German-Americans hate Nazis for much the same reason that most Italian-Americans hate Mafia groups and most Hispanic groups hate the drug-trafficking cartels. Every ethnic and religious group that I have ever seen hate the rogues of their groups.
5. Holocaust denial is absurd, cruel, and indefensible. It is only a matter of time before someone denies or trivializes race-based slavery.
6. As a nominal Christian who recognizes the Nazis as proof of the need for Hell for the most egregious sins possible so that Heaven can be free of those sins, I can't imagine anyone risking eternal damnation by being a Nazi. And what if God is Jewish? I can't imagine any swastikas or Nazi salutes in Heaven, but all righteous people get to accept the truth.  
7. I consider the Jews my cultural and moral brethren, and if I had to choose between being a Jew and a Nazi I would convert to Judaism because I could keep my moral and cultural values intact as a Jew. To be a Nazi I would have to be evil.

Culture? This is as German as one can get. Johann Sebastian Bach would have heard his truest successor as a master of counterpoint in this rondo, really a one of the most wonderful fugues possible until   the climax in which Mahler finally completes the phrase, after which all else is a short-lived anticlimax . Bach typically ends his fugue only when completing the phrase... so Mahler composes this 150 years after Bach dies. The world was very different in 1904 from what it was in 1750, and even 40 years after Mahler (1860-1911) died the world would be even more different. For one thing, the great music eritten in 1951 and later would largely be jazz with little connection to Back or even Mahler.

 



Enjoy! Great counterpoint recognizes only one culture, the culture of excellence.

But it was a German-American who led us through the rigors of WWII and later was very popular as President.