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Do German reparations as restitution for the Holocaust place a burden on the wrong generation?

Results so far:

No
30% 188 votes Total: 629 votes
Yes
70% 441 votes

by Wayne Leon Learmond

Created on: September 07, 2009   Last Updated: October 16, 2009

This is a question that I have fought with for many years and it puts me in mind of the saying: 'The Sins of the Fathers shall be visited upon the sons.' According to its works, does a nation's bloody history visited upon its victims of the past place a burden on those that are living now? Having thought this through many many times, and also having spoken to many people about the self-same thing, I came to the conclusion that it does.



Of course one may say that what the people of a nation did in the past has no bearing to the generations that have followed since {and certainly not to the present generation}. But is that not brushing the problem under the carpet? Again, I believe it is. For instance, the country and the city in which I was born and raised in {Liverpool, The United Kingdom}, some years ago apologised for their part they played in the slave trade. Within Liverpool there are many fine buildings, from which the proceeds of the slave trade where used to finance the building of them. Indeed, our Town Hall itself, was built on the proceeds of what I consider, 'blood money', the trafficking of human beings.

And what made this all the more distasteful, was the sheer ignorance of the people who completely ignored the history of these buildings. The sheer 'couldn't care less' attitude of the local population in not caring about how Liverpool profited from the African Holocaust. Indeed one can walk around the city now and see the rich architecture that adorns the town centre, the docks and the outskirts. Today's generation simply do not understand - or they fail to understand - the sheer blood, sweat and tears that kept Liverpool rich, off the backs of the slave trade.

So, the question is, Liverpool - and indeed the United Kingdom as a whole, having apologised for the African Trade in human beings, will it stand to reason that America will too? Of course, I make no apologies for straying a little from the title of this piece here, but I do believe that the two are connected more closely than people think The Jewish Holocaust was/is a stain on the human psyche. It was one of the main courses for the beginning of World War 2. and the evil that the nation perpetuated against a people would reverberate not just in that generation, but for generations to come.

Indeed, some evil deeds are so big, so horrific, that they stain the human race with its stench, and all those who are born afterwards, long after the events of the past, are indeed, 'stained' too. Some might

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