Oddly enough, my interests and career have brought me to a place where, outside my own culture, the two peoples of the world I understand most are the Arabs and the Germans. I'm enamored with them both in spite of the fact that I can't help but associate Islamic jihadism with the mass psychosis Germany experienced in the 1930s.
Islamofascism as some call it, will likely subside over the next three or four decades, but what is certain is that 75, even 100 years from now the Arab people will find themselves haunted by their terrorist history and will still be feeling the world's enduring scorn.
When I stumbled onto this video clip I realized just how far across our sky an ideological vapor trail can stretch. Germany is a case study in how a people's historic legacy doesn't die quickly. I've spent enough time in Germany and with Germans to know that, although its people now genuinely embrace democratic ideals, the Nazi era is still a source of unease and humiliation. Worse, the last German citizen to hold a birth certificate bearing a Swastika won't die until somewhere close to 2050.
A Nazi rally in Nuremberg, Germany, 1933Although it's been 85 years since the first Nuremberg rallies, if you think those images don't still haunt the world's consciousness, just watch this clip of a 2005 German Bundeswehr parade in front of the Reichstag. I'm told this official military ceremony predates the Nazi era but a cold chill runs up my spine to see it. I can't begin to imagine what I'd feel if I were Jewish. There were protests in Germany over the parade.
It may take yet another 100 years before the memories fade and these images cease to provoke such strong emotion. In the meantime, perhaps someone should tell the Germans to dispense with torches and eagled standards in their military parades.
Again, this is NOT footage from World War II, it is a recent clip. We're only lucky it's not in black and white.
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's armed forces celebrated their 50th anniversary on Wednesday with a torch-lit musical ceremony that drew protests and complaints that it was overly militaristic and a throw-back to the Nazi period.
About 500 soldiers held flaming torches and played instruments outside the Reichstag parliament building watched by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, his likely successor Angela Merkel and NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer.
About 1,200 demonstrators, angered that the ceremony was taking place by parliament for the first time since World War Two, marched in protest along Berlin's central Unter den Linden avenue at the same time.
The critics say it is an archaic tradition that should have been scrapped when the postwar German armed forces, the Bundeswehr, were formed in 1955.
Hundreds of police blocked the protesters from proceeding beyond the central Brandenburg Gate to the Reichstag. Police reported minor scuffles and a few thrown bottles, leading to five arrests...
