A Quote by Donna Summer
German people get very uptight if you mention World War II. Germans today feel that what's past is past, new generations don't really remember it.
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It's important to remember that World War II was experienced very much as a continuity in that sense. Most of World War II in most of Europe wasn't a war; it was an occupation. The war was at the beginning and the end, except in Germany and the Soviet Union, and even there really only at the end. So the rest of time it's an occupation, which in some ways was experienced as an extension of the interwar period. World War II was simply an extreme form, in a whole new key, of the disruption of normal life that began in 1914.
The Germans have done wonderful work. Not long ago, a German battle group battalion conducted a very impressive counterinsurgency operation in a portion of Baghlan province. I think these are the first counterinsurgency operations conducted by any German element after World War II. And they did a very impressive job.
I don't think my generation carries the weight of World War II anymore. But I've got to tell you, even if we don't really talk about it, we get reminded constantly by other people or other countries. I get offered a World War II movie at least once a week just because I speak German and was born there. I have always stayed away from it because I didn't want to be put into that box.
It's very important to understand that World War II is at the base of this new policy. From the 1890s on, the U.S. was always imperialistic. We went after the Philippines, and we did the same in Cuba, in Hawaii. We controlled South America. Woodrow Wilson was not what he was supposed to be. He was very much a white man first. "The world must be made safe for democracy." It really accelerates after World War II.
I always thought those World War II films with German people speaking English with German accents was weird.
It's too easy, you see, to get trapped in the past. The past is very seductive. People always talk about the mists of time, you know, but really it's the present that's in a mist, uncertain. The past is quite clear, and warm, and comforting. That's why people often get stuck there.
German people are essentially pacifists. Many still remember the experience of World War II. And they may not have seen Saddam Hussein as evil a person as a lot of other people have.
I did not believe in the war. I thought it was wrong to go into any war. And I got to the war, and saw the Germans, and I changed my mind. I decided we were right going into World War II.
A lot of people are really hung on the past - they can't get past that - but you've gotta get past that if you want any future.
We learn in the past, but we are not the result of that. We suffered in the past, loved in the past, cried and laughed in the past, but that's of no use to the present. The present has its challenges, its good and bad side. We can neither blame nor be grateful to the past for what is happening now. Each new experience of love has nothing whatsoever to do with past experiences. It's always new.
Boredom is the consciousness of repetition. Because animals cannot remember the past, they cannot feel bored. They cannot remember the past, so they cannot feel bored. They cannot remember the past, so they cannot feel the repetition. The buffalo goes on eating the same grass every day with the same delight. You cannot. How can you eat the same grass with the same delight? You get fed up.
And so, the youngsters you have today, even though there are far fewer of them - in World War II 16.5 million men and women in uniform, today roughly a million in uniform in spite of the fact that the country is almost twice as large a population as we had in World War II.
You live in the present and you eliminate things that don't matter. You don't carry the burden of the past. I'm not impressed by the past very much. The past bores me, to tell you the truth; it really bores me. I don't remember many movies and certainly not my own.
In Iroquois society, leaders are encouraged to remember seven generations in the past and consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.
It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past. Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and active mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement against that past.
... it isn't in my nature to cry for very long. It is one of the blessings of my life that things that are past -- are past. Yesterday's calamities are merely today's challenge. I can get down -- but I can't stay there.
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