What makes you feel ashamed of your country?

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Well, more than anything, I'm ashamed of the way we treated the Koori people (Aboriginal Australians) in history. Simply because of the fact that they had a culture far different from the white settlers, they decided that the Koori people were inferior and therefore had to be Europeanised, Catholicised, Anglicised, whatever-ised. They were 'barbarians' and thus had to be shown the wrongness of their existence and the rightness of ours. And how many full-blooded Koori are left? Absolutely bloody none! Therefore we really have no strong link to our country's true history.

Also, of course, p***ed off with Little Johnny jumping on the Bush bandwagon for no real reason other than to get a bit of a brown nose.

As for Poland persecuting Jews or not, the only reference I've read in that respect is a reference in "Schindler's Ark" to the Polish in Brinnlitz (is that right?) not wanting Schindler to set up his factory there with so many 'unclean' Jews as employees. Evidently they were completely ostracised and hated at the time. Also according to the same book, though Poles had a hand in the Holocaust, Austrians and Ukrainians did as well. But, there are many references as well to Poles assisting the Jews in recovery.

I guess it's like most races and most nations across the world - you have your bad seeds and your good seeds and more often than not the bad ones get the most publicity.

 

I'm ashamed of the way popular African-American culture debases a very proud people. They say it is just an expression of the urban reality but I think the expression has become self-fulfilling. Nothing is sadder than when a culture prostitutes itself in a most profane way.

 

Late Night Thinker. Just curious, are you black or white?

Here in Australia, a comment like yours would be interpreted as patronising if made by a non-indigenous person.

On the Poland issue of the Holocaust, it is lame for people to be blamed when the real guilt lies on the heads of those who committed the crimes...

 

Everyone hated the jews back then. Many Western and Eastern Europeans who opposed Hitler thought that his ideas about jews and other deviants were worthwhile. Which incidentally is something I am ashamed of now of my country. We were greatly influenced by Germany during the 30's and we had many outright nazi's.

Every territory Germany concquered more or less gleefully joined the Germans in their extermination of jews. I wonder what fiercly nationalistic history books you have been reading Chev.

 

Nethershames:

-Sending back 26.000 refugees

-Slavery in our Golden Age: IIRC Africans were first deported to America and sold as slaves by our most beloved hero Michiel de Ruyter (the Walter Raleigh of the Netherlands).

-We're Europe's main entrance and distributor of drugs, etc.

-and somehow I feel sorry for the Srebrenica Massacre. Though it's complicated.

 

Quite obvious.
Nazis & Holocaust, the German Trauma. It dwarfes and staines everything else, good and bad.

I still cant really comprehend how such an atrocity could happen here, in my country, committed by some of my people. Its just beyond imagination.

And whether others had or had not a part in this, it will always be on our hands. Rightly so.

 

The fact that our voting process is so screwed up, that depending on which state you live in, your vote is worth more or less than mine. I am of course referring to the electoral college.

I could go on for hours with a large essay on what makes me ashamed to be a part of this country but I'll just leave it at one thing for this thread.

[ February 28, 2004, 04:18: Message edited by: RangerFox ]

 

Yea, they say so, but they give no proof. I'm quite sure there were people who turned Jews in for personal gain, but it's not like that was a trend. Let alone anything supported by anyone anyhow entitled to speak in the name of anyone other than himself. The wording "Poles had a hand in the Holocaust" suggest action. There was no more action than in any nation under occupation of which there is a number of people who turned Jews in.

I don't claim that Poles loved Jews, that would be quite far from truth. But Poland was the last country in Europe to be called anti-semitic. Sure, we did have antisemitic nazi activists, but they weren't as succesful as usual in Europe in that time.

If I were the one to read nationalistic history books, would I really see anything wrong in being a militant nationalist or in persecuting a minority?

@Dendri: I'm sorry if it looked like I aimed what I said at German people. That wasn't my intention.

 

I'm ashamed of the ineffectiveness and corruption of our politicians, this applies to many or most countries on this planet, but damn! Mafia virtually runs the show here.

I'm ashamed of the Congo-Anvers-Lebanon-Israël diamond trade in particular and, in general, of all the international traffic that pass through Belgium.

I'm ashamed of the lack of justice, just take a look at any Belgian newspaper this coming monday and you'll hear about a certain Dutroux case...

I'm ashamed how much time, energy and money we waste on petty linguistic issues.

I'm ashamed we host Nato's headquarters, bombed Yugoslavia, occupy Afghanistan, let a foreign army use our soil for a war we opposed...

I'm ashamed of the Nazi sympathising Rexists, some of them were so in love with Hitler they went as far as to go die in Stalingrad.

I'm ashamed we conquered Congo, left it to rot afterwards, shot Lumumba, never lifted a finger to stop the genocides over there.

I'm ashamed we're straggling behind the rest of Europe regarding environment policies.

And much, much more.

 

I am actually not ashamed about to many things my country did.

The worst thing, I think, was that our custom authorities proposed the jew-stamp in passports to the Germans, an idea they took up. As for the rest of WW2, I don't see anything to be ashamed of. A lot of people made it through Switzerland, a lot more than through bigger and mightier countries. And we've always been lucky. A lucky porcupine.

We were the last in Europe to grant women the right to vote 1972. I'm not ashamed of that, we're the breeding ground of presbyterians, anabaptists and guard the pope, what do you expect ? On the other hand, I don't see any lack of emancipation. The only countries I can think of where women are more emancipated are the Scandinavian ones.

But what really gets mad is the fact, that are country was torn for many centuries by religous insanity, and a multidute of civil wars, massacers and atrocities because of religous reasons. Religious borders did divide us much too long.

 

@Abomination

I was hard on classical Greece? When? Where?

As far as the computer games law is concerned, it doesn't ban computer games exactly. The law was created in order to stop illegal gambling (you see illegal gambling doesn't bring taxes like the legal gambling) but I guess that legislators knew nothing about Internet and computer games and because of this they created a stupid monstrocity, which has a total mess as result. As far as I know, the law is obsolete now, but from time to time a stupid cop sees a teenager playing an online game in an internet cafe, and he decides that he has to stop this filthy criminal and so he arrests the owner of the internet cafe and when the trial takes place, the judge finds the owner not guilty and that's it, end of the show until another stupid cop do the same thing. Should I be ashamed because of this ridiculousness? I don't think so, there are far more important things to be ashamed of than this stupitidy.

 

Nothing for me, apart from the IRA I suppose.

 

As opposed to Oxymore, I'm not ashamed at too many things my country did. Not that I'm proud of many things we did either.

Belgium is corrupt, the environment is messed up, sure, but society functions reasonably normal. It's impossible to create the perfect society or government. Humanity is a synonym for imperfection. It's not always a bad thing. It creates diversity, but it also means that there will always be events that are regarded as failed or gone terribly wrong.

I see these more as experiments we can learn from. The way a single person fails and makes mistakes in the course of their life is much the same as the growing and altering of a country and its society.

 

The bloody trains.

 

What makes me ashamed of my country?

Watching my country's leader brown-nosing someone who can't even pronounce his country's name.

And the bloody trains