27 noiembrie 2013

Războiul de după război

Violence often returned to familiar patterns. The French picked up where they left off in their former colonies, adjudicating harsh, murderous justice to exploding nationalist movements in far-flung places like Algeria and Vietnam. In occupied Germany, anywhere from several hundred thousand to two million German women reported being raped by Soviet troops, and some 240,000 deaths were reported in connection to the rapes. Elsewhere, old antipathies flared up under new political justifications. In a shocking account of violent anti-Semitism in Communist-dominated Poland, Buruma details how Jews returning from the horrors of concentration camps were somehow assumed to still have plenty to plunder and be ardently capitalistic to boot. "Communists were not above exploiting anti-Semitism themselves," he writes, "which is why most Jewish survivors in Poland ended up leaving the country of their birth."
de aici