Revenge is a Dish Best Served Cold.

In Norman M. Naimark’s Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing In Twentieth-Century Europe the issue of multiple cases regarding ethnic cleansing are brought to light.  Ethnic cleansing in layman’s terms is the action of eliminating ethnic or religious groups by means of deportation, forcible migration, mass murders or by threats.  One such case that especially caught my attention was that of the Germans expulsion from Poland and Czechoslovakia.  It is made apparent that right off the bat when the Second World War had started the governments of both the Polish and Czechoslovak’s had already started looking into the future, past their victory and the removal of the Germans.  Both the Czechs and Polish simply wanted revenge for what their people had gone through, so this was their justification for what they made the Germans go through.  Nor the Soviets, Americans and British had no objections to what  the Germans were going to be put through.  They were given two hours of notice and then thrown out is how it all worked out, if they did not leave the ones in charged were ordered to make the conditions so that they would want to leave. 

The Germans were given no mercy, shot at, told to do life threatening tasks, people were randomly killed, villages torched, acts of mass rape against the women, children and men were thrown off bridges and hit at with stones until they would no longer surfaced.  They were sometimes marked with swastikas so they could easily be identified, many of the Germans because of the situation would just commit suicide, in one instance more than 50 Germans were found dead all with slit wrists.  The majority of the Germans were led to “work camps” were the trip to said camp would cause hundreds of deaths, because of hygiene and the food scarcity.  The expulsion of Germans in the western territories was more uncertain, tens of thousands moved from east to west or vice versa.  Their whole outlook on this “justified” expulsion of the Germans was based on revenge and they said,” an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”  They were given the same treatment that the Jews were given in the Holocaust.

I relate this instance to the forced deportation and scaring of Mexicans and Mexican Americans into leaving the United States in the 1930’s. Although, one dealt with more deaths and suffering, the comparison stands; one group (Germans) was forced to go through all that because of revenge and another group(Mexicans) because Americans felt that they were done with their (my) use and because it would help out with the current issues since the Great Depression was present.  My whole opinion on this whole situation in general is just that it is very unnecessary; you have a dominant group and a minority group, which will keep this cycle of putting people down over and over.  We are all created equal, yet people always adopt the thought that since they are part of the majority that it is justified to perform these acts of ethnic cleansing. The two articles I found go further into the forced migration of the Germans in Europe and the other covers the death of Raymond Rodriquez, who if it not were for him, the forced deportation of more than 1 million Mexicans might have remained hidden.  Sure the mindset was,” an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”  But I’d like to think Mahatma Gandhi said it better,” An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”

http://chronicle.com/article/The-European-Atrocity-You/132123/

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-07-08/national/40445045_1_mexican-americans-deportations-mexican-immigrants

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