this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
41 points (90.2% liked)

Canada

7206 readers
408 users here now

What's going on Canada?



Communities


🍁 Meta


πŸ—ΊοΈ Provinces / Territories


πŸ™οΈ Cities / Local Communities


πŸ’ SportsHockey

Football (NFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Football (CFL)

  • List of All Teams: unknown

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer


πŸ’» Universities


πŸ’΅ Finance / Shopping


πŸ—£οΈ Politics


🍁 Social and Culture


Rules

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage:

https://lemmy.ca


founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (2 children)

It should have been done 70 years ago, its too late now and doesn't help anyone, it will literally enable the modern "nazis" with more propaganda material.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

The difference between a democracy and an authoritarian nationalist state is the commitment to truth. The pretext that the descendants should be shielded is actually very very toxic. It is precisely what Germany has very honourably refused to do. People should know the truth about their ancestors. This applies to descendants of victims and to descendants of criminals equally.

If there is an actual reason to not do this right now, the government should give a different but short timeline. They could say that they will keep the records secret for 2 more years for example. We can then argue about the timeline, but the underlying principle holds: in a democracy the truth should come out.

That said, I am not convinced a shallow propaganda victory like this even matters. There is nothing new the putinist state would actually be able to say that it hasn't already.

Edit: and in fact, by keeping the records secret, the putinist propaganda machine wins even more, because they can (a) say whatever they want about the content of the secret files (b) can say whatever they want about the extent of the files, and (c) can claim that the Canadian government is complicit in covering up for Nazis. Keeping the records secret gives control of the narrative to Putin hands down.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Yes, the "modern Nazis" that despise actual Nazis.

It's never too late to prosecute war criminals. There will never be a good reason to keep their identities secret.

If you are siding with the actual Nazis of the 1940s in trying to keep their identities secret, there's a good chance you are also a Nazi.