mc3744
Posts: 1957
Joined: 3/9/2004 From: Italy Status: offline
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I'm coming in a bit late, but I'd like to add another point of view. I usually happen to agree with GH, not this time , at least not entirely. In specific not on the notion that you should fight till the end with the side you started with. I cannot agree with this on several levels: theoretical, historical and personal. 1) This implies that you cannot learn. Once you start the wrong path you are supposed to keep marching it, just because you started wrong. Forgive me GH, but I really don’t think it makes much sense. 2) Italy, still today, is at least two different countries. I traveled a lot and lived in Germany too. Life style in Milan is so much closer to Munich or London than it will ever be, for example, to Palermo or Naples. If it is like this today, one can only imagine what it was 50 years ago. Different people, very different people, but only one man to talk for everybody. 3) My grandfather, now deceased, fought in North Africa and in Italy until the armistice. He fought because to him ‘king and country’ came first, even before his own ideas. He didn’t share the fascist values, but the country called him and he answered, no matter what. I feel the same, but I understand it’s not a rational thing. However, once given the chance - with the armistice - to choose and follow his own ideals he did so. I don’t defend this position because he was my grandpa, but because I share it. My grandpa ended up hating the Germans (all of them, quite irrationally), because after the armistice they executed all his war long comrades who refused to surrender to the new enemy (that would be the Nazis, from their point of view). My old man had been wounded by bombers just three days before and was in the hospital, therefore - paradoxically - he managed to see the end of the war thanks to the Allied bombings. To end the story: I have a wife who is half German, you can imagine how happy my grandpa was!
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Nec recisa recedit
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