"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will." - Frederick Douglass
Power always asks the oppressed to adhere to codes and play by rules it itself does not obey. Power always asks its victim to start from a further point of disadvantage. If you are looking to change the rules, why start by abiding by them? In fighting for fairness, you don't have to play fair.
The Native Americans were the first peoples to be called terrorists in the United States, and they were called this for resisting extermination policies which were legal and sanctioned by the state. When the Natives were conquered, calmed down and signed peace deals, these deals were then betrayed and they lost even more land. Violence got them nothing and adhering to laws got them nothing.
The Palestinians on the West Bank are peaceful and have a stable government and still lose land every day to Israel. Peace gets them nothing. In Gaza, they're uppity and violent and the Israelis have stopped taking land.
Ghandi's non-violence movement is exalted for "liberating India", but Britain would not have let the colony go were it not for the massive loss of life and resources the violence of World War 2 engendered.
As tools of Progress, peacefuil protest, chaotic violence and organised resistance are all a giant crap shoot. Most of the time, all three get you nothing. So you might as well use them all.
But that wasn't my original point. The original point was, complaints about violence enacted by the oppressed always serve to distract from far greater, systemic violence. For all its violent pronouncements, the Nation of Islam has never comitted any acts of violence against those it hates. It has never launched a war against white people.
Nobody's going to celebrate brown people flying planes into buildings or Savage Injuns shooting cowboys or black people shooting cops or Vietcongs shooting GIs or Palestinians killing Israelis or Elijah Muhammads prophesying whitey's extermination, but no sane person is going to waste time being outraged by these things either, because they are not the Cause. They are impotent, sometimes crazy, often reflexive reactions to far greater abuses. And we would all act just like these "crazy people" if we were in their precise situations.
But "we" did worse than that. Millions of Germans died due to deliberate Allied starvation and explusion policies after the war ended. They were put in concentration camps, to work, forced to march to camps in Poland and elsewhere, a large-scale, unspoken, unofficial massacre.
And your point implies that abusing Germany after the war "makes up" for the fact that Germany started the the war in the first place.
But Germany didn't "start" anything. Germany's Imperialism was no different to Western Imperialism at the time. It echoed and was caused by the Imperialism of the other Empires. Indeed, Hitler explicitly said that he modelled his concentration camps on British camps in Africa. He was even supported by the "Allies" up until 1938 because he was merrily crushing unions and communists, and because they wanted him to go north into Russia.
Many western countries even supported Hitler's taking back of Rhineland, Saarland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, West Prussia and Danzig, all of which were once German territory.
It's like the people who diss Japan for invading countries during WW2, countries which were themselves possessed by Western nations who had invaded them a few years earlier (even China was a defacto Western colony, as the US, France and UK had it locked in exploitative trade deals which excluded Japan).
So there's always a kind of selective condemnation.
