This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Is the progressive left developing it's own form of Holocaust denial?
I came across this video on Twitter where an ITV presenter informs us that:
This reminded me of something similar I saw last year, where then Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf talked for several minutes about the victims of the Holocaust without mentioning the...distinguishing ethnicity of who exactly was most targeted.
The above examples might just be two cases of human error, although I find it hard to imagine how such an oversight could have taken place in the ITV situation. And while this sort of thing stands out less in tweet format, where you don't have many characters to begin with, it still seems strange that Angela Rayner can't find space to mention Jewish victims when Keir Starmer manages to.
Does this point to the emergence of a longer term trend? Despite proportionally being the victims of most hate crimes, Jews are too pale and too successful for the left to care about advocating for (unless it's for the purpose of making dubious claims of fascist sympathies against right-wingers). Given that for many on the progressive left being anti-Nazi is the primary sources of their moral legitimacy, I do wonder if many of them feel the need to find more sympathetic victims of the Holocaust whose future wellbeing they can claim to be the only reliable safe-guarders of.
With the broad racial nature of the progressive coalition, it's also impossible to rule out straightforward antisemitism from many of the far-left's more diverse members. I wouldn't be surprised if the ITV staff member responsible for writing the script was from a Muslim background.
It is of course impossible to divorce this issue from Israel. Despite strenuous claims that anti-Zionism != anti-Semitism (which can technically be true), I imagine that even some committed progressives struggle with the cognitive dissonance of claiming to care about Jewish well-being while simultaneously advocating for the massacring of 50% of their remaining global population. It could well be just too tempting to give up this fig-leaf and instead aim to eventually shift the perception of Jews towards never having been serious victims of oppression in the first place. This comes with the bonus of being able to credibly claim that Israel is the modern day equivalent to Nazi Germany.
Is there something there? Or am I reading too much into a handful of small cases?
ETA: 15 upvotes and 13 downvotes. This is most likely my most polarising post in the short time I've been active here. I wonder what that says.
"Millions of others" - other than what? Other than the 6 million jews referrred to in the first part of the sentence. This is a statement that only makes sense precicely because the speaker is not a holocaust denier and thinks it goes without saying that the 6 million refers to the jewish victims and then on top of that there were "millions of others" who were instead killed for being "Polish, disabled, gay or belonged to another ethnic group".
That's just how people talk. It doesn't reflect anything besides the fact that the sensitive nature of the subject matter means some people on Twitter are combing through statements like these in order to complain because someone said "six million" instead of "six million jews". Similarly with the others, when someone says "all those who were murdered just for being who they were" it's because she wants to emphasize that aspect of the motive, not because she doesn't think jews were targeted.
Conversationally, sure, but news broadcasts that are going to be seen by millions are carefully scripted beforehand. Substituting the word "Jews" with the the vaguer category of "people" is a deliberate choice that's quite hard to find a good reason for (what would they even gain by being vague about this?) and also one that would have been authorised by a separate person before going on air.
I don't think this is a huge scandal or anything like that, nor do I think the median leftist is going to start claiming tomorrow that no Jews were targeted by the Nazis. But larger trends start with small steps, and I'm interested if that's what we're seeing.
I think you may be underestimating the extent to which everything in the world is the result of duct tape and improvisation, and that most things are done by people who do lots of things and thus didn't spend as much time as you might think.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I haven’t yet seen any serious attempts at Holocaust denial from the left, but on Reddit I did notice a sharp increase in the “Oy vey! Remember the Six Gorillion!” type of cracks whenever Israel tried to invoke the Holocaust as justification for the Gaza war. It was pretty shocking to me, because that type of thing would have immediately gotten you ridiculed and hard-banned on Reddit just a few years ago.
TBH overeager Israeli media and figures has caused them huge amounts of credibility damage. Reddit has noticed, lots of normies have gotten markedly more anti-Israeli and that does bring you closer to anti-Semitism.
Don't believe your lying eyes - they're using special techniques! https://x.com/Jerusalem_Post/status/1883574178407915916
Then there was the 'babies incinerated in ovens' story which doesn't seem to be real.
And then there was a government minister calling for sodomizing Hamas prisoners as part of a 'we can do anything to them' torture policy on a live, recorded debate on the protests against soldiers being charged with rape.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-hamas-war-idf-palestinian-prisoner-alleged-rape-sde-teinman-abuse-protest/
I can see how normal human beings would get really angry in a bitter war and do such things (let alone lying/justifying such things), yet it's no good when pro-Israeli voices turn around and say 'israel is the great bulwark of liberal democracy in the Middle East and you need to stand with us (give us material and diplomatic support) and share in our overflowing moral superiority.' This kind of behaviour inspires reflexive distrust in many.
Now that people can clearly see a modern-day manifestation of a very particular modus operandi- By way of deception you shall engage in war, it is worth revisiting WWII wartime propaganda as well. Given the stuff they've blatantly lied about in front of our own eyes, imagine the stories that would have been told during WWII...
I think that we're basically agreed in principle, both of us think that the 'because Germany exterminated a few million Jews it follows that nobody of European heritage can ever be allowed to have nationalist or racialist ideology or enjoy a homogenous country' is ridiculous.
But you attack it on the basis of 'Germany didn't actually exterminate that many Jews and there were extenuating circumstances' and I prefer 'even though Germany exterminated many Jews it is still fine to attack mass immigration and anti-racist ideology, nor does it follow that we must treasure and cherish Israel no matter how much of a mess they make'. You get bogged down in the details of death camp logistics 80 years ago. Who cares? The past is the past, the present is more important. Israel and the whole never-again lobby are trying to borrow moral rectitude from the bank of history to persuade and silence people. Instead of arguing with them over the documentation of the loan (an inherently uphill battle), we should close the bank. You shouldn't get away with things just because your ancestors had a bad time, that doesn't give you a free hand to harm my interests in the present. If we bomb Algeria because of the Barbary slave trade the Arabs aren't going to say 'fair point we deserve it', they understand this crucial point and fought France bitterly over Algeria. They didn't care if they were in the right or not, let the safety of the people be the highest law.
And it seems fundamentally implausible that a powerful country like Germany that could fight three global empires simultaneously (while constantly emphasising that Judeo-Bolsheviks were behind their foes) would be unable or unwilling to eradicate Jews in conquered territories. They wiped out tens of millions of armed and trained soldiers, a few million civilians was well within Germany's abilities. And implicitly your arguments imply that 'if Germany did exterminate those Jews then the current stance of various Jews in the media/anti-racist/Zionist genres is justified and never-again would hold'.
I don't necessarily think "he who controls the past controls the present, he who controls the present controls the future" is a hard and fast rule, but a lot of people care about that thing that happened 80 years ago. Look at OP, he cares so much he is on guard for anybody who doesn't even pay homage to it correctly. There is a growing body of censorship laws in Europe, and censorship of Holocaust Revisionism was and continues to be a top priority of the usual suspect lobbying for internet censorship. These groups themselves regard Holocaust Denial as a huge threat which would have catastrophic consequences if it proliferated.
So the "Who cares?" thing just doesn't do it for me because clearly people care about it very much. Everyone does. Denying the existence of gas chambers disguised as shower rooms is one of the biggest possible taboos in this day in age.
There are a lot of things that happened in the past which have absolutely no salience in the United States today, like the Holodomar. The Holocaust is important because it's a present-day mythology with a lot of political and cultural power.
Revisionism is a historical critique, which means it focuses on a lot of minutiae such as documentary evidence and interpreting the probability of the claims of the Holocaust narrative. But that's just a means to an end- the end being to undermine the mythology that rules over us. Look at how atheists used scientific and technical arguments to undermine Christianity, nobody can doubt the critical effectiveness of bringing a scientific critique to a myth body that fundamentally makes impossible claims.
This could be reversed, the Jews in the media who say that the proliferation of Holocaust denial would be an existential threat to Jews are also admitting the truth is highly threatening to their position. So the "who cares?" rings hollow when so many people care very much and consider it relevant for maintaining their station.
And that is not the claim of the Holocaust, the Holocaust is the claim that millions of Jews were brought to 5 "extermination camps" where they were tricked into walking into gas chambers on the pretext of taking a shower. The majority of the victims were allegedly buried, and then months later unburied and all cremated on makeshift open-air pyres in the matter of months. A claim that defies all logic and possibility, and fundamentally lacks documentary and physical evidence. The claim is false. It's a modern-day Exodus myth enshrined by the conjoined efforts of Hollywood and the apparatus of Stalinist propaganda, used as a tool for denazification, direction immigration policy and American perception of multiracialism, support for Israel, and much more than that.
The truth of a body of myth is not important in its influence or perception among the laity. The truth is relevant though for undermining the myth in the case where the myth fundamentally relies on the truth-value of claims that are false.
No, the official story is that the gas chambers only came at the late stages, more Jews were killed by firing squads and hunger. I suffered through extensive Holocaust education in school. They pre-emptively innoculate people against standard holocaust revisionist ideas, that's not the way to go. See here what they say:
https://www.memorialdelashoah.org/upload/minisites/ukraine/en/en_exposition4-radicalisation.htm
You're never going to beat these people when it comes to arcane factual disputes. Especially when they just go 'lol the history is settled now pay up' as some courts in Europe now do. It's much harder for them to outright fix in place the second half of the argument, the ideological stance that directly and clearly harms white interests in the present day. They prefer to keep that part elided and implied. Regardless of what the facts are, it's better to target the weaker part of the argument, that there is any reason to be guilty and sacrifice interests in the present due to what happened in the past.
Nothing we can do would persuade Turkey that they're in the wrong and should give Armenia reparations, let alone all the slaves they took and indoctrinated from Southern/Eastern Europe. They just don't care and would happily say 'Turkey strong' in response. Imagine that you get rid of Holocaust rhetoric but they move onto 'oh your slavery and colonialism was so awful' or 'all your coups and invasions were so awful' or 'think of the humanitarian virtue in ensuring Africa has 4, 5 and even 6 times the population of Europe' to justify dissolving nations and erasing culture. This guilt-tripping and distorted moralism is the core of the problem. It's impossible to counter every sin and argument these people can produce, real or imaginary. Far better to say 'not my problem' and leave them speechless and impotent.
The strongest argument in favour of Europeans getting to keep their own countries and have pride in their own achievements is not 'wooden doors, Wannsee Conference notes being unclear, chimneys moving around after the war, masturbation machines in the extremely cringe postwar literature', the strongest argument is Rotherham, Detroit, crime stats, all the academics gleefully looking to abolish the white race, a glance at the lawyers, donors and judges who pursue antiracism and their demographics... I have a massive reserve of useful and immediately relevant facts, as compared to bitterly contested, esoteric facts that haven't done anything useful in decades.
I don't have to trawl through 80 years of history. I can find things that happened last week and use them to support my case.
I said the official story, about half were claimed to have been killed with gassings inside shower rooms, more than any other single method. Many died from disease, and many died in hunger and shootings as well, Revisionist do not deny that part happened, only the gas chambers. Yes, many Ukranian Jews were killed by Ukranians themselves because they were associated with the Soviet apparatus by the Ukranians.
You can walk and chew gum, it's fine if others want to emphasize that argument. But the Revisionists are correct, so the fact they have the truth of it is worthy of pursuing in its own right. If you don't find it interesting that's of course up to you. I find it interesting for a lot of reasons, although I do not believe it's a silver bullet.
I don't think you really responded to my point that they heavily rely on that 80-year old mythos, as evidence by OP's post. They find it very important, and they find denial if it to be highly threatening. So they themselves do not believe you that it's just history that is unimportant.
It's not history, it's a mythology. Part of that mythology is that, at Treblinka, in an effort to erase all trace of the crime, the small labor force there unburied and cremated 5,000 people per day on huge open-air pyres. According to DeepSeek R1, that would require 3,400 cords of dry wood to be delivered, constructed, burned every single day for 120 days straight. With no documentary evidence at all. And no witness reference to any deliveries of fuel at all. And no physical evidence. And no contemporary witness reports, just rumor and testimony after the fact. And no scientific excavation of any mass graves to study the alleged cremated remains of 800,000 people in a precisely known location.
It's not history, it's a mythology. And it does fall apart in the face of facts very easily. It's not going to last forever. Again, I don't think it's a silver bullet. But it's a relevant mythology that is severely undermined when challenged on a factual basis. That's why they are so afraid of it, and they aren't afraid of you talking about crime stats or Detroit which every conservative does.
If you're taking flak, you know you're over the target. "Detroit and crime stats" is harped on by every other conservative, Revisionism is responded to with absolute hysteria. That's a hint that it's more important than you think.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That was an actual concentration camp where at a minimum tens of thousands of people were murdered. I think we can forgive one inmate for not counting them properly.
After Soviet investigators conquered the camp, they claimed 2 million were killed there between 7 gas chambers. Now today it's "tens of thousands" (not a minimum, by the way) who mostly died of disease and poor hygienic conditions. The gas chambers at Majdanek were a hoax, that newspaper article about 500,000 children being lured into gas chambers with candy and chocolate has no basis in reality whatsoever. It was wartime atrocity propaganda, only one example of a deluge that has been dumped onto the West, a psychological warfare campaign that didn't end with the war itself.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
These would be the gypsies(brown and widely hated), which progressives don’t seem to be exactly rushing to emphasize the role of. So I think this is just about anti-Israel awkwardness.
More options
Context Copy link
Strong War on Christmas vibes- conservatives complain "the cashier didn't adequately say the thing, there's a War on Christmas" while Christmas continues to grows bigger than ever in the culture. I was driving in the South last year and, I kid you not, I saw a billboard off a rural highway that said I miss hearing you say 'Merry Christmas' - Jesus.
How many people of influence have bent the knee to Jewish remembrance in the past couple days, but to retain power you need to find the people who don't correctly participate in the civic ritual and publicly make an example of them, right? That's how it works.
As a Holocaust Denier I don't see evidence of Holocaust denial on the Left, just public punishment for non-compliance to the small number of people who make the mistake of disrespecting the Holiday.
The entire consideration of Gentiles as Holocaust victims at all has been a very fluid matter; for a time it was claimed that there were 11 million victims in the Holocaust, 5 million Gentiles and 6 million Jews. But the figure of 5 million Gentiles being killed in the Holocaust was a number totally fabricated by Holocaust studies advocate Simon Wiesenthal. According to people close to him, he invented the number in order to manipulate Gentiles into having more stake in the Holocaust narrative.
Incidentally, the article is another attempted dressing-down of Sean Spicer for not correctly acknowledging Jewish victims:
Nowadays, it is not fashionable to emphasize Gentile victims in the Holocaust, now that the "5 million" figure is acknowledged to have just been a symbolic propaganda figure intended to manipulate Gentiles into having more stake in the Holocaust narrative.
Of the 6 million Jews allegedly killed in the Holocaust, it is claimed that about half of that figure (approximately 3 million, give or take) were killed by being tricked into entering shower rooms that were actually gas chambers in disguise. It is not claimed any significant number of Gentiles were killed in these gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Likewise, the alleged "Final Solution" which purportedly ordered the extermination of the Jews is a cornerstone of the Holocaust narrative.
Given that these particularities of the Holocaust, and which define it really, are said to only have been applied to Jews it doesn't really make sense to include Gentiles as being victims of the "Holocaust" as such, and the current meta is more around emphasizing the Holocaust as a Jewish experience. But it should be noted that it was the Jews themselves who originally emphasized Gentile victims of the Holocaust in order to influence their perception of the narrative.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think what most anti-Zionists want is for Israeli Jews to be massacred. The more moderate wing presumably wants a single state with equal rights and no privileged status for Jews (i.e. no right of return, citizenship based on presence on the land, etc) while the more extreme wing wants to send Israeli Jews packing; there are of course people who want Israeli Jews to die as an end goal, but despite some high-profile demonstrations I believe those people are the minority.
I rarely speak up on the Israel-Palestine issue here or in person because it never changes, and will never change, and yet is totally radioactive, so it's almost useless to express an individual opinion. But I personally don't really like anyone involved in the conflict; as far as I'm concerned there are no winners, there are only losers. I can absolutely see the left's point that Zionism was rather colonialist -- the Jews who moved to Israel during the Zionist migration hadn't been in the region for many generations, and thereafter took over governance direct from the British -- as well as essentially religious: the claim of sovereignty over the territory was based, however many epicycles of irony and rabbinical reinterpretation Zionists wanted to invoke, essentially on the belief that God had promised the region to Jews in perpetuity. And so it's really easy for me to see why progressives, who loathe colonialism and hate religion, would see this as fundamentally incompatible with the "rules based international order" that predominated after WWII, and therefore perceive Israel/Palestine as an active non-self-governing territory.
Given that a few generations of Israeli Jews have made their lives there, it certainly seems like ethnic cleansing to say they have to leave now, and I think people who directly call for that are triggering people's Holocaust detectors for good reason. At the same time, I also just don't particularly like that the West straight-up endorsed the foundation of an ethnostate in the 1940s on territory that had just been involved in an active ethnic civil war. There were a lot of good reasons many Jews felt the foundation of a Jewish state was a moral imperative, but with the benefit of hindsight, it seems likely to me that Jews would live in greater peace and security, and lost fewer lives, had European Jewry stuck around in Western Europe, or fled to America. The Israelis can do whatever they want, but I'm just not at all convinced that the ethnoreligious passion of Zionism could ever justify the immense suffering that civil war has brought to both Jews and Palestinians in the region.
More options
Context Copy link
Consider also the other side of the coin:
As I've posted before, it may be possible that the Nazi regime could lose those qualities of evil we've assigned to it from history, if political realignments continue as extrapolated. After all, for those pro-Israeli Jews being criticized, one would have to look at what happened in the Gaza War, and perhaps conclude that "this is what 'securing a future for your people' looks like."
I think that the defence and moral justification of what Israel has done in Gaza is an extremely bad thing for the jews in the long term for these (and other) reasons. Setting a precedent that inconvenient minorities can just be liquidated and murdered to acquire more living space for your ethnicity is not, in my opinion, going to be particularly pleasant for the diaspora - especially when you look at how quickly antisemitism is rising around the world. Most people agreed with "Never again" as a general principle, but if it turns out that it just meant "Never again to us, we can do it to others" a lot of that support is going to evaporate, and fast.
More options
Context Copy link
Looking on from a European perspective, I always found it curious how much the American narrative around the Nazis focussed on the Holocaust to the exclusion of everything else. In Germany's own self-flagellating historiography (at least the version of it delivered in the Eastern states) it maybe is assigned something on the order of 50% of the total weight of sin, with the rest being split between assorted other internal oppression, warmongering, the eastward expansion in search of Lebensraum, and the attendant scouring of Slavs; and in Russia, the focus is naturally overwhelmingly on expansionist conquest and the extermination of their own. That's also why in the context of the Ukraine war, "Zelenskiy is Jewish" looks like a slam dunk argument against "Ukrainian Nazis" to listeners living in the American memespace, but like a barely relevant piece of trivia to those living in the Russian one.
I see too much of an interlocking web of conflicting interests in place in Europe to enable a rehabilitation of the Nazis anytime soon - even in the maximalist scenario of both "Israel is evil" and "killing Soviets is good" catching on, there is still the circumstance that Poland (America's new protégé in the EU) relies on the Nazi invasion of itself for its national myth-building and as a cudgel to keep German interests in check when they are at odds with its own, and the meme is also a very reliable tool against nativist-antiglobalist parties that both are easily associated with the Nazis and a constant threat to ruling class objectives.
I think it goes like this: during the war and after the war, there was already a consensus that Hitler represented a historical form of evil, but during that period the main thing he was considered evil for was warmongering, ie. starting it, all the flagrant invasions, all the bodies (military and civilian) caused by the war, the industrial efficiency of the war and so on. For a lot of countries, of course, the most raw memories were related to German occupation itself and its depredations, or German bombings, or so on. However, after the war, it was the Soviets who staked a stronger claim to this narrative due to bearing the yeoman's burden for fighting the war.
The West soon started to find the focus on the war itself sort of problematic, not only due to the Soviet narrative but the necessity of getting the West German war machine back in order and finding places from former Nazis in the said war machine, getting rid of pacifist tendencies the war narrative was creating etc. This particularly meant America, which hadn't had the experience of German occupation on its own territory.
Thus, in the new narrative, a particular facet of the war - terror against civilians, the Holocaust - took a major role, with the war being cast in terms of democracy and genocide. This, for instance, allowed a comparison of Soviets and Germans as totalitarian states, since Soviets were also associated with persecution, killing and camps - and it actually facilitated the integration of Germany into the military apparatus of the West, since it focused on one particular sin that Germany could repent from vigorously through reparations, while the idea of "good Wehrmacht, bad SS" in terms of the Holocaust (later to be challenged, sure) meant that sufficiently non-Holocaust-contacted German personnel, and some whitewashed Holocaust-connected ones as well, could be utilized.
The Russian WW2 narrative, meanwhile, as said, continues to focus particularly on "the war itself" and the atrocities committed by Germans on all Soviet citizens, implicitly cast as Russians, which means that references to Zelenskyy being Jewish and so on do not really answer this narrative mcuh at all.
Ironic, because the red army was all about committing atrocities on civilians.
It's not particularly expectional about nations to focus more on atrocities committed by others on them than on atrocities they've committed on others.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm somewhat surprised I haven't come across memes responding to pictures of destruction in Gaza with pictures of Berlin in 1945 with the caption "What did you think punching Nazis looked like?" But I have a personal policy of not directly engaging with meme warfare ("memefare"?), and maybe this has already happened somewhere I'm not following.
It's hard to make Hamas looks like Nazis. People have a list of things they associate with the Nazis, usually it's something like: discipline, uniforms, industrialized cruelty, progressivism, scientific discrimination. Religious fanatics led by rich and cynical manipulators don't look like that at all.
I mean, there was that whole "Hitler 2" storefront in Gaza. That was a thing.
Does this make Indians Nazis as well? https://www.hindustantimes.com/india/tasteless-but-true-made-in-india-hitler-ice-cream-cafe/story-C6usCqTUqv4zAeU30b0GVM.html
Now I want to learn what karak mejaz is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Also, while it's just one isolated post, I did find this on Bluesky today.
I actually thought about that very idea before, I'm intrigued to read that a confluence of interests between antisemites and Zionists was hypothetically conceived. It seems logical that you'd want a place you could send Jews if you didn't like them that much.
But raw ethnic antisemitism just doesn't make logical sense to me, if you really hate Jews I presume you'd consider the Holocaust a great achievement, but antisemites deny it happened, and if you think Jewish presence in your country creates a disloyal class, presumably you'd want somewhere to banish them, but antisemites hate even the concept of a Jewish state. Frankly, I've never been persuaded from my core assumption that hardcore antisemitism is just people looking for a scapegoat to pin their ingroup's problems on the outgroup, and if the scapegoat goes away the problems can no longer be blamed on it.
But also, honestly, I don't know that the far-right actually supports Israel in large numbers, although I'm sure it happens. It seems to me that far-rightists who hate Jews tend to really despise the state of Israel for similar reasons to the left, and believe that any support for the Israelis in the West is due to "Jewish control of the media."
Possibly the bluesky poster is saying someone like Trump is far right, but I consider the idea that the firmly pro-Israel part of the right is either far-right or anti-semitic to be laughable. These are the most philosemitic gentiles who have ever existed on the face of the earth, they brag about how much they love Jews and how much they want Jews to like them.
I mean, interwar Poland (largest Jewish population in Europe, second largest in the world, ~20% of world Jews) was pretty enthusiastic about Jews emigrating en masse to, sure, Palestine, why not.
That’s fair, and good context — my point is mostly about modern-day antisemitism of the kind Jewish people seem to be worried about, where I’ve rarely seen this; I’ve seen a lot of people complain about “New York Jews” but few, if any, who make such complaints and then talk about they should all go to Israel. It seems more like aimless, grumpy complaints, or like sour grapes, like I’ve said, rather than something thought out.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
IRL antisemites giving a take on the war in Gaza will like use the term 'sand nigger' and talk about how the Gazans are all terrorists.
More options
Context Copy link
It's very possible to be a racist without also supporting mass murder. Maybe someone doesn't want to live around a certain race, or believes races in general should have their own nations, but isn't an insane mass murderer.
You've missed the second part of what I said: I said that antisemites often both deny the Holocaust and despise the concept of a Jewish state. If you "believe races in general should have their own nations", but not the Jews, and also don't want to live around them, essentially what you're saying is that the Jews should go away, but there's not any place on earth you can put them... well, that rather sounds like the public position of the Nazi party before the Holocaust. The final solution was final because they decided the other solutions wouldn't work to get rid of the Jews they despised. If someone doesn't want to live around Jews, hates the concept of a Jewish state, and despises mass murder, it rather prompts the question of what exactly they want Jewish people to do.
Which brings me back to my point: the crux of antisemitism isn't about trying to do something with Jews, even though that can spiral out of control -- it's about finding a scapegoat for the ingroup's problems. "Our society would be grand and peaceful and glorious, were it not for those dastardly Jews!" is a refrain heard from Toledo to Berlin to Little Rock; somehow the cause of
good German Aryanswhite liberals being liberal isn't white people's culture, but the Jews, becausegood German Aryanswhite people are, of course, the master race with protagonist energy, they've just been duped by the Jews and their damn verbal intelligence. It lets people rectify the purity of the ingroup, by blaming all its problems on the outgroup. But it also says some pretty pathetic things about the ingroup, if you think about it.I get why Jews make an easy scapegoat -- they do have a strong sense of ingroup-loyalty, they do have a lot of success in fields requiring high verbal fluency, and they do have a unique, even odd, culture, which makes them easily distrusted, especially in pre-modern societies that never prized pluralism. But I think the error of the Zionists who claimed antisemites would be on their side is they thought the point of antisemitism was about trying to not live near Jews or wanting an ethnostate -- in fact the very things you're saying -- rather than getting really, really angry at Jews for problems they didn't actually cause, because they're an easy scapegoat.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The idea that Trump would be an anti-semite when his daughter converted to Judaism to marry into an Orthodox Jewish family is insane to me.
More options
Context Copy link
This is because a lot of anti-semitism discourse is not really about the jews. Most anti-semites have never met a jew. There are some who just look for someone, anyone, to hate, but I think a lot of rightwingers are "antisemitic" because of the anti-semitism discourse. There is this line of argument, which Ill summarise as "If society could do this, it could do the holocaust if it wanted. As a jew, I feel threatened by this.", which is frequently deployed against them, where the "this" includes things they consider central to a functional society. That gets them really mad, and thats basically it. You dont even need actual jews to make this argument, the lefties will do it for them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Because we are missing the objective of the Holocaust Remembrance. It was never about remembering the Jews, it was about depoliticizing and deracialise European cultures, imprinting self-hate and leftists narrative control of reality. The moment the Jews became outmoded for several reasons (Israel, too European-like, whatever) Holocaust Remembrance will shift to gays, trans,gypsies or actual communists.
Humiliate the old regime and allowing a new one to root itself in place. The Japanese killed millions here in Asia, with two branches of my family snuffed out directly, but after a few apologies the Japanese moved along and got on with their own lives, letting the remembrance be for the smackdown they received for being such dicks as opposed to grovelling for eternal forgiveness. In turn the Japanese are able to adapt as the situation changes and consider abandoning pacifism in the face of Chinese militarism and ignore complaints from activists seeking to use Japan as a punching bag. I extract penance from the Japanese by not paying for my JAV, which I'm sure my ancestors smile upon me for.
More options
Context Copy link
Makes perfect sense as the reasons we actually tell the story of the holocaust generally don’t have anything to do specifically with Jews or Judaism.
Firstly, it’s a moralizing myth casting the Nazis as a secular Satan who must be stood against at all costs. It casts the allies (and NATO which grew out of the non-Soviet part of the alliance) as heroes who beat back an evil, expansionist, and genocidal regime. Now the point of this is to set certain international norms and standards. You can’t be with the good guys and do Nazi things. Thou shalt not invade. Thou shalt not make prison camps. Thou shalt not ethnically cleanse. Thou shalt not genocide. Thou shalt not think more highly of your own civilization, race or religion than anyone else’s. It’s a new religion in essence, to replace the moral system that Christendom used to provide before the First World War. Antifascism was the religion of the post war era.
Second, it provided an opportunity to sell alignment with NATO to third world countries. We saved Europe. We defeated people who invaded France and Poland. We liberated the continent. We are strong enough to protect you if you ally with us against the Soviets. This is why the Soviets end up airbrushed out of the picture. We almost immediately started a Cold War with the USSR and her allies. Telling southeast Asian people to side with us sounds a lot less impressive when it turns out that the Soviets did a fair bit of the liberating and at much greater cost.
Third, it forced through a lot of changes that liberals wanted. A turn toward internationalism with the UN leading the way. The ascendancy of cultural relativism where it’s now forbidden to suggest that some ways of doing things are better than others. The beginnings of globalization and the transition to thinking of countries as economic development zones rather than places with a culture and people who belong there and have a right to sovereignty. It meant a lot of rules to formalize these changes and therefore more control over people.
We handed over half of Europe to the USSR to administrate because we trusted them so much, going so far as to gerrymander half of Berlin into an exclave 100 miles deep in the Soviet zone because what tactical and logistical problems could possibly come of that?
We then reduced our military force in Europe from 12M to 1.5M men in the space of 2 years, obviously not because that's a great way to prepare for a new conflict, but because we were dumb enough to believe the Soviets didn't want more conflict either. Stalin, on the other hand, was already making plans for a unified Soviet Germany in 1945, though it wasn't until their Berlin Blockade that the plans became too obvious to handwave away.
I sometimes wonder just how much William Bullitt exaggerated his posthumous quotation of FDR:
"I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not and that he doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."
That seems like it almost has to be slander, right? Even if it's consistent with US policy, there's no way FDR could have been that naive in his beliefs? But I guess if someone could today think the US started the Cold War, with the benefit of hindsight, it's at least conceivable that FDR was legitimately equally foolish about his expectations for the future.
The Soviets' idea of "liberating" Poland, a country they originally invaded as part of their secret pact with Nazi Germany, was to halt their forces during the Warsaw Uprising to give the Nazis a chance to beat down on the Polish first. The use of the word "liberating" to describe strategy like that is utter nonsense.
More options
Context Copy link
The Soviet Union relied on the anti-Nazi mythos to legitimise the post-war regime domestically even more than the West did.
But the anti-Nazi mythos didn't really work in the post-colonial third world - Germany lost its colonies after WW1 and Italy was about as effective at imperialism as you would expect a bunch of Italians to be, so essentially almost all of Africa and large parts of Asia were former colonies of western Allies, who could credibly claim that for them WW2 meant being dragged into someone else's war against their will.
More options
Context Copy link
I think people in southeast Asia care a lot more about their liberation from Japanese occupation then anything going on in Europe. WW2 wasn't just a European war.
tbh it’s just pathetic that the Japanese blew their potential goodwill with anti-colonial Southeast Asians as badly as they did. They had every opportunity to back “freedom fighters” a la Reagan inviting mujahideen to the White House; the stars were perfectly aligned for them to portray themselves as stalwart supporters of liberty and self-determination against the evil white oppressors, aaaand … they ended up being even more reviled than the Western colonial powers to this day 🤦♂️
At least the (non-KMT) Taiwanese still generally look back fondly on the Japanese colonial era.
With what resources? After FDR's sneak attack on Japan's oil supply, Japan could barely fight to end the chaos in China, let alone send aid abroad to rebels, which were considered the enemy of the European colonial powers (and in the Phillipines the US), but also the US which was allied with them.
As the US showed after it declared war on Japan, it considered any ship flying non-Allied colours to be legitimate target, which leads me to believe that ships carrying aid to rebels would be sunk.
After the Pacific War began, the aformentioned Unrestricted Submarine Warfare meant that supplies were lost to the sea, thus creating a general deficit of goods.
The equivalent of Reagen inviting the Mujahadeen did occur, but only in late 1943. Perhaps you don't consider that conference to be similar or perhaps you were ignorant of it.
Or maybe the US backed the most anti-Japanese faction which then portrayed the Japanese poorly as to make their (most often poor) governance seem reasonable.
This is certainly the case in South Korea, where the Allied influence was the strongest: Japan brought literacy and industry, but the South Korean narrative literally inverts facts that instead Japanese rule improving the Hangul, it attempted to stamp it out.
It is easy to convince a population to hate another country, if instead of seeking co-operation and cultural exchange, you enact as strict a censorship of foreign culture and punish even [professors](https://www.universityworldnews.com/post-mobile.php?story=20191009153231491 for underming the regimes narrative, while distorting history in textbooks.
South Koreans are apperently withheld the truth about Japan's contribution to public education in the Korean language and improvements to Hangul, instead they are taught that the Korean language suffered. Queer sentiment in light of English language infestation the American rule brought, yet for which the South Korean government alters history to defend.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Makes sense. I'd also add that it meant the Allies could tell themselves they were the heroes in the conflict (don't get me wrong, I'm glad they won, but they fought against the Nazis for entirely self-interested reasons).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link