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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.
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'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.
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