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Ye, better known as Kanye West has released a song titled "Heil Hitler"
I have to admit, it's quite catchy, especially the unlikely refrain "nigger, Heil Hitler", which definitely has an intriguing ring to it. Whether Kanye is a truly great artist or not, he's nothing if not a skilled craftsman.
I've long since lost the ability to treat anything on the internet seriously and my reaction was limited to squeezing my eyes shut and suppressing a chuckle, but I suspect that the wider audience is also outraged only in a performative, inertial way. I doubt it will end up making any real impact on anything and waves in the social media will likely fizzle out in no more than a few weeks.
I wonder if we're seeing the first signs of postmodern corrosion eating away at the last grand unifying narrative of our age: WW2 mythos, with Adolf Hitler at its center not as mere historical figure, but as the archetypal villain and the secular devil. In many countries the taboo is backed by legal force, but legislation doesn't truly govern things of this nature. The law may end up hollowed out and irrelevant long before someone cares to remove it from the books
Maybe I will live to tell my incredulous grandkids about how we were all expected to perceive one specific 20th century dictator through a prism of quasi-superstitious dread.
Should this really happen, good riddance. Though on the other hand, we might end up remembering having this kind of culture spanning, unifying narrative as kind of comfy compared to total balkanization
Will it be “post-modern corrosion” or will it be time? Genghis Khan Is believed to (1) have caused the deaths of enough people to slightly alter climate, and (2) have been the most-prolific rapist of which we are aware. And, currently, there are a couple of restaurant chains named after him here in America.
I once saw an inflatable, bounce-house type slide made to look like the Titanic. Kids would slide down the tilted deck, onto a landing area made to look like the sea. Fifteen hundred people died in the actual tragedy.
There is typically a loosening of taboo once knowledge of horrible events passes out of living memory. Are those around WW2 going to be different?
(West is certainly, dementedly ahead of the curve, here.)
The youngest people to claim they have experienced anything from WWII are 91-2 . Doesn't help that the biggest victims are universally hated. Also doesn't help that nazism struggle was intrawhite thing, and white people are at record low share of global population.
I wouldn't call antisemitism universal, although it's certainly more common than most forms of ethnic prejudice.
Are there peoples or cultures where it's absent? I don't mean uncontantacted people's in remote areas.
East Asia seems not to have adopted that particular prejudice, for one.
In particular, China didn't adopt this particular vice despite being home to small but significant populations of Jews throughout history, with enclaves in many Chinese cities (with the Kaifeng Jews being the most famous of the bunch), while also hosting significant numbers of Christians and Muslims. There has been some suggestion in the official records that the earliest of them arrived mid-Han dynasty approx. two thousand years ago, and there are independent observations by e.g. Persian travellers noting established Jewish merchants operating in China by the Tang dynasty.
Interestingly I have noticed an uptick in a bizarre sort of antisemitism in some of the wackier corners of Chinese popular culture very recently -- some sort of combination of classic Da Jooz tropes imported from the West, combined with the perception that the West is trying to contain China, resulting in various syncretic conspiracy theories about how (((they))) are puppeteering Western institutions to control China (or have in some nonsensical way done so in the past). But on the whole the Chinese remain philosemitic.
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Malaysia has.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahathir_Mohamad
I have seen a theory that some of it was intended to create a (nonexistent) Jewish scapegoat for Malay ethnic mobs to distract them from (very real) Chinese and Indians they were currently targeting.
Similarly, "Black americans stop beating up Asians. Your real enemy is the Uzbeks."
Does Malaysia count as East Asia rather than Southeast Asia?
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If antisemitism is a response it could be there's be insufficient exposure.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0031322X.2023.2287877
Pharaoh seems not concerned with the Israelites until they've become too numerous in Exodus 1:9.
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Yep, I recall reading somewhere that Asians tend to respect Jews for their disproportionate influence, the thought process going something like:
They have a more diverse array of “market dominant minorities” so they’re more familiar with the concept in general and yet less familiar with the particular expression of the phenomena re: the Jews. Which explains their thoughts on the subject.
They have market dominant minorities in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia & more…
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