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I don’t think the issue is that genocide and ethnic cleansing are always fake. I think the issue is that a lot of the history as taught and then used as propaganda are exaggerated and weaponized to create a propaganda machine that uses the mythology to demonize even relatively harmless ideas or to justify wars to destroy movements or to prop up bad ideas. It furthermore creates an idea that there was only one major genocide in human history and it was uniquely evil. It means that any ideology that you can connect to something the Nazis said or did is now to be suppressed and if possible eliminated by “right thinking people” everywhere.
I mean our “satanification” of Nazis and Hitler did quite a lot of harm in the world. It turned them into cartoons, basically, not real people who lived on earth. It flattened a lot of history into black and white thinking where anything a Nazi did anywhere is automatically considered at best suspect and at worst evil. Even things that are seen as potentially leading to ideas that lead to Nazis is seen as a pipeline. Nationalist? Traditionally European? Christian? I’ve seen hysterical reactions to the idea of: men trying to be masculine, fantasy novels, HEMA, traditional family structures, traditional Christianity, trans skepticism, and reading classics of European literature called out as “part of the fascist pipeline.” And since it’s obviously evil, the hysteria often means that people are being told to watch out for such “red flag” activities and materials in their children’s lives. It’s insane. Furthermore, from my point of view, the dose makes the poison. I think it’s perfectly well and good to embrace your own traditions. It’s certainly better than trying to LARP as East Asian or some other ethnicity. Why, if I want to learn a traditional martial art do I have to learn a tradition that has nothing to do with me? Why can’t I appreciate my own culture? American culture comes from England, not China or Japan or Argentina.
Furthermore, by removing them from humanity, you make outbreaks more likely. People who are like the Nazis know that having those aesthetics turn people off. They know that swastikas and Hugo Boss set off alarms. They simply rebrand. The propaganda looks different. And people don’t want to think that it can or is happening.
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Yeah it's used as an automatic conversation ender and the amount of 'genocides' on the colonial frontier that turned out to be a combination of less deliberate, invented by modern people not realizing the baseline for deaths in rural 1800s Canada and/or perpetrated largely by locals like the Belgian Congo.
I believed the Holocaust happened but the reaction of confused outrage from certain people who are used to essentially having an auto win button in these arguments is silly.
Past tense is a typo. I do believe the Holocaust occurred
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The Belgian population of the Congo never went over a couple thousand. Most of whom weren't exactly plunging off into the jungles to go disarm the locals. I agree they provided the economic incentives, but the vast majority of the cruelty was native on native
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