These things take time
Why this is stupid:
Hi Kumail, Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews in a mass genocide. I lost family on both sides in the holocaust. The more you guys compare everyone to Nazis the more you’ll be blind when the real ones show up… https://t.co/ho7OdxRO9Y
— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) June 25, 2018
Kumail Nanjiani:
I know there are a bunch of people upset at the Nazi comparisons, but the highlighting-crimes-by-immigrants move is literally what the Nazis did, with Jews instead of immigrants. A sure fire way to stop being compared to Nazis is to stop acting like them.
Dave Rubin:
Hi Kumail, Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews in a mass genocide. I lost family on both sides in the holocaust. The more you guys compare everyone to Nazis the more you’ll be blind when the real ones show up…
It’s stupid because the Nazis didn’t go from being a normal democratic rights-respecting government to exterminating 6 million Jews in a mass genocide in one jump. That’s why. It’s stupid because there was a process, with steps, that took years. Pointing out that some things Trump is doing are strikingly similar to things the Nazis did during the process that led to the exterminations is, it seems to me, necessary in order to point out the seriousness and danger of those things that Trump is doing.
Hitler didn’t come with a label REAL NAZI and neither will any other potential Nazi. Dave Rubin doesn’t know that the real ones have not already shown up; he doesn’t know they’re not on the path to full real genuine authentic 100% guaranteed Real Nazism. Germans in 1933 and 1936 didn’t know that Hitler was going to exterminate as many Jews as he could, either.
Another little detail: Hitler didn’t have nuclear weapons at his disposal. Trump does.
We have stronger institutions than Weimar Germany did. They may be able to prevent Trump from going all the way. But is there anything in Trump that would prevent him from going full exterminate? No. It doesn’t take visible horror-movie demonic evil; the ordinary everyday kind is perfectly up to the task.
It’s irksome also because it frames the Holocaust as the only thing the Nazis did. We don’t oppose the raids, the yellow stars, the segregation, the invasions, the fascism only because it led or might lead to genocide, but because these are terrible things themselves. The Nazis provide a lot of examples of terrible things, and comparisons are apt.
@1,
Exactly. Talk about “terrible things”. Themselves. I’ll join you. Evoke fascism if you will. But don’t hop on an easy train to Auschwitz. It’s a place that’s unspeakable (as I learned on a visit). It’s the depreciation of gas chambers and ovens that troubles me.
This comment also belongs in this thread
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2018/swear-you-love-us/
No one is depreciating gas chambers and ovens. We don’t know, should it come to the worst, whether the followers of Trump will become literal or figurative Nazis. My guess would be comparable, rather than literal. I doubt they would use chambers and ovens, not for a generation anyway (he said optimistically). What I am certain of is that unless this trajectory suffers a major reverse, that is where you/we end up.
There are many technological, automated and bureaucratic ways to kill people and dispose of the bodies. While some may horrify the living more than others, does anyone think the means bothers the dead more than the fact their existence is about to be terminated? Come to that I’d rather be gassed than burnt alive or drowned, both of which we could also achieve on a grand scale.
No one is taking ‘an easy train to Auschwitz.’ Rather, we’re pointing out that the station to somewhere nasty is just down the road and around the corner a bit.
Actual death camps are unlikely in America. It’s much more profitable to herd the undesirables into for-profit prisons and keep them there indefinitely. Private industry profits, the government has something to intimidate dissenters with, and the rabble get to feel that they’re being kept safe. It’s win-win-win!
What Rob said.
Helene, the trouble with the horrors of Naziism, as a parallel for current events is everyone always jumps to the end, to the gas chambers and the mass graves. But the German people weren’t some uniquely violent or wicked population and yet so many of them were a party to the Third Reich’s crimes. How do we explain this? How do we explain how a civilized nation descended into such madness? The answer is that you coax people into accepting things, in baby steps, that would once have seemed unimaginable, while constantly demonizing and dehumanizing those you wish to target.
If you don’t believe me, answer me this: If I could get in a time machine and go back to early 2015 and told you that in three years the United States would be building jails for babies, you’d have thought I’d lost my mind. If I’d told you that the current president routinely entertains authoritarian notions such as presidency for life, removing due process for certain classes of people and arbitrarily banning whole groups of people from the USA, you’d have called me a liar.
The Nazi’s didn’t even know themselves that they were on the road to the gas chambers until they got there. Read the transcripts of the Wannsee conference or if that’s too dry, watch Conspiracy, the excellent and chilling play Kenneth Branagh made about the conference based on those transcripts. They talk a lot about what the people would accept. Now tell me that Stephen Miller wouldn’t fit right in.
Or just read Eichmann in Jerusalem.
Sackbut@1
“It frames the Holocaust as the only thing that the Nazis did”
Yes, the Jews weren’t the only victims of the Nazis. The Nazis exterminated up to 1 million Roma (one of the forgotten victims) and probably, directly or indirectly, 20 million Slavs.
RJW, indeed, and not all were killed in gas chambers. The source of the list below is Wikipedia, but at least there are references…
Victims Killed
Jews 5-6 million
Poles 1.8–3 million
Soviet citizens 6 million
Soviet POWs 2.8–3.3 million
Serbs 300,000–600,000
Disabled 270,000
Romani 130,000–500,000
Freemasons 80,000–200,000
Slovenes 20,000–25,000
Homosexuals 5,000–15,000
Jehovah’s Witnesses 1,250–5,000
Spanish Republicans 7,000
I believe this excludes those who dies as a result of warfare itself and those who died as the by-product of warfare, but without particular special animus.
Rob @8
Ghastly list, isn’t it. It’s disappointing when people count the Jews as the only victims of the Nazis.
I’d say that the list understates the death toll in the Soviet Union where the Nazi strategy was devastation and starvation and eventually, settlement by Germans.
There are many ‘forgotten’ facts, for example Germans were the victims of ethnic cleansing when they were expelled from Eastern Europe after WW2 or how many people did the Japanese warlords kill in the Asia-Pacific from the 1930s to 1945?
I have to say that I never anticipated how appalling Trump would be in office both domestically and in foreign policy terms, America’s celebrated ‘checks and balances’ seem just a myth.
Ghastly indeed. Military deaths are generally excluded from the list above, as are civilians who were killed by direct military action or who died as the result of the war (starvation, disease, exposure etc) – with teh exception of the Russian civilians listed above who were specifically under German occupation and who were directly killed or died as a result of German policy because they were Russian/Slavic.
I hadn’t been aware till I read the wiki page, that amongst the first to go were Germans of mixed German/African birth. Apparently after WW1 France stationed a lot of their troops within Germany and many of those were from African colonies. There was significant marriage/cohabitation. Hitler saw these children of mixed race as a deep affront to the purity of the Aryan nation.
We could as you say pick many regimes from recent or ancient history as examples of how a civilised population can slide into horrific acts. But why pick an example that few people may know about or that even fewer people will understand the sheer horror of what happened? Why not use one of the best examples in memory an emotional impact?
All western democracies really rely on norms of behaviour, rather than any super strong legal checks and balances. Something we should keep close to our hearts. To hold to ‘normal’ standards of polite and civilised behaviour when the other side is openly trashing the place and laughing about it is suicide.
The checks and balances rely on everyone agreeing to follow them, first. And second, when the same party has all three branches of government, and that party has little to no integrity and doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as they get their goodies, there will be no checks and no balances.
iknklast @ 11
Yes, it’s disturbing to discover how partisan and undemocratic many politicians are, particularly those on the conservative side. I wasn’t claiming that America is unusual in the low quality of its politicians, but that, up to the present day, Americans have been rather complacent about their system.
Rob,
I forgot to mention that I would have been on the list you provided.
During the 1970s I worked for a car manufacturing company, most of the top management were Germans or Austrians and former members of the Nazi war machine. My boss was a veteran of Stalingrad, every year on the anniversary of his escape from the Russians he had a small private celebration.
RJW, you’re not (gasp) a Freemason are you?!
Rob,
Yes, although I haven’t been an active member for years.
Since the organization has subverted most of the world’s governments and government agencies there’s very little left to do, except our eternal rivalry with the Illuminati of course.
Dammit, an Australian as my new overlord.
Yes, these things do take time.
So, when is the Reichstag Fire?
If anyone argues that the Trump administration isn’t making people disappear like the Nazis did, ask them where the refugee children have gone.
tiggerthewing – especially the girls…