It’s All Lives Matter Holocaust Memorial Day
Et tu National Secular Society?
Seriously? All Lives Matter on Holocaust Memorial Day?
The name “Holocaust” is specific to the genocide of six million Jews.
It’s not a good look to hide the genocide of six million Jews on Holocaust Memorial Day.
So as not to hurt the poor antisemites little antisemitic feelings? Secularism is meaningless if you pretend religion or ethnicity had no part in history.
I didn’t think it possible, but the past four months have increased my distaste for so-called social justice.
Extraordinarily insensitive.
The NSS has now re-edited the tweet to mention Jews:
https://nitter.cz/NatSecSoc/status/1751329558215704960#m
The argument, of course, is that other groups (gays and Romani, in particular) were also targeted by the Nazis and ended up in the camps, along with anyone deemed sufficiently hostile to the Fatherland. This is as true as it is irrelevant.
Sure, once the Nazis had this shiny new toy with which to purge entire unwanted populations, they did what fascists do, and started selecting all sorts of folks to feed into the machine. But that doesn’t change the fact that the machine itself was built, entirely, for the purpose of eliminating the Jews; everyone else was, to be a bit crude about it, collateral damage. Without anti-Semitism, and without Jewish victims specifically, the murders of all those other victims also don’t happen, at least not on the scale they did; sure, a fascist state under a hypothetical non-anti-Semitic Hitler would’ve still been rounding people up and disappearing them. But the camps were a unique institution, much like American chattel slavery, and only existed because it was the only means by which the Nazis could effect the failed Austrian painter’s horrific ‘final solution’.
I have been noodling about what a Jewish-neutral fascist Germany would’ve looked like (which is to say, would it even have been possible?). Maybe it would’ve just been ultranationalist and virulently Francophobic and not actually fascist.
Good for Jerry Coyne.
Freemage #4
“a unique institution, much like American chattel slavery”
Unique?
Slavery was a rather common, & nasty, thing in world history.
Do you mean the racial basis for it was unique to the US, or all the Americas?
A post from UniteWomen.org also failed to mention Jews. The image, though, does contain a Jewish star, and features a quote from Elie Wiesel.
[looks at UniteWomen post]
Yes, I think that image counts as mentioning Jews.
freemage#4 But I think it needs to be said that the Romani people always have been, and continue to be, particularly in Eastern Europe, ‘collateral damage’, largely because so many people do not realise, or care, about the way they have been, and are being, treated. They are too often regarded as being somehow outside the circle of ‘respectable’ humanity. I certainly think that both Jewish & Romani people should be recognised as victims of the ‘Holocaust’ – a word that a number of Jewish people who suffered under the Nazis, notably the Hungarian-Jewish writer Imre Kertész, who was sent to Auschwitz, very much dislike.
Jim Baerg: Indeed; at nearly sixty I am of an age to have been taught the significance of the name Epaminondas without undergoing exposure to the referent.