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CW: Beck's virulent antisemitism.
I know exactly why i'm mad about this but trying to figure out how to frame it. In short: this manages to simultaneously make him the victim, minimize the shoah, and feed antisemitic canards. Any is disgusting; all together are beyond the pale. https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1349163003472699393
I know exactly why i'm mad about this but trying to figure out how to frame it. In short: this manages to simultaneously make him the victim, minimize the shoah, and feed antisemitic canards. Any is disgusting; all together are beyond the pale. https://twitter.com/oliverdarcy/status/1349163003472699393
1. Conservatives marched in CAMP AUSCHWITZ and 6MWE shirts. A conservative official said Heil Hitler. Forget personal reflection; you have to make a PUBLIC STATEMENT condemning that shit and explaining exactly why it's wrong before you can use us as a rhetorical device.
2. Evoking the Holocaust to refer to a "digital ghetto" shows a profound lack of understanding of what happened in ghettos. This ignorance is not an excuse, esp when you have a microphone. Jews died in overwhelming numbers in ghettos. You're being asked not to encourage treason.
But 3 is the most important, and it KEEPS coming up in discussions, so I want to spell this out really really slowly and carefully. Because people will recognize 1 and 2 but let 3 sneak under our skins, and no. Not today.
Equating powerful conservatives, who have political positions and spaces to speak in media and WHO INCITED RIOTS WITH CONFEDERATE FLAGS, with the Jews of the Holocaust ghettos, implies that they had influence. It implies they had power.
To say that GOPers with one less avenue to spout patently-false bullshit to keep their ~godking~ in office are just like Jews oppressed by the Nazis makes them feel noble in powerless while making it seem like European Jews' predicament was exponentially more minor than it was.
What we're not going to do is let the Glenn Becks of the world go on national TV and redefine what the Shoah meant to make losing one megaphone seem tragic. 70,000 troll twitter account were purged and Parler violated its TOS. Six million Jews DIED. Go fuck yourself, Glenn Beck.
(I want to be explicit here that five million other marginalized groups were targeted, and no discussion of the Holocaust should ignore the fact that the Nazis wanted to commit genocide of the Sinti and Roma people as well as Jews. I'm responding to Beck but this is much bigger.)
Actually that should have been a bigger point. The Nazis weren't trying to ~lessen the voices~ of the marginalized. They were trying to COMMIT GENOCIDE.
Not to defend Amazon in ANY WAY but AWS shutting down Parler is not an attempt to exterminate a whole people.
Not to defend Amazon in ANY WAY but AWS shutting down Parler is not an attempt to exterminate a whole people.
Also sorry, I should not finish this thread without explicitly recognizing the queer people, disabled people, and other groups the Nazis were imprisoning in work camps and murdering.
Again: THIS IS NOT EQUIVALENT TO @JACK FINALLY BANNING YOUR LYING, RIOT-INCITING TWITTER ACCOUNT
Again: THIS IS NOT EQUIVALENT TO @JACK FINALLY BANNING YOUR LYING, RIOT-INCITING TWITTER ACCOUNT
But as a Jew in particular, I cannot get over how much of the Holocaust-comparing rhetoric (even from people who mean well, like Schwarzenegger's video the other day) equates Jews in Nazi-occupied territories, at the height of their powerlessness, with the powerful elite.
It's a perfect example of the insidiousness of antisemitic lies. The idea we're powerful/elite and as a result DESERVE to be exterminated is ingrained into society. Doesn't matter if that was Beck's intent; it's baked in.
I can't do much, but I can at least call it out.
I can't do much, but I can at least call it out.
