CW: holocaust

Today is #HolocaustRemembranceDay and I want to share this picture. Many of you will probably be familiar with this, it's a photo of the Nazis working at Auschwitz. Why am I sharing this? To make an important point about the mechanisms of the holocaust 1/?

We think about the Nazis as some creatures of pure evil, and by doing that we ignore the fact that they were bakers, husbands, wives, florists. They weren't nazguls. They were people like you and me. Which means you should HOLD YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE. 2/?

By thinking of the Nazis as some evil parenthesis of history we ignore the hate that led them there. The antisemitism, the xenophobia, the racism, the homophobia. The same hate that is festering in modern society. 3/?

By thinking of the holocaust as something that is 'unthinkable', that could 'never happen in our societies' we ignore that... it is fucking happening. Each time people cheer for a migrant drowned at sea. Each time people claim the Uyghur genocide is a hoax. 4/?

We should NOT detach ourselves from Nazis by blaming what they did as something that was just 'evil'. We should analyze how NORMAL PEOPLE - like your mother, your father, your aunt, your siblings - decided it was okay to exterminate whole ethnicities & the 'diverse' 5/?

How many people would pay their respects at concentration camps, claim they'd have never helped the nazis, and then laugh at picture of migrants' dead bodies. How many people 'remember the holocaust' without really *understanding* it. 6/?

The Third Reich may have been defeated, but the true causes of the holocaust are still alive and well. So, let's remember those we lost. But don't forget that we still have to fight a long way for truly considering all of this over. 7/7