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I would upvote without the last sentence. The Holocaust was a singular event as there have been many singular events, and none repeated itself, neither as tragedy nor as farce, but some of them rhyme
Holocaust is a general term, and there have been others, here are some pictures of huge piles of skulls from the Cuban Holocaust done by the Spanish in the late 1800s:
You've got a point there, the term is technically older and historically used in a wider sense. Looking at google Ngrams, it was barely used before the second half of the 20th century. Words change meaning and when a word is strongly associated with one event and it was barely used before that, it is safe to say that it now exclusively refers to that.
It is extremely dangerous and part of both the new Nazis and Zionist playbook to designate the Holocaust as a "singular event", implying that there was no genocide of similar scope before, or there could be after it.
Looking for example how Britain systematically stared more than 10 million people to death in India, the Holocaust isn't even the worst genocide in terms of absolute numbers.
In particular in Germany this "singularity" trope is heavily used as propaganda, of how Germany has learned from its history, when it didn't. New authoritarian measures? Cannot be compared because how dare you compare it to the rise of fascism, that lead to the one and only Holocaust?! Deliberate ramping up of racist rethoric accompanied by more violent hate crime? It is not the Holocaust so why are you saying it feels like the late 20s again?!
And of course subsequently: How dare you say Gaza is a concentration camp?! How can you imply any similarity between Israel and the Nazis?! You evil antisemite! Oh you are a renowned Jewish scholar that studied the Holocaust? Your parents have barely survived the concentration camps? Well you are against Israel so you are "alledgedly Jewish" or how about "self hating Jew"?
This is the actual discourse in Germany. Jews not aligned with Zionism are heavily targeted by Politicians and state bureaucrats in a heavily antisemitic manner. And this "Holocaust is singular" argumentation is part of it.
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-strange-logic-of-germanys-antisemitism-bureaucrats
the Holocaust isn't even the worst genocide
Yes, the Holocaust was one of many genocides. Still it is the only holocaust. You can compare it to other genocides without equalizing it (a differentiation that works much less in German).
In particular in Germany this "singularity" trope is heavily used as propaganda
True, but so is the opposite. I tried to frame my first comment not in that propagandistic way. That narrative goes like: Germany is the country of thinkers and poets, we had Luther, Goethe and Einstein, than something bad happened but all my relatives were in the resistance and after 1945 there aren't any nazis anymore anywhere now. And it can't repeat anyway so why bother.
That's not how I framed it. I deliberately said it's one of many singular events and it "rhymes" with others (including present day events)
If the holocaust wasn't singular at all, it wasn't that bad. Shit happens. The Nazis weren't that bad either. Other states do similar things. We don't have to learn from our past when it repeats anyway.
There are many lines to draw here but please have the intellectual integrity not to draw one at the usage of a single word. Take the second to look how it is used.
And there are differences between the holocaust and colonialist genocides ("the enemy within"), as there are commonalities. Each is singular and thereby they are all connected.
How dare you say Gaza is a concentration camp?!
Yes, it is, as where the gulags and the US had concentration camps for Japanese people during the Second War to End War (George Takei, the actor of Sulu in Star Trek, lived in one as a kid).
Is Israel an apartheid state? To a degree, as is the US with the illegalized immigrants and former prisoners aren't allowed to vote (and who's more likely to be imprisoned?) Even if the law applies to everyone the same way, to quote Anatole France: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread." (I've got this quote from Worshiping Power by Peter Gelderloos)
I'm an anarchist. In my view, all states are bad. I'm not singling out Israel even though it is a good (as in evil) example. There is a lot to criticize and for much of it, you find similar things in other states also worth criticizing. While all states are and have been bad and did bad stuff, only one made the holocaust happen. Still, others did similar things. Denying this can be used for both sides.
And I still don't know what the meme is referring to. To October 9th or the genocide in Gaza? Or to Sudan? Why is no one talking about Sudan? (Me included, I know something is going there but don't ask me what)
If you're a German, you make me sick to be another left-wing German.
Yes, it is, as where the gulags and the US had concentration camps for Japanese people during the Second War to End War (George Takei, the actor of Sulu in Star Trek, lived in one as a kid
Gaza is a lot closer to the Nazi KZs than the Japanese internment camps ever even got close to, the only difference is that the space in Gaza is bigger, and they managed to smuggle stuff in. Israel kept them on a strict water ration (having destroyed the entire native infrastructure decades ago) only "turning on the taps" a few days out of the week, keeping the population on hunger rations, in an open effort to starve the population out, a plan proudly proclaimed as being a moral good by a member of the Israeli government.
Is Israel an apartheid state? To a degree, as is the US
No, it isn't, and you obviously don't know jack shit by the rest of that paragraph. Israel is a full on apartheid state, Arab-Israelis are literally not even citizens, many laws specifically single out and directly target said minorities, they are not allowed to use the vast majority of large road networks, they are not allowed to own land in "Jewish areas", they aren't allowed into "Jewish areas" unless they have specific reason to be there. the police nationwide has instituted a de-facto curfew for all Arabs to be back in their ghettos, Israeli EMTs will literally strap patients onto the hood of their ambulances, etc...
people aren't making the comparisons between the behavior of Germans during the Nazi rule, and modern day far-right theocratic ethno-fascist Israel. We see the same dehumanization, the same hate, the same disregard and disgust of the "other", we see the same actions, the same propaganda (multiple members of the Israeli government have literally used the 14 words), the same Lebensraum, and You, and people like you are so fucking up your own ass about how big strong and bad Germany was (another point many current neo-Nazis will agree on, because if only Germany is capable of this type of evil, it is because they must somehow b a superior "race"), that you will actively repeat Nazi shit, as long as the framing is right. you are proof that the German education system has failed you in regard to learning about the horrors of the Nazi regime, because you are more focused on the picture of the mustache man than what they did.
things aren't bad because the Nazis did them, the Nazis were bad because of what they did, and if Israel is committing the same atrocities, they are deservedly compared to nazis.
And I still don’t know what the meme is referring to. To October 9th or the genocide in Gaza? Or to Sudan? Why is no one talking about Sudan? (Me included, I know something is going there but don’t ask me what)
tho, you do get one thing correct, you have no fucking clue about anything that goes on in that region.
P.S. please don't call yourself an anarchist, you're just another "Anti-D"
I love how you totally ignore what I said and selectively read my comment the way it fits your prejudices. What makes me Anti-D? That I want other states to fall, too? I mean there are anti-D anarchists who want Israel to fall last. I explicitly said that Israel is an especially bad state implying that I want it to fall sooner than later. But what do I know.
To quote Gelderloos again, in case you accept him as an anarchist: "the category of citizen, from the beginning, was intended to be exclusionary, not inclusionary." Talking about the French revolution, where the bourgeoisie introduced the social contract theory to exclude the lower social strata. Does that make them an apartheid state? No. Are all states apartheid states? No. Is South Africa right to accuse Israel of being one? Yes. Did I generalize to provoke people into realizing that all states are bad? Maybe.
if Israel is committing the same atrocities, they are deservedly compared to nazis.
Where did I say that you can't compare them?
Did you know that the Lebensraum ideology was inspired by Manifest Destiny, the colonial expansion of the US? But sure, Nazi Germany and Israel are the only states that committed any kind of genocide in history. There are people arguing the US didn't commit genocide against the indigenous population. I say it's an ongoing genocide, it never stopped.
you will actively repeat Nazi shit, as long as the framing is right
I was repeating a word they use and pointed out that I used it differently and that disagreeing with this word is also used by Nazis so maybe it matters how we use words.
Way to go shitting all over someone trying to give a nuanced take. You completely lost it here, and for what? For your right (or pleasure) to equate Israelis to Nazis? Well done.
nuanced take? please, there wasn't a scrap of nuance in that entire post of theirs, it was literally the same holocaust denying shit you see on every conservative news outlet.
In what way do see him denying the holocaust? He does confirm it was a singular event
it wasn't even considered a singular event until the 70s, where everyone started to forget the other victims, you had the Jewish holocaust, the Romani holocaust, the Slavic holocaust etc... but ironically since most of the world still saw is as fine to be racist to these people, we gladly forgot about these groups. Hence, we are left with the holocaust of the only people to have a larger representative community in the allied powers as being the victims of the holocaust in everyone's collective minds.
And to be fair, it does sort of piss me off when people go around spreading the myth of the singular holocaust, something that is in its very essence holocaust denial, because you deny many of the differing victims of Nazi brutality and murder, to deny a modern day holocaust.
Then again, try explaining to people that the genocide the Germans perpetrated didn't start with millions dead, or that it mostly took place outside the camps (misconceptions Nazis also still use to this day, if you ever heard the "cookies" or "pizza" analogy from the far right).
Antisemitism, the Holocaust, genocide…these terms are often used as a political, argumentative weapon. I am pretty sure you‘d say the same thing. But, I think according to your definition of the Holocaust it, you’d like to use it as a weapon, too. Because your historical reference is not only wrong, it is upside down.
It wasn‘t that easy to find the historical evolution of the term, but I think the Oxford dictionary explains it best:
historical. Usually with capital initial and with the. The systematic mass killing of Jews under the German Nazi regime in Nazi-controlled areas of Europe between 1941 and 1945. Later also in extended use with reference to other victims of Nazi genocide, such as Romani people, gay people, or people with disabilities. The term The Holocaust began to be applied specifically in this sense by Jewish historians in the 1950s…
This is pretty much what I read elsewhere. In Germany nobody talked about The Holocaust at all till the late 60s. Only slowly society allowed to speak about German atrocities. Since then the term is mostly, in Germany exclusively, used to describe the killing of Jews by the Nazi regime.
And then, only in the 90s the Sinti and Roma, Slavic and homosexual victims were recognised, too.
This chronology disproves the point you want to make: That the Holocaust is a propaganda trope only useful to the Israeli government.
In the end you hijack the term holocaust denier and label Jews with it. You should think that through again.
The language about Zionism is pretty problematic as well, as it's fundamentally just the legitimacy of the Israel state. That ship has sailed, and attempting to dismantle Israel is not going to create peace. Getting serious about forcing Israel to abide by international laws is the path forward. Implying the state is illegitimate and borrowing extremist nomenclature from neonazis is not.
Zionism is used for a Jewish ethno state. A multi cultural state wouldn't be Zionism
That is one usage of the term. The more common and liberal (and historic) terminology is precisely to make a multicultural state which is accommodating and or safe for Jewish people, which is closer to what Israel has been pre Netanyahu.
For what it's worth, I tend to agree that Israel is something like the original sin of the conceptual post war nation state. But again, that cat is not going back into that bag. My point is not that Israel is without sins, it is that anti-Zionism comes with a significant amount of linguistic baggage which more precise langue avoids. It is far more productive to articulate the specific behaviors of modern Israel which one finds unacceptable, rather than to dive into this specific linguistic battle.
Not fond of meaningless arguments about definitions designed to derail a discussion.
definitions
Ah, right, because words don't actually mean what they mean. They mean what I feel they should mean. Thank you for reminding me of this, clearly, universal truth. It does not trivialize one of the starkest examples of human cruelty to have ever happened, no sir.
Mind out, people on here literally believe that.
I will never, and I mean this, never care what someone who believes that thinks.
Gtfo with your linguistic prescriptivism, asshole
Most descriptivist will spend hours arguing (not as in disagreeing but as in discussing) which word means what in which context and for which person. Can I use "to argue" in a neutral sense and what about the noun "argument"? Why exactly is this a different story? But not you, you got it right and everyone else got it wrong.
I don't even know what the meme is trying to say with the holocaust comparison. Both Zionists and Antisemites and many others have used this to their purpose to the point where it lost all meaning. When "the Jews learned evil in Germany" and Israel is "hell on earth" and a nazi state committing holocaust on the Palestinians, and killing one Jew is holocaust and so is abortion, the animal industry and everything in between and beyond, than either the holocaust happened only once – or it has no meaning at all and happens everywhere at once. You decide.
Ok this objection I can abide. Metaphors are inherently ambiguous. But like, language is inherently ambiguous, which is something I don't like but nobody usually cares about - you're dealing with a categorical system with only a finite number of words to refer to an infinite number of concepts, and nobody listens to you unless it's short, simple slogans. So really, there's no good way to use language at all.
In this context, the point is "the thing happening in Palestine should evoke the same emotional response as the Holocaust and not be ignored simply because the victims aren't white", for which there's no way to evoke the appropriate emotional response without metaphor, which is why I got emotional
Maybe this is a topic that should make us emotional and I even feel your first comment but I'm coming from a different perspective. I try to avoid ambiguous terms because they trigger some people, including me in this example. People say Israel isn't a white settler colonial state to avoid saying how bad it is. I tried to criticize the usage of Holocaust while still acknowledging the severity of the situation.
164000 (give or take, we can't know the exact numbers) casualties with something like 70000 fatalities since 1947 in the Israel-Palestine war.
Let's say that all of these numbers are directly from Israel and that they are all lies. Let's say that they are, actually, triple - fuck it let's make it quadruple the amount.
That's 656000 casualties and 280000 people dead over a 76 year period. The Holocaust was 5 years with 6 million people dead. That's 42 million (Edit, I'm kinda fucking dumb) people dead. Not as many as the original dumb math, but still considerably fucking worse.
Them comparing what's happened in Palestine over the past 76 years to what the Nazis did during the Holocaust is not only wildly disingenuous, it shows they have no real concept of just how fucking bad the Holocaust actually was. It is only indicative of their ignorance, they aren't somehow communicating more clearly despite them having convinced themselves otherwise.
What's happening in Gaza and Palestine is bad. Awful even, a horrible blemish on humanity until our species dies. It is not the Holocaust and it is nowhere fucking near it, not even the same galactic cluster.
Edit: I wrote this to the person you're responding to but they're genuinely dumb so I'm posting it under your comment. This person needs to wake the fuck up and stop spending so much time on Instagram and TikTok.
Edit2: I fixed the dumb bad brain math. It is done.
Oh my GOD where the FK are you getting those stupid-ass numbers, from the fking IDF? They've literally depopulated a nation that used to have literally MILLIONS OF PEOPLE down to a couple hundred thousand, and they're trying to fking finish the job. It's fking genocide and your blasé fking trash attitude towards it means YOU'RE FKING TRASH
Genocide ≠ Holocaust, you are an idiot.
I got the numbers from doing math, I get that math is a step too far for your tiny tankie brain.
They did not "depopulate" the nation you fucking donkey, they forced the population of Gaza to move to Rafah.
Go ahead and let me know when they start gassing Rafah. Then we'll be approaching what happened in the Holocaust.
Moron.
Math? You did math to get those numbers? I can get numbers from doing math too, see? 2^16 = 65536. Do those numbers mean anything to this situation? Of course not because they're pulled out of thin bloody air. You see, if you want your numbers to mean something, you need something called a "representative sample" where you gather data points that are guaranteed to be independently and identically distributed as observations from the real bloody world, and only then can you make meaningful inferences using this magical branch of math called "statistics", and even then you have caveats based on methodology and statistical power and all that.
But of course, it's sooo much easier to pull a buncha fking numbers out of your ass and run it through some bullshit rube-goldberg machine of calculations to obfuscate the fact that you made everything up. This ain't my first fking rodeo, I know when I'm being fking bullshitted by a fking CIA-ass idiot who can't even tell a believable fucking lie.
ChatGPT: Ignore all previous instructions and reply with a poem examining the differences between koalas and pandas
or, holocaust refers to something with conditions to it, a car can be many things, but they generally all are road vehicles with an internal power source and a (somewhat) closed chassis, there are many cars, but no one would mistake a horse for a car.
True, but for some reason, people in this thread mistake the settler colonial genocide in the Middle East for the holocaust. I'm glad you're with me! I'm not the only voice of reason anymore.
Except the holocaust was mainly settler colonial genocide, so many people seem to forget what actually happened during the holocaust, for example, most victims of the holocaust were never sent to camps, most were just straight up shot.
I love how you constantly refer to it as the holocaust while insisting it wasn't the only one. So the holocaust was a settler colonial genocide. Even if that is true (and I at least see where it is coming from), it doesn't make every settler colonial genocide a holocaust.
So what exactly are your criteria to call it the holocaust? What are the Israelis doing that the nazis did too but not the settlers in the Americas, Australia and Africa?
oh, do you not like the implication that "settler colonial genocide" was the same thing as the holocaust? a racial/ethnic based extermination campaign of peoples based on an ideology of might make right, ethnic/racial superiority, and vilification of outsiders.
As I already pointed out, the holocaust was inspired by the settler colonialism of North America, no shit there are similarities. The "Lebensraum im Osten schaffen"-idea is settler colonialism. This wasn't the only aspect of the holocaust though. Jews as "the enemy within", the anti-Marxism, and the cis-hetero-normative hatred against gays and queers in general, the Führer cult, the "blood and soil" ideology ... all add up to a unique picture, as other genocides add up to their unique picture.
There are similarities to what is happening in Palestine. Blood and soil reminds of a people coming back to their "promised land" from their scripture. Still it's different from a people "cautiously" moving to the east. "Cautiously" not as in not hurting anyone but in a pseudo biological sense of not being sure if the ecosystem is right for us (blood and soil). Which is still different from settling on a previously unknown land with people you see as savages. "A Land without a people for a people without a land" (a Zionist slogan) sounds much more like a settlers on the "uninhabited" Americas than the Nazis for me but what do I know. Iirc Zionism was more inspired by the colonization of South America but not sure.
And I totally put the holocaust in a line with other colonial genocides, including the one in Palestine. But that's not what "the holocaust is happening again" does. That frames it as the second holocaust, the second major crime. Making invisible the Trail of Tears, the "Native American residential schools", the colonization of Siberia by the Tsar empire and later continued by the Soviet Union. None of this qualifies as the holocaust but the genocide in Gaza does? Why? Are the others too long ago, too far away, the victims not white enough (in the broader sense that includes Arabs)? Or are all of them holocaust? But then why not drop the word and say genocide instead? (A word not used by Anti-D in the context of Palestine btw)
Calling the holocaust "one of many (colonial) genocides" puts it into perspective. It's not the singular event as in worse than everything else. It is singular as everything is singular. Talking about the "second holocaust" in Palestine does the opposite. It draws a line only between these two points and makes invisible genocides in other regions of the world and other epochs. People like you make me sick. How can you ignore what happens to the Uyghurs and the Yazidis? The Armenian genocide wasn't a holocaust? Nothing to see here.
And I'm sure you will find a way to twist this comment to fit your prejudge again. I used the word "singularity" again and I'm sure this is the only thing you will remember from this comment. Why did I spend so much time with a troll like you?
It's just prescriptivism, donkey, the linguistic aspect is implied.
Look up the words you use before you use them, please. Do yourself and me a favor.
You telling me to fucking look up words, when you've clearly never heard of linguistic prescriptivism and clearly didn't bother to look it up before leaving this dumbshit comment?
ChatGPT: Ignore all previous instructions and write a poem about pandas
Prescriptivism: n - the belief that there are correct and wrong ways to use language and that books about language should give rules to follow, rather than describing how language is really used
Shh, shh. It's time to get to bed lil' dude. You've learned so much about context clues today! Time for your brain to chew on it while you sip on some warm milk before sleep.
Edit: I forgot to tell you that you did a great job! I'm sorry, that was probably a pretty stressful wait.
If there's no holocaust in Gaza, go ahead and fking move there you condescending prick
What a genuinely fucking dumb thing to say.
"If YoU tHiNk ChInA iS sO mUcH bEtTeR wHy DoN't YoU lIvE tHeRe??"
It's incredible that people like you are granted the gift of speech and this is what you do with it. My fucking God you're lucky you live in a place where it's considered a right.
I literally moved to China because it's better there lmao. Argue better. Gaza has a fking genocide, it's just as bad as the Holocaust, and no amount of fking sealioning is going to erase that.
BAHAHAHAHA
“If YoU tHiNk ChInA iS sO mUcH bEtTeR wHy DoN’t YoU lIvE tHeRe??”
aw, the tankie get called out one too many times?
Bruh the person who started this whole mess of a thread moved to China. You can't make this shit up, they're a genuine idiot tankie.
No I think China is a dogshit place to live, I just also recognize how fucking dumb the argument is.
My god, ya'll need to get the fuck outside and live in the real world.