this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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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
You called Gaza a nation. You are an idiot.
Know your place.
Too dumb to actually reason about anything, this guy resorts to vocabulary bullshit once again and uses it as a substitute for critical thinking
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?