this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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GenZedong
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As I was doing research on the Third Reich’s massacres of mentally ill Jews, it finally occurred to me that what I am effectively doing is putting a puzzle together: the Shoah is linked to the extermination of Native Americans, the massacres of the OvaHerero and Namibians, the slaughter of the Armenians, Fascist Italy’s exploits in Africa, mediaeval anti‐Judaism, Spartan ableism, Anglo‐American eugenics, violence against German communists, violence against Soviet POWs… I should have realised it sooner. The pieces are all meant to fit together.
Generally I don’t write my anecdotes or articles with anybody other than antifascists in mind, but I would be most delighted if they help the Jewish community in particular make sense of the tragedy that befell their relatives. That is when I can be certain that my efforts have been worthwhile.
Get ready to be called an anti-Semite and holocaust denier. Point of the Holocaust/Shoah narrative is that it is a unique event in human history and Jewish people are unique victims of it, comparing it to other events (no matter how similar or despite having a larger death toll) is considered Holocaust denial.
Bashar Al-Assad was called an anti-semite and hater of Jews:
What did Assad say?
He never denied lots of Jews were killed (he'd probably say it was in the millions himself), he has a problem with the number "6 million".
"there was no specific method of torture or killing specific to the Jews" is an anti-semitic statement because it doesn't recognise Jewish suffering as unique.
Even if the whole Zyklon-B showers/gas chambers thing is made up, and even if the Holocaust denialists are right when they say "only" 400k-1.5million Jews were killed due to malnourishment/disease/conditions, we still have hard proof of: 1) Einsatzgruppen genociding Slavs and Jews in Eastern Europe, 2) Jews were stripped of belongings, property, rights and put into concentration camps, 3) Germany did want to clear Eastern Europe of people to make Lebensraum and keep lots of Slavs as slaves for the reich, 4) Germany did attack all of Europe and want to turn it all fascist and extinguish any culture/ethnicity not compatible with it, 5) Germany did wish to expel all Jews and remove them from German society (along with other undesirables), and so on.
Even a hundred dead for racist reasons is too many. Method of killing os irrelevant too. Whether Nazis killed millions of Jews and other people with bullets, malnourishment, bad treatment, gas, kind words, hugs... it doesn't matter, Nazis killed a bunch of people. But I guess it is jmportant we know they killed differently than other European/colonial powers who also killed millions.
The Nazis should obviously be opposed (and many have opposed them even before they started genociding) so what are possible motivations for making up horror stories about them? I remember being told in the 90s Nazis made soap out of Jews and stuffed coats with their hair.
One I could think of is that the US had "internment camps" for Japanese people. Every Japanese person in the US was sent to a concentration camp. What makes US camps different than German ones? No systemic extermination of course!
Another extermination camp I can think of is Jasenovac, where people were killed by axes, saws, hammers, knives... handheld weapons. So the argument that Nazis used Zyklon-B so that their soldiers wouldn't have to actually kill people with their bare hands and not fuck themselves up mentally makes sense, with Jewish inmates responsible for dragging away the bodies.
If I were you, I wouldn't touch the issue with a ten-foot pole. You either have to accept the main ADL narrative where the Jews have suffered uniquely and therefore deserve special privileges on the world stage, or you don't agree with it and say Jews have been (and in some places continue to be) oppressed based on their religion and heritage, much like many people have been throughout history and be called an anti-semite for trivialising the plight of the Jews.
This is a topic where reason can't win, even discussing the topic gets you labeled an anti-semite. Questioning a single aspect of the narrative is akin to denying the whole thing.
Alright, I can't agree with what you are saying.
It's one thing to say how the Holocaust is linked to a variety of other atrocities committed by fascists and imperialists, but it honestly sounds like you're trying to say that downplaying the Holocaust isn't that bad.
As Communists, we are interested in the truth. This means we have to accept well-documented facts such as the Earth being round, humans originating with evolution, and, in this case, the numbers of Jews killed during the Holocaust and the methods used. And what makes denying this unique is that it's most often done with malicious intent, far more so than saying that the Earth is flat or that the Biblical creation story or similar stories are true.
Although Assad gets our critical support for fighting against imperialism, this does not mean we have to condone everything he's done, including the speech you mentioned.
Our hatred for Zionism and for imperialism does not mean we have to give a single bone to those who downplay or outright deny the Holocaust and other well-documented genocides.
Why does it sound like that to you?
Genocide wasn't invented by Hitler. It was "industrial" in a sense that technology from the industrial age was used and that it happened on a large geographic area, so it was different in those ways.
Nazis killed millions of Jews and Slavs (and some others). Turks genocided millions of Armenians by forcing them into the desert. Britain starved millions of Indians. England killed millions of Irish. Europeans killed millions of indigenous people in the Americas and millions more in Africa (Belgium is responsible for some 10 million deaths in Congo alone).
Why single one of those out as the worst?
Westerners only single out the Jewish genocide because 😱 they were white! None of the other genocided peoples are white, so it's OK.