So I'm getting kind of annoyed at the Ke$ha post I see everyone on my dash reblogging.
I think y’all might need a reminder about why I, and other, have a very valid reason to dislike her. It honestly has nothing to do with her music (which just isn’t in my wheelhouse) or her intelligence (she is actually really intelligent). No use in having much more exposition so let’s get into it:
Ok, I’m going to need people to understand that buddhism is not perfect and it HAS killed people (my people). It’s really starting to become a trigger for me when people say ignorant shit like how “Buddhists don’t kill” when my people have been fucking butchered by them.
I can’t type anymore. I’m shaking.
Tumblr stays writing these long-ass, pseudo-intellectual paragraphs about obvious shit that everyone knows. Yes, Hitler was a homo sapien who breathed air and had emotions. And maybe a vegetarian and some other shit but who really gives a fuck? Why are you going out of your way to humanize a mass murderer? Unless you’re really in 6th grade with a 30 Seconds to Mars hoodie on, I’ma need y’all to grow up, Tumblr. Seriously.
Squealer and the Finale; a discussion about SSY's ending and racism.
The previous week’s finale of Shinsekai was nothing short of excellent, wrapping up many themes and validating characterization of our main protagonist as well as setting up a horrific but also hopeful edge for the future. What probably made this finale the most distinctive, however, was its thinly veiled meta on oppression and racism, which really brings up some great points that I wanted to discuss.
That said, there is no arguing that the six million number is ABSOLUTELY the wrong one to use. Like, if you are not Ashkenazi Jewish and you use that number in any context, ever, at all, I will fucking find you. The obsession with Jewish deaths and the erasure of the suffering of other peoples ESPECIALLY Rromani people is not. fucking. okay.
We use these 6 million/ 11 million numbers because we simply do not have a way of knowing what the actual numbers are. Using these numbers is a way of acknowledging the “tip-of-the-iceberg”ness of the Holocaust NOT of saying “this is all the people who died, end of discussion.”
I read names from an 11 million book for more than an hour and I didn’t see a single numberless name ie. it only counted concentration camp deaths. And when it came out earlier this year that there were a lot more camps than originally thought, none of the Jewish people I know were surprised at all. But we still don’t know the toll from those.
Like, acknowledge that these are the wrong numbers, but understand why we use them. And don’t use the fact that we use the wrong numbers to deny our right to commemorate our dead.
re: Jenny Hyun (TW: genocide, racism)
Hey, Asian people who are telling everyone else to calm down?
I don’t want to appropriate anger here, so I’m going to lay out the facts as dispassionately as possible:
- Jenny Hyun called for the genocide of black people. Even if you understand where she’s coming from and why her tirade was sparked off in the first place, there is no excuse for wishing genocide on any race. It is a monstrous thing to say. It is indefensible.
- Frankly, if you understand where she’s coming from, you must know a lot of it stems from a grossly racist place. There is no excuse for that either.
- Of course black people are hurt and angry. They have been told that they are less than human, that they deserve to be exterminated purely based on the colour of their skin and the awful stereotypes associated with that.
- If they are lashing out, it is for good reason. Telling them to stifle that anger is telling them to stifle their own hurt. It is telling them to take their anger somewhere else so it doesn’t discomfit you. Maybe you didn’t intend for that, but that’s what it looks like.
- It is not for us to tell them what to do with their anger.
- It is not for us to tell them what to do with their anger.
- So you should stop. Now.
I can't follow you if you're reblogging images of mutilated and/or severely burned torture victims, especially when those victims are PoC without tagging, TWing, or putting the shit under a cut
happening a long time ago doesn’t matter
being in black and white doesn’t matter
being a drawing or painting or some other version other than a photograph doesn’t matter
that shit is all levels of fucked up
and it fucks me up to see it come across my dash
I am not so numb that the atrocities that continued to be perpetuated against my people has no fucking psychological and emotional impact on me.
someone asked me my favourite historian a few days ago and since i can’t find the ask anywhere, i’m answering it here: ian kershaw, probably the word’s most eminent historian/historiographer of the nazi state
if, for nothing else, because: i saw him speak at a conference for high school children in 2006, and his current area of research is attempting to prove that despite german claims after the war had ended, up to 90% of the german people knew about the holocaust (or knew ‘enough’) and didn’t do anything about it. (he is not remotely sympathetic to these people.)
his book ‘the hitler myth’ is an absolutely terrifying examination of how the nazis were the first dictatorship to ever use contemporary propaganda, and it’s a book absolutely everyone should read.
I've noticed that the only parts of history taught in school (including PoC) are the instances where Europeans interfere: Nothing about Native American civilization is taught until before Christopher Columbus discovered it, Africa before colonization and slavery, or anything about Asia which leads young PoC to wonder if there people had actually anything to do with world history outside of being raped, killed and stolen from
We’re all crying with you.
First I want to link to a post that came across my dash recently, because I’m responding to it, and to similar posts here. I’m not reblogging it, because this is something that is really important to me, and that post has gotten long, and I don’t want people to just ignore everything I’m saying because they have to scroll through all that bullshit first. The post is here. For those who don’t want to read/look at it, it shows a Hitler flirting with the woman filming him, and the text underneath goes on for a while with a lot of people talking, but after the description starts with
“I don’t know how this makes me feel”
“It makes me feel very uncomfortable
“You know what’s so uncomfortable about this? It shows that perhaps one of the most evil men in history, was a human being.”
People go on to discuss how when you see someone screaming at crowds it’s easy to see how they’re evil, but he was also nice sometimes.
It’s funny how no one seems to have considered where this footage came from or what its purpose might have been. Oddly enough, the Nazis also realized that they could not get the kind of support they needed if their people only ever saw their leader screaming and being military. This is Nazi propaganda designed to humanize HItler and make people less likely to believe any news they heard about the atrocities he and his followers were committing. When you look at this and say, ‘wow, Hitler wasn’t as evil as he was made out to be’, you are literally falling for Nazi propaganda.
We are reminded by these helpful folks that Hitler wasn’t evil for evil’s sake, but that instead he did it for reasons like those he cited at a dinner with a bunch of heads of state where others ordered meals as impressive as they could come up with and he ordered something simple, which he explained saying
“I don’t smoke when my people cannot smoke, and I cannot eat when my people are going hungry.”
There is even someone who argues that
“Also he might have been on meth (as medicine) during the entire war so he made extreme decisions kind of really quickly”
And somehow that makes it defensible? But you know what? A lot of people have done drugs without ordering the slaughter of millions. I don’t have to excuse him for that, not when the language I should speak disappeared because my great-grandparent immigrants like so many others tried to assimilate as fast as possible so that they would be less obviously Jewish, and Adolf Hitler slaughter those who had not emigrated. I do not owe this man forgiveness, and I will never give it to him, because he does not deserve it.
And for all of your arguments about how much he cared about his people? Within Germany alone, leaving aside Austria etc, there were 4,400,000 military deaths and from 1,100,000 to 2,500,000 civilian deaths. Hitler’s ambitions caused the death of between 7.9 and 10 percent of the population of Germany. Not a fantastic savior in that sense.
That leaves aside the aproximately eleven million Jews, Roma, gays, mentally ill, physically disabled, etc who were slaughtered in the death camps and concentration camps, not to mention the military deaths of other nations.
And here’s the other thing about falling for this propaganda. I know that it’s convincing in its way. I get that. Obviously it inspired entire nations to allow horrors to be perpetrated. But those people didn’t have the advantages that we do. They did not know what Hitler was doing in the same way that we, who can see piles of childrens’ shoes, and who must know, looking at them, that the children who once wore them were slaughtered in chambers filled with gas which pushed out the oxygen so that they suffocated know.
Here’s the thing. I guess that if they holocaust and the war didn’t affect you personally, maybe you see the world differently. After all, lots of people die in wars, and if it isn’t your culture that Hitler tried to wipe off the earth then it isn’t like you lost any of your culture. And if you aren’t Jewish, or in one of the other groups the Nazis targeted (I happen to hit three of them; I am Jewish, gay, and have a mental disability) then you probably don’t get reminded of those attempts regularly when people continue to discriminate against you. So maybe you can see this, and for you, the idea that he might have made his decisions very quickly is enough for you. They were mistakes, right, and everyone makes those.
But when you say this stuff, what I see is people saying that, well, we have to consider Hitler’s feelings, not so that we can understand his motivations and the historical conditions that caused this to stop it from ever being repeated, but because Hitler, who was really a nice guy, when you got past all that genocide and murder and slaughter of children so young they had never even fasted on Yom Kippur deserves our sympathy because he is so unfairly demonized.
You know what? It’s not unfair.
You told us to call out your ignorance so here it is: it made you look like a fucking fool when you said Armenians are middle eastern.
This is fun because just the other night my dad, my brothers, and I (ya know, actual Armenians) were debating this exact thing.
The arguments that came up were:
- Maps are mostly just a construct especially when taking culture into account.
- Taking history into account including the division of the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide
- The identities of Armenians within Armenia
1. Culturally, Armenia shares a lot of similarities to the Middle East. Including food, music, social habits, and art. What makes Armenia unique is that they have their own language and the vast majority of Armenians are Christians.
2. The ottoman empire was crumbling and Turks were trying to make the empire Turkish and in doing so tried to purify the land by systematically executing all Armenians. Armenians fled to countries in the middle east and Europe. So for those Armenians how do you define what they are? I’ve seen many Armenians consider themselves Europeans and many consider themselves Middle Eastern for that exact reason: because history has made their culture ambiguous.
3. Within Armenia, Russian Armenians tend to consider themselves European while western Armenians are more likely to consider themselves Middle Eastern.
That’s what we talked about and we still have no idea whether or not Armenians are middle eastern or not. It seems so subjective, doesn’t it?
Anyway, I know you came into my inbox having looked up Armenia on a map and saw that it wasn’t included in the middle east and thought you’d use that to call out my ignorance.
I’ve said before, I’ve seen both.
Here’s a google map that excludes Armenia from the middle east.
Here’s a description on the CIA website that says Armenia is part of the middle east.
So there you have it.
Things I'd Like to Say
Just because you disagree with someone or think something is slightly inconvenient, doesn’t mean the person causing that to happen should be compared to Hitler.
If you don’t like someone’s politics, it’s not right to compare them to Hitler.
No one is suggesting a gun ban. We are suggesting simple regulations, like the way the First Amendment has regulations (like hate speech, libel, and slander).
The Founding Fathers also saw slaves as 3/5 of a person and didn’t allow women to vote. Quoting them won’t win you any argument points.
Neither will comparing Obama to Hitler.
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” makes sense at first, until you realize how much easier it is to kill people when a person has a gun.
Yes, society is partly to blame in how we treat people, masculinity, mental health issues, etc, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t regulate who gets to have a firearm.
No, it’s not violent video games or heavy metal that caused this to happen.
Unless a person has committed mass-genocide, don’t use the Holocaust or Hitler as a means of comparison.
