#Holocaust Remembrance

[notaplaceofhonour]

An Open Letter Regarding the Holocaust Inversion & Blood Libel of the “Average Pace” Meme:

The person who shared the screenshotted post deleted it after I sent the following message. I truly believe they shared it out of ignorance & not malice; I cannot say the same of OP who created the graphic. I am sharing my deconstruction of its rhetoric & imagery here as a learning opportunity:

Nothing justifies the injustices Palestinians have faced, and what Netanyahu is doing is vile. No country should be above criticism, nor its leaders above condemnation, but this is not that.

What people like OP are doing is weaponizing legitimate atrocities to spread the antisemitic narratives of Holocaust Inversion (an offshoot of Holocaust Revision & Denial that claims “The new Nazis are Jews”) and Blood Libel.

And no, the fact that these libels are made in criticism of Israel does not absolve them of being antisemitic narratives that predate the existence of the State of Israel. As if to hammer in that point, that is not the flag of Israel that the creator of this agitprop decided to equate to the Swastika—that is the Magen David. That’s just the symbol for Judaism.

Worse, to impose the Magen David over images of blood (especially what is implicitly the blood of children) is a direct invocation of Blood Libel, the antisemitic accusation that Jewish leaders thirst for the blood of children. This libel has incited the mass slaughter of Jews since long before the Shoah, and is still being used to this day to incite violence against Jews through Qanon & accusations that Israelis drink & bathe in Palestinian blood.

And if it truly weren’t about the Jewishness of Israel, why would OP pick the Shoah specifically? There have been countless other mass killings in the world, many with much greater resemblance to Israel/Palestine than Jews in Nazi Germany (see: ethnic cleansings in Liberia & India/Pakistan for instance). Meanwhile, the only things The Shoah/WWII and Israel-Palestine have in common is people dying and Jews being present. So why specifically invoke the slaughter of Jews to criticize Israel if it is not about invoking the Jewishness of Israel?

That doesn’t even get into how cherrypicked those numbers are to the point the exact same “average pace” metric could easily be used (and in fact is, by the German far-right) to present the Bombing of Dresden by the Allies—a campaign that killed more than 25,000 German civilians in 72 hours in an area much bigger & less densely populated than Gaza with a fraction of the bombs that Israel has used—as comparable to the death camps.

This rhetoric does not aid Palestinians in any way. In fact it drags the movement down by providing ammunition that can be used to paint all criticism of Israel as antisemitic & give people who just hate Palestinians the casus belli they need to shut it down. The only thing it accomplishes is hurting Jews; it twists the knife in the wounds left in our community, it trivializes the Shoah by universalizing it or presenting it as “the lesser of two evils”, and it incites violence by equating Jews to Nazis.

[cleoselene]

[thebrightestwitchofherage]

Today is the international holocaust Remembrance eve.

To those who say “I’m not antisemitic, I’m anti Zionist” .I wish that were true, but it’s not.

The denial of the events of October 7th and the terror Israelis have always faced , has reminded many of holocaust denial. Which by the way, is also on the rise right now.

Hell, holocaust survivors who survived October 7th as well have compared the two.

I can’t believe I have to say this - comparing Israel’s actions to the Nazis’ is incredibly vile and ignorant. It a lazy comparison and I cannot stress it enough how different these are. Educate yourself.

Moreover,I’ve said it before, today, antisemitism is rebranded as anti Zionism. since the October 7th attacks/ Israeli Hamas war has started the following things have happened:

According to a recent survey conducted by CNN,73% of Jewish Americans college students have “expressed or seen antisemitism since the start of the school year “. Jewish students are terrified and I don’t blame them at all, when people are chanting “globalise the intifadas “.

-Antisemitic rates and antisemitic based crimes rates have gone up by hundreds-thousands of precedents (depending on the country).

-Swatikas or stars of David are drawn on Jewish homes. “Hitler was right” was trending multiple times ffs . Suddenly it’s ok to say that (or at least ignored). Suddenly , antisemitic stereotypes and antisemitic Blood libels are popping up. This is not a coincidence, and You cant deny it.

Whether you support them or not is another matter, and idk like to believe you don’t. If you see them, don’t jump on the bandwagon. Think about the sources of what you’re reading or hearing.

Jewish and Israeli people are constantly harassed, myself included. This has got to a point that as an Israeli jewish woman the current travel ban / recommendation for me are literally the entire world.

We are all advised to not wear Jewish symbols or speak Hebrew loudly. We’ve always done this but this time it’s different.

I will not let that be my reality anymore. This is not what my great grandparents legacy should be. In a way, I’m glad they’re not here to see this.

——

There are so many other examples for this concerning phenomenon. I could go on about how this phenomenon is caused by antisemitism and ignorance. Honestly, I just don’t want to see anymore hate today. You can read them yourself.

The main takeaway should be that You can wish for a better future for the Palestinian people without harassing or hating jews . Without demonising Israelis.

עם ישראל חי🫶🇮🇱✡️

Ps- Every time I post something about antisemitism/ the difficulties of being Israeli or Jewish nowadays, I get called “deluded” , “whiny”, or “self victimising “. If you fail to see how this is not any of these- you’re gonna get blocked.

[lostthenfoundmyself]

It is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Today marks 79 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 27th, 1945.

I was born after the turn of the century. The Holocaust sometimes seems like it is long in the past. So I’m taking today to really think about how it wasn’t that long ago. 79 years. There are still Holocaust survivors alive today.

As the years go by and fewer and fewer survivors remain, the Holocaust becomes easier and easier to forget. But we must not forget. We can’t let this fade into a distant memory. We need to listen to the remaining survivors, read their words, and remember their stories. We need to understand the Holocaust not as dry events in a history textbook but as a visceral and horrifying reality that people lived and died through. In the words of Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor:

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

[simplysiriuslyjoking]

Holocaust:

No matter what context. No matter what political agenda you are shouting, no matter what you bloody think:

DO. NOT. DARE. USE. OUR. HISTORICAL. HORROR. TRAUMA. FOR. YOUR. POLITICAL. AGENDA.

Those of you who say clearly you are antizionist but hey remember how terrible the holocaust was, are contradicting yourselves so much.

Israel is Jews. Jews are Israel. Israel is the home we went back to after the Holocaust. The only place Jews can be Jews.

I have no patience anymore for morons who don't know basic history or base their facts on propaganda by the Palestinian side. Come to Israel. See how arabs live here.

No discussion. You will be blocked.

[jidysz]

Fragment of Ghetto wall, Sienna street, Warsaw, Poland

"In the period from Nov 15, 1940 to Nov 30, 1941 this wall marked the limit of The Ghetto"

"A brick from this place is in the Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem"

Ghetto Enlave

"A place dedicated to the memory of Jews tortured and murdered in 1940-1943 by the German occupant"

[eretzyisrael]

Here is a page from ‘The Book of Names of Holocaust Victims’. The Book features the alphabetically arranged names of 4,800,000 Holocaust victims currently documented. At the end of the Book there are blank pages symbolizing the more than 1 million identities yet to be recovered.

Standing at 6.56 feet tall, 3.3 feet wide and 26.45 feet long, the Book has a strip of light runs the length of the inside, illuminating the memory of the Jewish men, women children murdered during the Holocaust.

If you look closely in this photo, you will find Anne Frank’s name (‘Frank, Anneliese Anne Marie’), surrounded by various individuals, each with their own story, their own family and personal history.

Beginning on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, The Book of Names will be on display in New York at the UN, in partnership with Yad Vashem: World Holocaust Center, Jerusalem.

Humans of Judaism

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Robert F. Graboyes

Published: Jan 28, 2024

On this, the 79th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Holocaust Remembrance industry stands as a colossal failure. Holocaust Remembrance Day, it turns out, successfully transfixed eyes on the rear-view mirror and diverted attention from the dangers 10 feet in front of us. And, truth be told, the rear-view mirror is growing a bit foggy, as well. Less than a century ago, the leading intellectuals of Germany—the most highly educated nation on earth—initiated, participated in, or acquiesced to mass murder on a previously unimaginable scale. And only weeks ago, intellectuals in America, Europe, and elsewhere waxed lyrical over the rape, torture, mutilation, murder, beheading, and kidnapping of innocent Jews. 

An important parallel underlies both historical episodes. Both Hitler and Hamas were the cancerous outgrowths of respectable and sometimes altruistic intellectual movements that saw individuals as nothing more than avatars of demographic groups, defined by immutable characteristics. At my own Substack, Bastiat’s Window, I’ve written of this in “The Briar and the Rose,” “Intellectual Tyrants Beget True Believers,” and “Zola, Weiss, and J'Accuse...! 2023.”

A century ago, eugenics provided the unquestioned and unquestionable foundation for academic writing and public policy. Eugenics preached a world of predestination, where an individual’s worth was irrevocably determined at birth by race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, economic status, and family history. No one could escape his or her essentialist destiny by dint of action, accomplishment, or character. Eugenics began as parlor conversation among well-born, well-educated, often well-meaning British academics. Then, it jumped the Atlantic and gave rise to a sexual sterilization machine in America—enabled by a debauched Supreme Court. Finally, it leaped back to Europe, where it metastasized into the Holocaust. 

In our time, the equivalent academic tendency is one that travels under many names—diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI); critical race theory (CRT); antiracism; white fragility; intersectionality; social justice; anticolonialism; social and emotional learning; progressivism; safetyism; critical social justice; identity Marxism; and (primarily to its denigrators) “wokeness.” The central connective tenet in all of this is something called “equity”—which does not in any way resemble any traditional definition of the word. 

A note on nomenclature: “equitism”

Writers like Thomas Klingenstein on the right, Freddie DeBoer on the left, and Bari Weiss in the center decry the lack of a consistent name for this intellectual and activist movement. I use the term “equitism” here and suggest it to others. Unlike “equity,” “equitism” offers no ambiguity of meaning. Unlike, say “the equity agenda,” “equitism” is a single word. Advocates of this philosophy often present “equity” as a substitute for “equality,” so “equitism” is parallel to “egalitarianism.” Unlike “woke,” “equitism” is not an insult or pejorative, and the web shows that a few advocates have used the term to describe themselves. I’ll use the term below for simplicity and clarity. 

Equitism as echo of eugenics

Like eugenics a century earlier, equitism presumes that demography is destiny, with some demographic groups imperiled by the immutable malignities of other groups. This often manifests itself as a Manichaean “oppressor/oppressed” dichotomy across demographic categories. Intersectionality and other frameworks array groups along a spectrum between these polar opposites. In its most extreme manifestation, this weltanschauung justifies horrific punishment of perceived “oppressors.” Hence, the pro-Hamas marchers proclaiming “by any means necessary”—which presumably includes baking babies to death in ovens, tying parents to children and immolating them together, raping young girls till their pelvises shatter, beheading children in front of their parents, and visiting all manner of depravities upon elderly Holocaust survivors—as long as they are Israelis and Israelis are classified as oppressors.

Clearly, those Western professors celebrating Hamas have not absorbed whatever lessons that Holocaust Museums were designed to impart. To name one category of protestors, LGBTQ+ Jews marching for Hamas seem not to understand the message of Martin Niemöller. The most enthusiastic practitioners of Holocaust Remembrance, unfortunately, seem to be the members of Hamas, who learned the lessons of those years all too well. It should noted that David Patterson’s 2022 scholarly work, Judaism, Antisemitism, and Holocaust: Making the Connections, documents Hamas’s literal organizational and philosophical links to Hitler’s Nazis. 

The central feature of both the Holocaust and of Hamas’s slaughter is that once one abandons the sanctity of individuals and considers only the presumed virtues and vices of demographic groups, one is free to attack those deemed unvirtuous in any way. 

Furthermore, equitism, like eugenics, can anesthetize those who do not share the murderous intentions of the Nazis or Hamas. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been open for 31 years, but its mission clearly failed to educate the Ivy League presidents who hemmed and hawed and equivocated over questions of whether calls for genocide against Jews qualified as protected speech on the same campuses where subjectively discerned microaggressions or misuse of preferred pronouns are grounds for ostracism and punishment. 

Who wants to contradict something called “social justice” or “diversity” or “equity?” The anesthetic effect seems to have impacted even the Holocaust museums themselves. At Commentary magazine, Seth Mandel asked, “Why Are Holocaust Museums Cowering in Silence?” 

Corrosion begins in microscopic proportions

The most important lesson for Holocaust Remembrance comes from Dr. Leo Alexander’s simple, chilling statement that “corrosion begins in microscopic proportions.” Alexander, an American psychiatrist, neurologist, educator, and author, of Austrian-Jewish origin, was a key medical advisor during the Nuremberg Trials. He wrote part of the Nuremberg Code, which provides legal and ethical principles for scientific experiment on humans, and discovered that German doctors didn’t fail to stop the Nazis’ program of genocide and barbaric medical experimentation. Rather, he discovered they didn’t do more to stop the horrors because they were instrumental in initiating them. In a 2018 article on this subject, I argued that:

German doctors enthusiastically volunteered for [service] to, and leadership within, the Third Reich. Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess declared Nazism ‘nothing but applied biology,’ and many German doctors apparently agreed.” Collectively, they decided that medicine’s primary purpose was to build “an economically productive populace,” a concept that “opened the floodgates for atrocities.” 

By contrast, Alexander found that Dutch physicians following the Nazi conquest of the Netherlands, unanimously rejected this assumption and viewed their role as healing and comforting the sick and dying. Even when threatened with punishment and death, “humility assured that no Dutch doctors participated in the Holocaust.

German doctors, besotted with eugenics, gladly segmented society by ethnicity, by disabilities, by sexuality, and so forth. And once they began thinking of groups (e.g., productive versus nonproductive races), rather than of individuals, then they were free to commit atrocities in good conscience—or at least to acquiesce in the atrocities committed by others. The same dynamic plays out today on the campuses of America or the streets of London and Paris and Sydney.  

Alexander’s work is described in James A. Maccaro’s brief 1997 article “From Small Beginnings: The Road to Genocide.” Alexander’s full paper is his 1948 New England Journal of Medicine report on “Medical Science Under Dictatorship.” A century ago, the oxidants that began society’s corrosion lay in eugenics. Today, the oxidants lie in equitism. 

In the early 20th century, eugenics was almost universally accepted by academicians, politicians, doctors, the general public, and celebrities. Opposing eugenics put one’s career and friendships in peril. One of the few public intellectuals to oppose this madness was the British writer G. K. Chesterton, author of Eugenics and Other Evils (1922). Chesterton understood better than anyone that evil comes most often not from evil people, but rather from good people with unmoored ethics. In 1908, he wrote:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is a worthy project, but not if it is solely backward-looking. Looking for Nazis in 2024 is a futile endeavor. Scanning the horizon in front of us for those with parallel intent is far more urgent and challenging. 

As goes the aphorism, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

[rhymeswithfart]

Art, Culture, Censorship, and Palestine

I'm late in posting this, but from Democracy Now, interviews with three important cultural workers, an artist and two writers, who are being censored. Samia Halaby, Marione Ingram, and Masha Gessen.

"We spend the hour looking at how artists, writers and other cultural workers in the United States and Europe are facing a growing backlash after expressing solidarity for Palestine. We begin with one of these "canceled" cultural workers: renowned Palestinian American artist Samia Halaby, whose first U.S. retrospective was canceled by her graduate alma mater, Indiana University, after she criticized Israel's bombardment of Gaza. The school’s provost said this week the show would have been a "lightning rod" that carried a "risk of violence." Halaby expresses her shock and disappointment at the betrayal of "academic freedom" evidenced by the decision. "The administration has lost sight of their responsibility to the community, to the students that are there," she says, and adds, "This is much larger than I am," citing the suppression of pro-Palestine student activism around the country and calling it "a kind of attempt at mind control.""

"We are joined by 88-year-old Jewish German American Marione Ingram, who describes how her scheduled speaking tour in Hamburg -- the city she fled in the Holocaust -- was "postponed" this month amid a wider backlash against those speaking out against Israel's assault on Gaza. Ingram has been protesting for months outside the White House calling for a ceasefire, and characterizes U.S. and German pro-Israel policy as "disturbing" and "frightening." As a survivor of the Holocaust, Ingram says, "My childhood was spent in the first 10 years much the same way as the children of Gaza. I know exactly what they're going through. I know exactly how they're feeling." She argues "it should be an absolute standstill of all governments that you are told over 10,000 children are being murdered. There is no excuse for that.""

"We speak with the acclaimed Russian American writer Masha Gessen, whose latest article for The New Yorker looks at the politics of Holocaust commemoration in Europe. Gessen was scheduled to receive the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize in Germany on December 15, but the ceremony was postponed after some award sponsors withdrew support over Gessen's comparison in the article of Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. A smaller award ceremony is set for Saturday. Gessen says Germany's culture of learning about and atoning for the sins of the Nazi regime has morphed into steadfast support for the state of Israel despite its actions, while banning most forms of pro-Palestinian solidarity as part of a flawed effort to fight antisemitism. The cornerstone of this form of "memory politics" is that "you can't compare the Holocaust to anything," says Gessen. "My argument is that in order to learn from history, we have to compare.""

[kittenninja14]

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Just wanted to share this piece of art before the day ended.

May we never forget the lives lost to this cruel part of history... To all the heroes we know and might never know... your sacrifice will never be forgotten.

To all of y'all who have family who have been through this horrific event... we remember them all.

The last of the survivors of this horrific event are dying off... let not their stories die along with them. Let us keep them and their stories close to our hearts forever.

https://kittenninja14.tumblr.com/post/731916269075480576/hey-yall-i-just-found-this-incredible-video-and

[girlactionfigure]

The soldiers in the bottom of the picture are the grandchildren of the Holocaust survivors above. We won.

Source: facebook.com

[raffaellopalandri]

We Remember

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

[sassytail]

So since today is international holocaust Remembrance Day I’m going to tell a story my grandmother told me when I visited her last week.

She grew up in an interfaith family. The nazis didn’t get around to interfaith families in the Netherlands. So only her father went to the camps.

He wasn’t in a death camp though. The camp he was in was a labor camp, building the German Phillips lightbulb factory. (Yes that Phillips. The company that makes Lightbulbs)

There he met a contractor who he paid some money to bring a letter to his wife in Amsterdam. My grandmother described her mother very carefully ripping out the stitches of the man’s jacket lapels, where her husband had hidden this letter to her.

I believe the man passed several notes between my great grandmother and great grandfather this way.

I’ve been told this story several times in my life.

The first time I heard it I was 12, and I had just bought a very smart jacket for myself for the first time. The lapel shape reminded my grandma of that man’s lapels.

[bixiebeet]

“The Shoah, or Holocaust, was initiated by members of the Nationalist Socialist Party (Nazi) which seized power in Germany in 1933. The Nazis believed in the concept of racial superiority, holding that the people of Northern European descent – particularly the Germanic peoples – were better than other races. While many experienced suffering, torture and death, the Nazis held a particular disdain for the Jewish people, counting them “unworthy of life.”

Of the nine million Jews who resided in Europe in the early 1930s, approximately six million – roughly two-thirds – were systematically concentrated, tortured and slain by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany. Estimates are given that as many as a million of this number were children.”

Read more:

[duchessofvastergotland]

27th January 2023 // Crown Princess Victoria and Prince Daniel commemorated the International Day of Remembrance for Holocaust Victims at a memorial ceremony in Stockholm. Victoria has attended many Holocaust remembrance events on behalf of Sweden, and was a representative at the 75th anniversary events in Poland in 2020

[petitemelusine]

Remember me