#cw Holocaust denial

[lyinginbedmon]

This line of thinking shows up a Lot when trans people try to talk about the impact of the Holocaust on the trans community, and yes part of the impetus for the destruction of the Institut for Sexualwisschenschaft and its library was that Magnus Hirschfeld was Jewish.

Except he wasn't there. He ultimately died of a heart attack in Nice, France.

And if the near-total destruction of early 20th century trans history and research was, as is often implied in such responses like this, just an accidental thing, just collateral damage... wouldn't it have stopped there?

Instead, trans people got sent to concentration camps along with every gay, Roma, or person of colour the Nazis could find. They may not have called us trans (the term transgender itself wouldn't be properly codified until 1965), but that was why they were putting us there.

The destruction of the Institut is legally considered part of the Nazi crimes during the Holocaust and one of its earliest contributing events. To deny that we were there is, legally, Holocaust denial.

[crystalsandbubbletea]

Why tf is Harry Potter trending? Didn't we literally witness JK Rowling going full holocaust denial?

(Screenshots yanked from Google)

[box-in-a-cage]

Jewish people ought to have an unquestionable right to not extend grace to people who engage in Holocaust denial. That is not now nor can it ever be considered a reasonable fair request to make of Jewish people.

Right now, if you ("you" here represents a hypothetical Jewish person) reject Holocaust denial on principle, other people will tell you that you're making a mountain out of a molehill, you're being oversensitive, it was just a joke, you're doing apologia for Israel, you're not being enough of an activist, you're getting paid off by either George Soros or Benjamin Netanyahu (depending on the speaker's political inclination), or any other brushing off of your criticism.

I think that one of the reasons that it is not socially supported for Jews to on-principle reject Holocaust deniers is that we-- people who aren't Jewish, goyim, etc.-- do not on-principle reject Holocaust deniers ourselves, especially without being cued to do so.

If Jews want to (understandably and rightfully!!) push back against people who engage in the denial of the Holocaust, right now they'd be on their own. It'd be Holocaust deniers versus Jews who want themselves and their history respected, and a whole bunch of goyim going "Why are you making such a big deal out of it?" / "Typical Zionist playing the antisemitism card🙄".

We need to invert that equation. It cannot be Jews standing up for themselves alone with no one else on their side. We must not tolerate Holocaust denial, full stop no exceptions no matter what. It doesn't matter if the speaker uses all the right progressive language, if they are positioning themselves as an advocate for another cause, nothing. The denial, casting doubt upon, inversion, or praising of the Holocaust cannot ever be accepted and everyone-- especially non-Jews!!-- has an ethical obligation and moral imperative to stamp out any Holocaust-apologia in our social circles.

Get serious about this. We need to show up for our Jewish friends, show them support and real, consistent, whole-hearted allyship-- not flimsy lip service support that we cast aside the moment it becomes at all politically inconvenient to us to maintain. And we must really truly oppose the ideologies and the people that idealize anti-Jew industrialized genocide, that whitewash or deify Adolf Hitler, that otherwise in any way intend to cause harm to Jewish people and downplay or deny the millennia-long-and-still-ongoing systemic prejudice against them.

Do not derail this post. The topic is antisemitism and how all people must reject Holocaust denial and Holocaust justification. Do not bring up any other topics.

[behave-or-get-ban-banned]

Edit:holy fuck it gets worse

[doomed-jester]

Hey, @staff what about my likes made you think I would want to see Holocaust denial on my dash?

[yuinterrobangapologist]

I think everyone should watch Denial, directed by Mick Jackson and David Hare.

I think its important that as JK Rowling threatens these suits, we take a look into how these suits have played out in the past. I think its important we understand what strategies Holocaust Deniers have used in libel suits before, why they failed then, and how we can be sure quash them again.

Obviously, this is a movie, not a how-to-win-a-trial-in-high-court guide for lawyers. But its important that those of us are having our genocides denied that the good guys have won before. It is important to understand that not only are we right, but history acknowledged us as right.

If you are queer, and the ongoing cultural genocide of mandating queer people out of existence in the English Speaking Western world is taking a toll on you, I want you to know that people like Rowling have existed long before this, and other groups who've had to defend themselves have won then, and we can win now.

[lezzian]

i actually think we should not be giving JK rowling any attention in general but to be honest maybe normies should know that woman is straight up doing holocaust denial on twitter now

[victoriadallonfan]

“Local Moron Who Denies Nazi War Crimes and Associates with Nazi Apologists Upset that People Call Her a Nazi Apologist.”

Remember who JKRowlings friends (aka homophobes, transphobes, and fascists) are:

[transexualpirate]

2000: everyone loves the fantastical magical universe a single mother created by herself in her amazing books!

2024: we regret to inform you she is currently engaging in denial of nazi crimes.

[sixty-silver-wishes]

so I typically think DNI's are pointless because not everyone will see them and they're often performative, but I don't want to interact with anyone who denies or justifies historical or current manmade atrocities, such as genocide, colonialism, slavery, ethnic cleansing, etc. I've had arguments with these sorts of people before in the past and I don't want to have them again.

Examples of rhetoric I will not tolerate:

"The Great Purges and Holodomor were good because they helped advance Soviet industrialization"

Yes, this one specifically. This is mainly where I take issue with Marxist-Leninists and Stalin apologists, and the main argument I have seen in my time researching Soviet history.

"X group of people who were targeted in the Holocaust deserves more pity and attention than Y group of people"/"People focus too much on X group of atrocity victims"

This goes for any atrocity, but this argument is often seen regarding the Holocaust, as it targeted multiple different demographics of people. Yes, the impact of the Holocaust on Jewish victims is more extensively documented than on Roma or queer victims (not to mention that in many cases, different identities can overlap), but that doesn't mean that Jewish victims are focused on "too much."

"Saying X was an atrocity is just propaganda for Y group of people, political ideology, or country"

Again, I see this frequently with Soviet atrocities, with the Holodomor and Purges often dismissed as "Western-" or "Ukrainian propaganda." I've seen people dismiss the modern genocide taking place in Xinjiang, China against Uighur Muslims as "anti-CCP propaganda," and dismissal of US slavery of Africans and African Americans as "anti-American propaganda." All of these events have been extensively researched and documented, and the people who decide what's true and what's "propaganda" in this case are typically picking and choosing what they want to hear.

"X was bad, but the people it was targeting deserved it"

No. Nobody deserves to be the target of a large-scale atrocity. It doesn't matter if you disagree with someone's religion or politics. This is not justification for atrocities.

"X never happened and is just a way for Y group of people to get pity"

This is the most blatant form of atrocity denial, but still a frequent one.

"X is bad, but what about what your country/group of people did?"

ALL ATROCITIES ARE BAD. THAT'S WHY THEY'RE CALLED ATROCITIES.

"X is not considered a genocide, so therefore it didn't happen/wasn't that bad/etc"

Using the example of the Holodomor again, there is heavy academic debate on whether or not it is considered a genocide by the UN's definition of the term. Due to this I refer to the Holodomor as an "atrocity," because while it was not specifically designed with the intention of killing Ukrainians and Kazakhs, and its primary goal was, like much of the events of Stalin's political and cultural aims, to increase industrial production by diverting agricultural yields to major Russian cities, it was still a manmade famine that resulted in thousands of deaths of people, primarily of these specific ethnic groups. The Holodomor was a consequence not just of Stalin's industrialization campaigns, but of a history of anti-Ukrainian oppression that predated the Soviet Union. The fact that it is not officially considered a genocide by the UN does not diminish the destruction of human life and culture that it resulted in. Same with Belgium's actions in the Congo; this is also not officially considered a genocide, but it doesn't mean that Belgium was in any way blameless for killing and mutilating Congolese people due to racism and greed.

[letmeliedown]

smashing your skull in with magnus hirschfield's gravestone. the nazis burnt the sexual research institute specifically so that you would think this, idiot terf blogger. in the 1930s hirschfield was literally giving out explanatory documents to his trans patients in case they were stopped by cops for crossdressing. stop making shit up

[bookshop]

from the vox culture room jn

The team: discussing the r/Kanye sub, which is filling with Holocaust awareness posts in response to Kanye's denialism

Me: important to note the r/kanye sub is also becoming a shrine to Taylor Swift

My erstwhile colleague Constance Grady: Wow, karma is her boyfriend

[liskantope]

Thanks for clarifying in response to my last ask! Back to the post you were discussing, specifically re: trolling (as opposed to more general "compulsive wittiness"), you speculate that "there’s another much more sinister component to" the sort of troll culture that's popular online among young right-wingers. What sort of component would you say that is? I figure you might be referring to people using shock humor to create plausible deniability around their actual beliefs, which I've def seen happen. Speaking from experience, if you're in an unhealthy enough place, sometimes not even YOU can distinguish between your genuine beliefs, your gut feelings, and provocativeness; from what I've heard this sounds like it might be the case for not just male trolls but also some radfems like Solanas.

You're absolutely right about using shock humor (or, I have noticed, excessively many layers of irony) to create plausible deniability, and I can certainly believe what you're saying about it getting to the point that you aren't even sure where what you're spewing out to the world begins and your actual beliefs end. (Coincidentally, the day I started writing this response I had just looked up Nick Fuentes because of current events and saw that he peddles Holocaust denial with a "just kidding guys" / "I'm only talking about Cookie Monster making cookies, any parallel to a real-life historical situation is your mind making connections on its own!" façade to it, and it's like... this technique can be taken really far to a really bad place.) I don't have any familiarity with Solanas and have fairly little exposure to radfems in general, so I can't speak to whether this issue is prevalent there, but I could imagine that it might be aside from the fact those spaces are a whole lot less male-dominated.

It took me some moments to recall what in my post from well over three years ago I was referring to when I said "there's another much more sinister component", and I don't think it's quite the thing that you brought up. It's even vaguely come back to me that at the time, I was kind of hoping someone might ask me what I meant so that I'd get around to expanding on it. I'm not sure I'll do it justice now because I haven't been thinking about it quite as much lately (the issues on my mind on this side of the pandemic era have been somewhat different and I think three years ago I was more preoccupied with trollish hate speech than now).

I think the "more sinister" thing I was referring to was the motive to bully based on perceived vulnerabilities.

Here's how it works according to my perception: a bunch of people make it clear that such-and-such thing (usually an expressed idea in the form of a really heavy, sensitive topic or a threat, but not a concrete action going beyond words) really isn't a joke, it's both incredibly upsetting and directly harmful, they're very triggered by it and so on. And a few bullies, who on some vague gut level don't understand and are irritated at that expression of speech or expressed speech in general being viewed as beyond the pale, decide "well, if you're so weak that this expression really hurts you, I'm just going to poke that hornet's nest as hard as I can", partly under a rationale that it's doing a service to teach those people to be less weak, but probably from a deeper motive of liking to feel power at the direct expense of the vulnerable.

The "expressed idea" can be anything from trollish offensive speech to spewing vile ideology to issuing (usually empty) threats of violence. The "more sinister thing" is that last "liking to feel someone else under their boot" motive I ended the last paragraph on, and it's often quite independent of any actual horrible ideological belief (which the bully may or may not hold).

And I have a long-time frustration with how many of the victims of this behavior frame it and the motivations behind it: they say it's simply proof of the ideology the troller believes and how prevalent these horrible ideological beliefs are and so on, when I imagine the primary motive of the troller is usually quite different. I'll bet a ton of guys posting pro-Nazi comments on forums or calling in death threats to Anita Sarkeesian events couldn't care less about Hitler's cause or feminist claims of sexism in the video game industry -- they are just disgusted by the fragility of the groups of people they've chosen to victimize and enjoy the feeling of being able to hurt them so much with very cheap anonymous words.

And I'm pretty sure that if I were to float this alternate view of what makes these scumbags tick, it would be met with an accusation of wanting to defend them. Not only am I not defending them at all, but what I'm suggesting is arguably an even worse motive than the one commonly being ascribed to them. Someone who aggressively but earnestly promotes their ideological views or fights their ideological war with words, even if their ideology is a completely hideous one like Naziism, at least is waging a battle for a greater cause than themself. Someone who trolls for the sake of directly hurting someone else and feeling bigger and stronger than them, under a half-formed rationale of justly punishing them for being more fragile than the troller judges they should be, is truly occupying the very lowest rung of sliminess in my eyes.

And... I know this has become a hobbyhorse of mine that I keep circling back to, but this points to, let's just say, a disadvantage of being more rather than less fragile. To be clear, in most of the examples where this trolly bullying comes up, the affected group has very very good reasons to be sensitive to the deliberately-provocative ideas they are being forced to handle (e.g. Holocaust denial), and as far as death threats go, of course those need to be taken very seriously because there's always a greater-than-zero chance that a death threat has actual murderous intentions backing it up. But the more a group of people publicly plays up how incredibly triggered they are at the most subtle expressions of ideas that suggest a threat to them, the more they're creating a great big target sign for bullies hungry for a cheap means to a feeling of power over others. It's something I wish more people would keep in mind.

Anyway, this is all quite separate from the "compulsive wittiness" I had begun that other post by talking about.

[shrimpfandango]

Despite what her lawyers will bully people poorer than her into saying, JK Rowling is and will forever be a Holocaust denier

[victoriadallonfan]

Sometimes I can’t insult anyone because their stupidity does the work for me