I genuinely do not understand this unrelenting insistence that we compare every horrendous thing the United States does to the Holocaust, when there are much better comparisons to be made to…well, the United fucking States.
The United States has a long, sordid history of separating families: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the families impacted by slavery for generations after being stolen from their homes and sold to the highest bidder, for one. The Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools, where Native children were ripped from their families in order to have their language, culture, and beliefs stamped out of them through forced assimilation and conversion to Christianity, for another.
The United States has an awful history of putting people in detention centres: Japanese and Native Alaskan internment camps during WWII, Fort Cass, Fort Snell, and other Native American internment camps that Indigenous Peoples were forced into throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, not even to mention Guantanamo Bay, and the camps so-called dissidents in the places like the Philippines, Vietnam, and other nations Americans had occupied were put into.
The United States has always been horrible to its immigrants, specifically non-white and/or non-Christian refugees. My own grandfather, an immigrant form India, couldn’t become a citizen of the United States despite being a college lecturer and the spouse of a US citizen due to Asian Exclusion, and had to continuously enrol in university courses he never actually took despite the fact that he was teaching them, just to stay in the country on a student visa. The one truly valid comparison to the Holocaust era you could make would be to the United States turning away Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe aboard the St Louis and sending them back to their deaths because that same law used to keep my grandfather from becoming a citizen had been put in place specifically to keep more Jews and Asians from coming into the country.
Like, the United States is not “becoming Nazi Germany” all of a sudden. This is not some aberrant “UnAmerican” behaviour. This is the United States being the United States, doing what the U.S. has always done from the moment of its inception.
Also, as one of my FB friends said on this topic recently: “Nazi Germany was not famous for cruelty toward asylum seekers, it was famous for making millions of asylum seekers and then murdering millions including many from my family.”
There is no good reason to constantly trot out bad Holocaust comparisons when we know damn well this is the same inhumane bullshit America was fucking built on. Hitler, Nazis, and The Holocaust are not just shorthand for “the government being really bad.” It was a specific atrocity that devastated the Jewish and Romani communities of this world, and you don’t need to constantly devalue it and re-traumatise Jews and Roma over and over again when you can just as easily condemn the heinous way asylum seekers at the US border are being treated by saying the United States is still in the business of systematic oppression and has not learnt anything from its own appalling history.
i think people make the comparrisons because whenever we bring up slavery, were always told to “get over it” and that “it was so long ago” but no one says that about the holocaust. And since they all share the fact that they were all horrible events in human history that are easily recognisable, it seemed acceptable to substitute comparrisons we could have made to slavery for the holocaust inatead because no one wants to be silenced when theyre trying to be taken seriously.
@ohnosbros People absolutely, unequivocally, without a doubt tell Jews to “get over the Holocaust” ALL THE FUCKING TIME. I know you probably weren’t trying to be insensitive, but to suggest that we do not hear this on a regular basis and that our suffering is “more respected” that that of other groups is incredibly insulting. Gentiles accuse us of “playing the Holocaust card” constantly (especially gentiles in Europe who do not want to confront their own role in our genocide), and people constantly tell us to “move on” and “get over it.” There is nothing said about other tragedies and suffering that is not said about ours.
im sorry for coming off as insulting. I never witnessed the dismissal of jewsish suffering other than holocaust denial so i did not know jews got treated this way. From my experiences and perspective as a black person, jewish suffering is more respected, that’s why it read like i implied that. But now I know that that is not true. Thank you for your reply.
not to trying to get into some sort of suffering olympics but do jew get told that the holocaust left them better off like we get told slavery did? I genuinely would like to know.
Yes. Often.
Quite a few gentiles (read: a helluva lot) claim that Jews got Israel as reparations for the Holocaust, and therefore antisemitism is over, so Jews should stop complaining. Quite a few gentiles (read: a helluva lot) claim that because some Jews got a few dollars (we’re talking like the equivalent of $300USD) in recompense for the theft of their homes and property during the Holocaust, that antisemtism is over, and Jews should stop complaining.
well i learned quite a few (read: a helluva lot) things today. Thank you!
I’m glad we could connect! I know it’s hard for people who only belong to one minority group sometimes to see the different factors at play, but for multi-ethnic Jews like myself and @eshusplayground, we see how these things intersect regularly, and how the divisions between the communities we straddle keep us from working together. Thanks for listening and learning!
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