Day: March 27, 2018

rumpelstiltskinix:

hussyknee:

afrosoka:

“The name Hitler does not offend a black South African because Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson. I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and be rightly horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal? So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he’s just another strongman from the history books.”

— Trevor Noah, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (via christymtidwell)

Anyone who thinks this is anti-Semitic is wilfully misreading the text. The discussion is about how Euroamerican history is elevated and used to humanize the cost of white bodies over that of the Global South under Euroamerican colonialism.

No one is saying Holocaust deniers don’t exist. But almost everyone in the world learns about it, of who Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini were. The rest of us are just erased or shrugged off like our dead don’t matter. It’s not because Jewish people are privileged in Europe and America, it’s because Jewish people are PART of Euroamerican history and the Holocaust serves the narrative of British-American war heroism.

Anti-Semitism exists and is no less a problem than racism. But you can’t use that to silence PoC struggles or to police our words.

There are white folks who come to see our war monuments (1983 – 2009, hundreds of thousands dead) and scoff that the Holocaust was way worse. Let that sink in.

Jewish descendants have passing privilege, which is this awful in-between where they get to be “white” when people question why they’re being targeted to make it seem less racist, but get to be “not” when armed Nazis are circling their temples again.

The US’ Holocaust obsession isn’t about “these guys are paler than the other ones, cool!”

It is about reputation guarding against the fact that the US was the admitted inspiration for Hitler’s level of horrors.

We’d go back in time to kill Columbus because that might have stopped that specific wave.

No doubt another conqueror’s death farther back (or even at the same time as Columbus) would have disrupted his methods, too.

I agree with most of the above mentioned – I’m just cautious of any grounds that reminds me of the “Jewish folk are white” rhetoric that occasionally goes around.