vivialopod:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

icouldbeclever:

rose-in-a-fisted-glove:

icouldbeclever:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

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. 

So we have to wait a few years instead of preventing this? I’m so tired of the nitpickery.

My aunt came here seeking asylum from Guatemala in 1994. All she really has been able to get is a visa and she has always renewed/extended it. She has children who were born here, but this is what her lawyers have told her to do. In 2017 it was up for renewal and due to one DUI from late 2012/early 2013, which was barely above legal limit (and had it been someone without an accent that had been pulled over, there may have just been a warning). Since 1994 this woman has only had ONE bad mark on her record: that DUI. Her visa was not renewed. She is required to leave the country in 2021. She will not likely go back ti Guatemala. We are currently trying to figure out which country may provide better for her. Because Guatemala is too dangerous. People are still fleeing to this day.

Gues what? PEOPLE ARE FLEEING THE UNITED STATES TOO. Just last year, thousands of people fled America seeking asylum in Canada. I haven’t gotten around to the numbers other countries have seen, but those are American citizens, and scared Immigrants. And yes this has been going on for ages, but not in this quantity and not with the increases seen in the past few years.

Many Latinos are terrified and setting up plans to leave this country even though we are US citizens. Many of us born here.

No, there isn’t really a moment in US history where we are not treating people like shit and separating families, but how much do the common people empathize with those situations? They don’t, because it’s never as deeply talked about. Where in US history were those same people leaving for other countries seeking asylum? If that’s your qualifier: we got it. Murder? Done. Let’s add mass child-trafficking. Is this bad enough for you yet? Are we now being beat up on enough to join your hyper-exclusive club? Or will you not be happy unless we have stood by and let millions of our people be murdered?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN19H10T

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/fearing-u-s-rejection-asylum-seekers-flee-to-canada

You may want to re-read the post there since you seem to be having some trouble understanding the main point.

It is not a matter of ‘better’ or ‘worse’. It is partially a problem of people not making the connection to the atrocities the United States have committed time and time again. Comparing it to a German single incident as opposed to one of the many many US examples is mostly sensationalizing.

The other portion is that people ignore the reality of what did happen to both the Holocaust and what is happening today. It becomes a “hyper exclusive club” of who is treated “badly enough” rather than a specific tragedy that happened to specific peoples. And that is not fair either.

I won’t speak for everyone, but I’ve been making the connections to many, many, many of the atrocities the US has previously committed. But people didn’t listen to me then. The difference is now it is so similar to the preceding events, so horrifyingly similar to pre-Nazi Germany, and this rhetoric is what that finally got white culture to share our plight like a fucking meme. Because it is a history they are very familiar with. Am I happy about it? No. I’m relieved people are finally watching en masse. Do I wish more people knew about US history? Yes. Do I hate having to argue with people daily about what actually happened? Yes. Fix the educational system. In fact, thank you for not stopping at “THEY’RE NOT THE SAME!?!” and going on with “The US actually did way closer”. YES. THEY DID.

THEY DO.

THEY SHOULD NOT.

But not everyone is like that. Now I have to watch hundreds of people getting butthurt that this is the comparison that finally stuck when we shouldn’t be treating this as the main issue. We need to prevent it from getting that bad again. By trying to fight people who are scared instead of acting to prevent it as we are begging you is telling me that you care more about semantics than this potentially happening again. Whether we are comparing it to previous US or non-US historical events.

You aren’t wrong.

But you’re going about it wrong.

First of all, the comparisons are not what got people to finally care. They are just a byproduct of their outrage from caring. People are outraged at what’s happening and they are using the Holocaust as a way to express their outrage. Not the other way around. 

Secondly, the imagery of dead Jewish and Romani people is not “semantics.” This is exactly our complaint. The fact that you can boil it down to that is exactly the problem. 

WE CAN BE OUTRAGED ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING AND FIGHT BACK WITHOUT USING DEAD JEWS AND ROMA AS PROPS AND WITHOUT TRAUMATISING OUR COMMUNITIES WITH CONSTANT HITLER IMAGERY

We’re not “going about it wrong,” we’re asking people to respect our dead and recognise that the Holocaust isn’t shorthand for fascism or atrocities. It’s a specific event that traumatised our communities and people need to treat it as such. The fact that it’s everybody’s generic go-to for every situation around the world and that non-Jewish, non-Romani people feel like they have ownership of it when they don’t is a problem, and it has nothing to do with invalidating the horrific things currently being done by ICE. 

If you can’t understand why using our dead as props and acting like “the Holocaust” is interchangeable with the “fascism” then I don’t know what to tell you. 

Nobody is downplaying what’s happening. We just want our dead and our trauma respected. 

And uhhhh literally hitler was greatly inspired by the genocide committed against natives and was very approving of the Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo concentration camp in particular. We don’t need to look to Germany for comparisons. What the American government is doing now is what they’ve been doing to indigenous children and families since their boats first bumped our shores. They did the same thing to my grandpa, they continue to do it to children on reservations. And they’ve drawn invisible borders across the land to separate native families and then use that to further the genocide.

I think it’s lazy to say “people don’t care unless we compare it to the holocaust so let’s keep comparing it to the holocaust even though jewish people are being hurt by it”

When someone says that this isn’t american or a new low point in America, correct them. Don’t let them export the blame to Germany so they don’t have to confront their complicity in the ongoing genocide of indigenous people across all of turtle island.