Tag: holocaust mention

aka14kgold:

historicaltimes:

European Jews on Ellis Island protest against their deportation to Germany, 1936

via reddit

Don’t forget this part either. While the 1924 Immigration Act essentially cut off Jewish immigration to the U.S., further action by officials enforcing anti-immigrant law was a huge issue in the 1930s too. Being a refugee did not save you from deportation.

And the same thing is happening today with all the refugees from the west and south Asian, and Central and South American countries we’ve either destablized or aided in the destabilization of. We can’t let ICE and their minions deport these immigrants to be killed.

tikkunolamorgtfo:

This is an article about an apology from the Dutch Red Cross to the Jewish Community, issues last year, in regards to how the organisation failed the nation’s Jews: 

The Dutch Red Cross offered its “deep apologies” for failing to act to protect Jews during World War II following the publication of a research paper on its inaction.

“The war years are undoubtedly a black stain on the pages of our 150-year history,” Inge Brakman, the Dutch Red Cross’ chairwoman, told the De Telegraaf daily Wednesday. There was a “lack of courage” on the part of the organization during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands, she said.

“We have offered our deep apologies to the victims and their relatives,” she said, adding that the organization “acknowledges the mistakes made during and after the war.”

In a study commissioned by the Dutch Red Cross, the Amsterdam-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies found there was “a serious shortfall in the help given to persecuted Jews in The Netherlands.”

“Dutch political prisoners in camps outside the Netherlands also had to go mostly without the help of the Red Cross,” the study concluded. But it also said that the Red Cross had mounted considerable efforts for some prisoners, though not Jewish ones.

The results were presented in a book by NIOD historian Regina Grueter, launched on Tuesday in Amsterdam after a four-year investigation.

The organization’s headquarters “made things too easy for the occupiers,” said the current Dutch Red Cross director Gijs de Vries.

Of about 140,000 Jews known to have lived in the country at the start of the Second World War, only about 30,000 survived. A total of 107,000 were interned in Camp Westerbork, in the north-east of the country, before being transported to Nazi concentration camps in other countries.

This is how you show contrition for failing act in a way that ultimately aids evil. You acknowledge that your inaction was complicity. You acknowledge your lack of courage, your shortcomings when the time came to do between choosing what is right and what is easy. 

Nobody is saying “these people didn’t do the right thing so you must never be at peace ever in your life, you and your descendants must be cast aside into a pit of despair for all eternity.” We are just asking that you acknowledge your failings, apologise for them, and learn from them.

When you come into my inbox seething with rage because I dared to hold people who complied with the Nazis accountable for their inaction, saying “They had no choice, they were scared for their lives, how dare you!” what you’re telling me is that, not only are you not ashamed by your ancestors’ shortcomings, but that you would, without question, repeat their mistakes. 

If your response is to be defensive rather than ashamed, what you are telling me is that you have learnt nothing from history and that if the Nazis were knocking on your day ~today~ asking for your help in rounding me and my community up into cattle cars, that you would, without hesitation, repeat the sins of the generations that came before you. 

You are not actually defending your grandparents or great-grandparents for being complicit in the extermination of our families, you are defending yourselves in the eventuality that you are complicit in ours. 

archdemonblood:

Hey, I can’t believe I need to say this while the Holocaust is still in LIVING MEMORY but Jews, including white Jews, are not “allies” in the fight against Nazis, and if you think they are and that Jewish concerns shouldn’t be centered at anti-Nazi rallies, you need to look up what a Nazi actually is.

quincyrose:

“The concentration camp was never the normal condition for the average gentile German. Unless one were Jewish, or poor and unemployed, or of active leftist persuasion or otherwise openly anti-Nazi, Germany from 1933 until well into the war was not a nightmarish place. All the “good Germans” had to do was obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, avoid any sign of political heterodoxy, and look the other way when unions were busted and troublesome people disappeared. Since many “middle Americans” already obey the law, pay their taxes, give their sons to the army, are themselves distrustful of political heterodoxy, and applaud when unions are broken and troublesome people are disposed of, they probably could live without too much personal torment in a fascist state — some of them certainly seem eager to do so.”

— Michael Parenti, Fascism in a Pinstriped Suit
(via vinegardoppio)

Europe’s Life-Long Nazi Hunters Horrified By Rise In Anti-Semitism

littlegoythings:

Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, two of Europe’s most famous Nazi hunters, are preparing to publish a memoir as they confront Europe’s rising anti-Semitism and xenophobia, the Washington Post reported.

Over five decades the Klarsfelds, who are married, have tracked Nazis from Paris, their home, to as far away as Syria and Bolivia. Their most famous catch, Klaus Barbie, called the Butcher of Lyon, was extradited to France after their extensive lobbying of the French government and convicted of crimes against humanity in 1991.

“All my troubles in the past started when Madame Klarsfeld came to Bolivia,” Barbie said when his trial began.

But now the couple fears that Europe is forgetting the memory of the Holocaust.

“The young today don’t know hunger. They don’t know war,” said Serge Klarsfeld, who is Jewish and whose father died in Auschwitz. “They don’t know that the European Union brought to Europe so much, and they don’t know that the generation that came before them worked so hard for what there is.”

They hope an English translation of their memoir, “Hunting the Truth,” will help change that. The story covers Serge’s memories of watching his father be taken away by the Gestapo, and Beate’s memories of her German Protestant upbringing, and her parents who she says “sleepwalked” through World War II.

The couple has been behind seminal moments in Holocaust awareness history, such as when Beate slapped the West German Chancellor Kurt Keieinger in 1968 for being a member of the Nazi party.

“We fight for values that we will defend the rest of our lives,” Serge said. “After we die, we can’t say what will happen.”

Europe’s Life-Long Nazi Hunters Horrified By Rise In Anti-Semitism

crazy-pages:

pidgevspigeon:

birdrhetorics:

my great-grandfather had to leave italy in the 20′s because he hit a fascist with a tuba, so if you think I am going to take this sitting down you are going to have to catch these hands and also this tuba

Fun story my Great Great Grandma left Germany in the 1920s because she had family in the US and could get citizenship pretty easily and once she was over in the US she then smuggled over 15 jewish families out by forging family documents so now my aunts are currently in the process of trying to tell the real ones from the fake ones because my great gran just died and there are legally over 100 surviving descendants but we know that math is a lil screwy.

I’m pretty sure that when you lie that someone’s your family to help them escape the Holocaust, you become actual family regardless of blood ties. I don’t make the rules that’s just how that works.

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.