What do you think about the reclamation of the pink triangle (and the black triangle which isn’t even fully or mainly ours) and the way it’s handled. Because I honestly kind of hate it. I’m German. Those were the deaths of people who may have lived in my house before me. But Americans decided they could “reclaim” (as if it had ever been ours/theirs) it as a fun pop symbol. And instead of respecting the dead (like it is done with aids) it’s for celebration. And I feel that’s wrong.

vaspider:

You are always entitled to your feelings, however, I think that you’re missing some pieces of the puzzle and attributing some meaning to it (”fun pop symbol”) that it simply doesn’t have in the United States – at least, not any part of the communities I’ve been a part of.

Let’s walk through some of the pieces that I think you’re missing, and how those things expressly make it clear that it is not a ‘fun pop symbol’, and never has been, not to us.

I’m going to put this all behind a cut, because this is going to delve into some painful history. Content warnings have been tagged.

Keep reading

The last Nazi hunters

kvasrespecter:

Between 1945 and 1949, West German courts issued 4,600 convictions for
Nazi crimes, but after the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949, a
desire for amnesty and oblivion prevailed on both sides of the Atlantic.
The UN War Crimes Commission was shuttered and its records sealed, an
erasure propelled by the cold war and a rising tide of pro-Nazi
sentiment in the US and Germany. As Communists became the greater enemy,
the public turned away from reckoning with the Holocaust.
Many of the Nazis convicted in the trials that followed Nuremberg were
released in the 1950s, when a series of amnesty laws passed by the newly
minted West German parliament reinstated the pensions of Nazi soldiers
and paroled 20,000 Nazis previously jailed for “deeds against life”.
According to the German historian Norbert Frei, nearly 800,000 people
benefited from amnesty laws. By the end of the decade, thousands of
Nazis had been freed from German prisons and rehabilitated, taking up
comfortable posts in the judiciary, police and state administration.

saddening

The last Nazi hunters

marmoset-marmoset:

pervocracy:

Look, I appreciate that progressives are compassionate and empathetic people, who aren’t content to cheer on “winning,” but want to make sure they’re acting ethically and towards worthwhile goals. If we didn’t have these qualities, maybe we really wouldn’t be much better than the opposition.

But for God’s sake don’t let people hijack your empathy entirely towards a Nazi or a Klansman going “oh no you’re making me feel intimidated,” and away from the people he’d murder if he got half a chance.

This isn’t theoretical. The far right murdered most of my family in the 1930s and 40s. And now they’re trying to stage a comeback, with the approval of the fucking President. In the face of that, I think it’s justifiable to be a wee bit impolite.

The already worrying “is it okay to punch a Nazi” discourse is sliding into “is it okay to make a Nazi feel bad?” discourse, and FUCK YES IT IS. IT IS ENTIRELY OKAY TO DO THAT.

So many nerdy Internet people are psychologically stuck in how all their classmates thought they were weird and it made them feel bad and nobody respected their ~original unpopular thinking~, and project that in a silly and self-centered way all over serious political issues. When your Geek Social Fallacies lead you all the way to sticking up for crying Nazis, it’s time to address your own issues and seek help, not project your fear of social exclusion all over people’s opposition to violent far-right movements.