Is this anti-semitism?

the most dangerous parts of europe were parts entirely outside the german legal system (snyder's bloodlands is about this), places like poland and ukraine

in occupied countries there were sometimes level of resistance to the liquidation agenda and within germany and austria there were still german laws that excised a sort of restraint. that's why all the death camps are in poland and babi yar in ukraine -- they were state free zones where anything would go

oh yeah it wasn't like the mass bloodletting of the wild east where full capacity stadium levels of death on daily basis was the norm. But i can recall reading that as a percentage of population a lot more Austrian Jews were murdered than German and arguably Austrian antisemitism was much more deeply entrenched than in Germany- as ridic as that sounds. But I'm just commenting on what other commentators have said here ftr.

i've read that romania was so violently antisemitic they even shocked the germans who came to supervise

arendt: "In Rumania even the S.S. were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of oldfashioned, spontaneous pogroms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way."

This seems like a better question as far as gauging denialist sentiment:

Which of the following statements comes closest to your views about the Holocaust in Europe during World War Two?

The Holocaust happened, and the number of Jews who died in it have been fairly described 83% 65%
The Holocaust happened, but the number of Jews who died in it has been greatly exaggerated 9% 11%
The Holocaust is a myth and did not happen 1% 1%
Not sure 7% 23%

i.e. 11% of millennials think the numbers have been greatly exaggerated.

xxp
oh yeah leading SS ppl were saying this Antonescu chap was giving genocide a bad name by blatantly doing it right in front of his poplace.

I think when people talk about Austrian anti-semitism they often refer to this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Lueger

in the context of this convo, the weirdest thing to me about the eastern territories is Bulgaria. Like, why was p much every other country in the region filled with rabid anti-semites at worst and casual (or indifferent) anti-semites at best but then oh hey here's this one random exception.

yeah that newsweek article is kind of misleading -- if you asked me how many people died in the Sino-Japanese war I'd get the number grossly wrong, but that doesn't mean I "don't believe" in the number of deaths that actually happened.

(xp) Ottoman Empire perhaps?

Ottoman Empire covered Hungary and Romania too

I think Bulgaria was in the Ottoman Empire for much longer though - that's an educated guess though.

Antonescu was oddly lenient when it came to Romanian Jews he viewed as 'assimilated'. By 1942, after countless pogroms carried out in Moldova and Transnistria, he refused to deport the remaining Jewish population to Poland. He was a two-faced genocidal psychopath who also protected 'his' Jews when it suited him. Anyway, most Romanians who haven't emigrated (and some of those who have) continue to spread vaguely antisemitic 'wisdom' within the community and are generally indifferent to the role our country played in the Holocaust, when they don't outright deny it. I get the sense that this is fairly common in Eastern Europe, perhaps because we tend to suffer from a titanic inferiority complex.

Bulgaria ceded loads of territory after Paris '19 and came out a definite loser. yeah so maybe their Ottoman Empire days (when they were a classic "melting pot") are seen as a golden era? Fuck knows.

xpost

watched Shoah in my 10th grade English class (1985-86)

Is that how long it took your class to watch it?

the most dangerous parts of europe were parts entirely outside the german legal system

'The Anatomy of Fascism' talks about this too, how fascism was increasingly radicalised in the lawless regions, moving it to it's conclusion in the holocaust in Poland (iirc).

i know some teachers whose post-millenial students share sort of anti-semitic memes on social media (ostensibly anti-"zionist" but infused with classic anti-semitic themes) and are probably into "light" holocaust denialism.

wtf world?

(is "post-millenial" what we're calling them btw?)

honestly if i had a student like that... yeah i dunno.

gen z

gen (Na)z

every new generation name just sounds like some cyberpunk novel from the '80s.

xxxp hopefully you'd educate them

hopefully!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2019/01/25/jewish-family-was-booted-flight-over-body-odor-says-anti-semitism-is-blame/

Gonna say ... no? None of this makes sense to me.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/27/one-in-20-britons-does-not-believe-holocaust-happened

One in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust happened, and 8% say that the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated, according to a poll marking Holocaust Memorial Day.

I'm afraid that the numbers will continue to rise as WWII further recedes into the sands of time.

they should force some of these wilfully ignorant motherfuckers to read the Victor Klemperer Dairies, I swear.

I once gave a lecture on Edmond Jabès, a francophone Jewish Egyptian poet who settled in France in the late 1950s, as a result of the Suez Crisis. Although Egypt's Jewish community suffered throughout WWII (tensions in neighbouring Palestine leading to a spike in hateful propaganda, employment quotas, sporadic pogroms, etc.) it was a relatively safe haven when set against the calculated extermination taking place throughout most of Europe. After the war, distressed by then-emerging reports, Jabès began writing – obliquely, poetically, almost biblically – about the Shoah as an indirect witness, although I'm sure the Egyptian government's growing hostility towards the Jewish community was also a motivating factor. Anyway, we briefly discussed all this as a lead-up to our reading of Jabès's The Book of Questions (a genuinely beautiful volume of prose poetry, by the way, in addition to its historical import, although I haven't read the English translation), and it went well.

After the lecture, a student came to see me, dead set on letting me know that he would be dropping the course (this was mid-semester, so there would be penalties) because he was sick and tired of my 'obvious Jewish bias'. He found it especially upsetting that I had chosen to devote so much attention to WWII – and to the Shoah in particular – at the supposed expense of the Algerian War (which I did discuss in another lecture, without sparing the French by any stretch of the imagination). As expected, he asked me 'whether I really believed' that so many Jews had died during the war. Arguing with him was predictably pointless, since he felt like acknowledging Jewish suffering was simply not compatible with his ethnic and religious identity, and I never saw him again. I wish I could say it was the last time I encountered this attitude, but it's fairly widespread (more so in France, in part due to its specific colonial history, or so it seems to me), and it's always grounded in the same twisted narrative: 'Jews are doing amazingly well for themselves whereas my community is not – clearly a cabal of puppeteers is at work here'.

Holocaust ignorance is just that, and probably inevitable, given we live at a time when knowledge and information has never been more readily or easily available and yet people still argue and quibble about what is right in front of their faces on a daily basis. But Holocaust denial is a specific strain of hatred, either self imposed or culturally imposed, and probably more virulent and widespread in and around the middle east than anywhere else, for lots of reasons, some or several of which you just laid out. I do feel bad for people who have been living for generations on the losing end of geopolitical malfeasance, often with no one specific to blame. But at the same time, fuck them for denying the Holocaust. The very existence of genocides that people generally don't deny is demonstration enough that the scale of the Holocaust is at least feasible, and that doesn't even take into account all the diaries, news reports, movies, and photos, and public accounts. I mean, jeez, the *Nazis* kept careful records!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-47019350

Anti-jews among French Arabs are vile and widespread.

xpost See, I don't even know what to make of that. Thailand was occupied by Japan in WWII, so assuming one knows about that, one would presumably know about the Germans/Nazis as well. But is it possible a young person in Thailand doesn't know they were once occupied by Japan? I have no idea. Probably.

https://www.vice.com/sv/article/xd5bdd/nazis-chic-is-asias-offensive-fashion-craze-456

One in 20 British adults do not believe the Holocaust happened, and 8% say that the scale of the genocide has been exaggerated, according to a poll marking Holocaust Memorial Day.

i know this sounds a little, uh, UKIP, but what's the overlap b/w that 8% and the growing number of british muslims? i imagine ignorance is growing among younger generations regardless of ethnicity/background, but i also wonder if the worst of this is a product of the rampant anti-semitism within that particular community or communities.

there's a bar graph about 1/3 down in this article that suggests that ignorance and denial of the Holocaust is much greater in the middle east than elsewhere:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/the-world-is-full-of-holocaust-deniers/370870/

uh, not b/w but b/t

Well that 8% compares to 9% in the US (per the first poll mentioned in this bump), where the Muslim population is proportionately smaller. This could be a common ratio in Western countries.

"It's not that I like Hitler," a Thai führer-chic designer who goes by the name Hut told the Jerusalem Post in 2012, "but he looks funny and the shirts are very popular with young people."

punk's not dead

behind every artschool-edgelord nazi-chic lover is a conservative reactionary bursting to get out. well that is what I learned from UK Punk.

British Muslims are overwhelmingly of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin and not, in my experience, as exercised about Jews and/or Israel as Arabs and North Africans are. Also the Muslim population of the UK is 5%, despite what Fox News might be telling you people over there.

fuckin yikes to this from harry potter theme park social media

https://i.redd.it/4hei93mjqxe21.jpg

Sorry, this New York Jew is not taking instruction about what constitutes anti-Semitism from Kevin McCarthy, Chelsea Clinton, and Nancy Pelosi. pic.twitter.com/Bks7BuNnE2

— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) February 11, 2019

that is 100% how i feel.

my congressman tweeted some fake outrage about this and i called him and asked if he had any jews in his office. the communications director declined to comment. i suggested that if they were so outraged by anti-semitism they might have considered not spreading anti-semitic libels about george soros during the 2018 campaign. also, in my mind, i said "eat shit and die," but i'm not sure if that made it out of my mouth.

On a FB discussion post populated by MN5 voters, we had one vocal Zionist (“when I went to Israel I saw why armed guards and walls are necessary there, go Bibi!”) wondering what Ilhan says in private if that’s what she says in public, who wants her thrown off committees, one Reform person saying they accepted the apology, one very hard left Jewish person saying AIPAC is the NRA for Dems, and three non-Jewish people who grew up in a very Jewish community pretty much taking the middle path.

The Omar smearing felt like a bit of a last straw for me in anti-semitism-mongering, and I'm not exactly a JVP type.

Personally her comment didn't strike me as problematic but enough people who I trust explained their feelings in good faith that I don't think it's just bullshit. Among the things that made an impression on me are that it isn't her first comment so it's harder to dismiss as accidentally provocative, the song she picked to quote has antisemitic lyrics, and that she reduced a complex/multifaceted relationship to bribery. Again, I'm not really bothered by her comments but since I try to defer to people's sensibilities about bigotry/offensiveness even when they don't strike me as offensive I'm willing to accept that ppl were legitimately bothered.

It's complex/multifaceted bribery, and is in no way unique among lobbying in that regard.

The reason America supports Israel is not because AIPAC pays congresspeople.

AIPAC does not directly pay congresspeople, its network of bundlers and donors do though.