Uh, like non-violent marijuana offenders who are imprisoned (and/or who've been handed a lifetime criminal record that prevents them from getting jobs) while white people can now shop for weed at veritable Apple stores? Yeah I think it's probably a good idea to let most of those people out and expunge their criminal histories, especially in states that have now decriminalized or legalized pot.
Yeah, just off the top of my head, some areas of Louisiana are incarcerating a ton of Black people for just that. They have parishes rather than counties and there are certain ones known for being extra vigilant if the person is of the right color.
Yes that's true, but you're also talking around the fact that black people are given higher bail for the same range of crimes. So there is a racial element whether conscious or not on the part of the court system. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/cyang/files/ady_racialbias.pdf
First of all he wrote "freeing black prisoners" and your comment suggests you treat criminal and prisoner as coextensive terms. Second, it's a good thing because prison destroys families and often entire communities for little benefit, and with overwhelmingly disproportionate effects on black families and communities.
But the burden is on you here, since you want the state to limit freedom in the most extreme way. You tell us why imprisoning "black criminals" is "a good thing."
You shouldn't "free" any criminals. The state shouldn't take away all their freedoms either. They should reform them. That's the whole point of the criminal justice system. We don't need to abolish the cops (or even defund them), but we need a better justice system. Anyone can see that.
And there's no such thing as "black" criminals. There's just people. Who do crimes. Usually because they have no better options. (With the exception of sociopaths, who have to be separated from the general population forever usually.)
Oh really? Do you have links to back this up? Just seeing the words "rehabilitation" and (American) "prison" or "jail" in the same paragraph makes me LOL. Which states are legitimately trying to rehabilitate prisoners? In the ones that might be doing it, I can assure you that the budget for that is miniscule.
Well, there are accused and convicted black criminals and they're highly over-represented in the criminal justice system including jails and prisons. There are laws and statutes still in place to ensure that this disparity continues or continues to worsen. We do need to reform the criminal justice system for sure. But many of the "crimes" for which many of these people are incarcerated are no longer crimes anymore.
Not the main categories I'm talking about they don't. In some serious categories they might (murder, for example) commit crimes at a rate higher than would be expected from their % of the population, but most other crimes whites commit equally frequently yet are far less likely to be stopped, charged, arrested and black ppl receive higher bail bonds, are charged more seriously and get stricter sentences, etc. for the same alleged crimes. I'm pretty focused on quality of life and drug crimes here.
Whoopi Goldberg is an unfettered idiot. Why anyone cares what comes out of a fool's mouth is a mystery. The world would bea far more pleasant place of we stopped giving a good fuck to what celebrities have to say.
I lost about 60 relatives in the Holocaust. There are probably 300 people who don't exist because of their deaths. Excuse me if I ignore the latest nonsense from old media.
As a Jew myself, or at least a fervent supporter of Israel as I'm not religious at all....I wish people would just stop referring to the Holocaust and calling others "Nazis.". Calling someone a Nazi these days is like calling someone "bro," it's ubiquitous, it has no meaning anymore.
I'm convinced everyone will be called a Nazi at least once in their life, including Jews like Ben Shapiro.
Depends on how you are doing the tallying, 15 million were exterminated in camps and through systematic programmes to eliminate certain people. A whole hell of a lot more if you are also counting casualties of war. Soviet casualties along from WWII were like 26 million if I am remembering that correctly.
“Do we need to know if it was about race to know that it was really, really bad, like as bad a thing as exists in human history? No. It doesn’t matter if the Holocaust is “about race.” The Holocaust is about six million bodies.“ Great essay, as usual. And in the main, I agree. However, as a Jew, I’m aware that once you get beyond the holocaust, public ignorance of Jewish history is quite thoroughgoing. E.g., how many people know what a pogrom is? How many people know the word ghetto comes from Renaissance Venice? Etc. The importance of that being not only the long-standingness of anti-Semitism but also its nature. Often it was conceived in terms of the impurity of the Jews. Ghoulish so-called practices like the blood libel, and in the case of the Nazis, belief that we were racially impure, in other words not Aryan. So while I agree you can have a conversation about the morally unspeakable nature and scope of the holocaust without referencing race, I think it does provide useful historical context.
Yes. Agreed. As a possible jew myself, (1/16th Ashkinazi on my mother's side according to her sisters most recent 23 and me, ha!), I agree that we can't forget the history. Which is the same point NIcole Hanna Jones is making with 1619. And I'm sure the Hutsi's want to remind all the Tutsi's about their history. (Is in the other way around? Sorry Rawandans!)
Seriously, we DO have to teach history about hatred, slavery and genocide. But if it's not done within the framework of......"All this stuff? Jewish, black, arab, Asian etc? IT'S ALL 100% UNFETTERED BS!!", then I think it becomes a merry-go-round we can't get off.
I know Jewish history isn't JUST "racial". But as much as the Jewish "people" have been mistreated through history, they're "Jewishness" isn't as important as their Peopleness.
I think that's Freddie's point. If so, I agree with him. I'm sure you're as proud of your Jewish history as I am ignorant of mine. Maybe I gotta' learn more. But I think the Bari Weiss's of the world gotta' be a little less proud. Race, ethnicity, religous or national origin. None of it is anything to be proud of. It's all just stories made up by our dead ancestors. There's no good reason I can see for us all not to just move on from these labels.
Indeed. It was a feature of Jewish life for centuries. Heck, there was a pogrom in Wales, of all places, in 1911.
At a bare minimum it would be good if people could name more than one camp. The Nazis had 40,000 camps, I’m told. If people could name four or five that would be nice.
30,000 Jews killed in the Ukraine in 1918-1920. The numbers just blot out the sun. Yes, so many more genocidal periods than the Nazi period. I think a good source is this one: Abramson, Henry (1991). "Jewish Representation in the Independent Ukrainian Governments of 1917-1920". Slavic Review. Cambridge University Press. 50 (03): 542–550.
Race is supposedly a "social construct", meaning that it has no biological bases...I have heard it put that way many, many times.
Yet one of the characteristics of a "social construct" is that it's open to change and interpretation. Yet here it's treated as a near absolute.
Suffering has become the ultimate status symbol and so many fly into absolute rage it someone's suffering is denigrated, which can include claims that another group has suffered as much. Seems to me that suffering-greed is a really iffy ground on which to build moral legitimacy.
I am hoping someone writes a comparison of how the faux pas of Joe Rogan, Whoopi Golderg, and Ilya Shapiro (Georgetown Law School guy) are shaking out.
BTW, Whoopi Goldberg went on Colbert and don't think she helped herself...
Oh Lord. On Colbert she's saying "the Nazis lied" -- meaning, the Nazis just convinced people the Jews were a "different race" when in fact they were the "same race" and it was "white on white." She just can't think beyond her 21st century American view of racial categories. Like does she think the genocide in Rwanda happened because the Tutsi weren't seen as Black?
Anyway, whether the target group is defined by "race" or "ethnicity" or "religion" when you try to kill an entire group of people it's called genocide. That's what matters, that it was the slaughter of a specific group of people.
I understand your point. I do. Not all of those who were killed at the hands of Hitler were Jews. I think the reason it's important to say it was about race was because it was about genocide. Obviously any group can be dehumanized. That is the only way you can get to genocide. In fact, we're watching a massive dehumanization campaign go on right now with the "proles" on the Trump right. They are thought of and treated as human garbage to the point where they could be sent away in camps and people like Whoopi would cheer. That doesn't mean I'm comparing this in any way to the Holocaust but just to say that dehumanization is dehumanization, whether it's witches or during slavery and Jim Crow. It is something to be avoided at all costs. The left is the side that is obsessed with race and racism to the point where their dehumanization is about believing all of those people are white supremacists. To them THAT is all about race, the Trump thing.
But specific to the Holocaust, what's important to remember is how many times Hitler uses the word "race" in Mein Kampf, and why he believed the Jewish RACE needed to be exterminated and how he dehumanized them BECAUSE of their race. Any Trumper could, say, absolve themselves by begging Joy Behar to forgive them their sins. They could confess and say "I AM A WHITE SUPREMACIST please love me" and she would. Because it isn't about race - but about ideological compliance. You can absolve your way out of it. They do generalize that their whiteness makes them Trump supporters but it can be forgiven. Being Jewish never could have been.
You couldn't as a Jew go up to anyone in Germany and beg for their mercy. Too bad. You are Jewish by breed, by race and by blood. Ditto black people in the American south after slavery ended. There was no way out of that. They were born that way.
The other reason to remember it was about race is that in his own twisted warped way Hitler believed he was purifying the German Aryan race. He specified that there was one race that was superior to the others. The Aryans. So yes, it was all about race per Hitler's perspective. And in fact anti-semitism IS about race. Why do you suppose they never hired any Jewish actors in major motion pictures for most of the time Hollywood has been making movies and making stars? If you look Jewish you are considered not attractive (if you are female). As a half-Jewish person I know what that feels like to be judged because of my blood.
So it is important to remember it was about race. That is the key to unlocking the Holocaust. But it must follow that one race of people was dehumanized BECAUSE of their race. Both things can be worth talking about. In my opinion.
My point is not that the Holocaust happened to people who weren't Jews - whether the term should be capacious in that way is not my business. My point is that you can't layer additional intensity onto the Holocaust by calling it a race crime BECAUSE IT'S THE HOLOCAUST. There is no additional register of greater evil that it can be added to.
You mean it can't possibly get any worse by saying it was about race. I agree with that for sure. Meaning it is kind of the lesser bad thing than the worst thing about it.
I regret to inform you that to a great number of present-day Americans, not only is there a register of greater evil than the Holocaust, the Holocaust itself is small beans -- because it wasn't about race, gender, imperialism, or even class. It wasn't about any of the categories Americans have been taught to understand as morally relevant, and therefore isn't a real historical event at all but a kind of silly mistake. "How could Hitler confuse his fellow whites for people of color?"
I get your point but I think an accurate description of intent is necessary to make a moral judgement. As an example, dropping atomic bombs on innocent people without the corresponding argument that it was to save more lives would entirely change the moral calculus of that event. And I'm not arguing that Whoopi was somehow trying to make the Holocaust less heinous with her comments, the only complaint I'd have is that she just was historically inaccurate. Her inaccuracy in this case didn't really change the morality of it to me (your point), but maybe to some who think white-on-white isn't so bad it could have.
"There is no additional register of greater evil that [the Holocaust]can be added to."
...so, I am actually not 100% up on the complete tally of war crimes committed by the Nazis, but I am hesitant to take the stance that 'the Holocaust was horribly unique and nothing will ever top it', such that, for instance, one might not ever say 'those nazis were *bastards* but at least they didn't do X.'
If only because some sick mofo will take it as a challenge.
"Not all of those who were killed at the hands of Hitler were Jews."
But they were all people. And all the American slaves? Also people. Rawanda? People. On & on. It's the same problem everywhere there's genocide or slavery. It's the exact same populations being abused and murdered. Human beings. My people.
"they never hired any Jewish actors in major motion pictures for most of the time Hollywood has been making movies"
I'm pretty sure this is not correct. John Wayne was Jewish, the theatre company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ... pretty sure these are Jewish names. Jewish people created Hollywood. Barbara Streisand Jewish? I'm pretty sure that's a yes. Neil Diamond? Yep. Paul Newman, Kirk Douglass, William Shatner, Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Dustin Hoffman, Sammy Davis Jr., Jerry Lewis, Michael Landon, Leonard Nimoy, "The sons of Jewish immigrants from Germany and France, the Marx Brothers became zany masters of stage and screen." My favorite Spectator writer/actor Ben Stein? A definite yes.
While yes, Jewish people faced a lot of discrimination, Hollywood wasn't one of those places. Pretty much most of the western US hasn't seen much in the way of Jewish discrimination, not like we read in BariWeiss, a story relating that East Coast golf courses weren't open to Black or Jewish people until Donald Trump came along and opened the Trump golf courses and resorts to Black and Jewish people.
Yeah, anyone can see anti-whiteness is a subset of antisemitism.
(Not being sarcastic. "Anti-whiteness", when it is real at all, is far more like antisemitism than like anti-blackness. People don't accuse The Whites of being genetically inferior. They accuse The Whites of controlling the media and the banks and the government and betraying the rest of society by pursuing only their racial/ethnic self-interest etc.)
Sullivan is right.....this is why Jews, along with Asians, are sometimes called "White Adjacent". It has to do, in part, with the mix of Jews' American success, and Asians', vis a vis their being probably the most maligned group in history.
Also, most American and European Jews are light-skinned.
The thing is, Jews and Asians are only "white-adjacent" in relation to black Americans, so saying this kind of thing amounts to giving up the ghost that the whole movement is defined around a kind of soft black nationalism or black ethnocentrism.
I like Sullivan in small doses. But he really sticks his foot in it sometimes. I feel like he's trying to imply that BLM and "wokeness" et al, is in fact a racist movement at heart. (Which I don't really agree with but I think many people even slightly to the right of me might believe). But it's a really clunky way of making a clunky point.
I'm personally anti-white. And anti-black. Anti-Jewish, Asian, Lantinx. All anti all the time. Race is bullshit.
I read the linked CNN article, and apparently she said that Holocaust is white people hurting themselves. I guess that's one what of looking at it, but it really shows the shortfall of understanding everything through race. Just bizarre.
It seems like Whoopi was basically saying that she considers Jews to be white, and therefore the Holocaust was not motivated by race because there was no racial difference between the "master race" and the Jews. However, this way of looking at it is myopic in the extreme. It's quite obvious that Hitler considered the Jews to be a different racial group. He said so many times.
She isn’t. She appropriated the last name early in her career, using it as an opportunity for differentiating herself. However she didn’t bother to learn any history that goes with it
Right. If the claim is "it didn't adhere to America's 21st century understanding of race," then she's right. But that would point to race being arbitrary, rather than the center of human existence, as it is among the liberal media class
I believe she said it was about "ethnicity", as opposed to "race". Quick search shows article that try and say that race is about physical differences, while ethnicity more heavily involves culture. Personally I find this line of reasoning very confusing; if Jews are portrayed with large noses and curly hair in anti-Jewish propaganda, does it then become about race? Groups of people being subhuman by virtue of their birth isn't race?
On top of which Freddie is right, this is worthless hairsplitting.
"The root of much of this is the Marxist idea that people are marked solely by their membership in certain groups, that the individual actions don’t really matter to that designation because it’s all about groups, and that there is always an oppressor group (or groups) and always a victim group (or groups), and that the former are bad and the latter good no matter what they actually do, either as individuals or together."
Well, I suppose the underlying question becomes: "Is there such thing as a Jewish race and is there evidence that racial rather than social characteristics were employed by the Nazis in carrying out the Holocaust?" I mean, it's widely known that millions of Poles (Roma as well) - ostensibly non-Jews - were killed among other groups. So for the narrative that it's about race to hold water, there must have been other "races" targeted as well. To put it another way, the Holocaust wasn't JUST about Jews.
Personally (not really) I feel that all these so-called controversies are a bunch of huey. When people can't change the big things they will nitpick about small things and that is the sad truth about 21st century capitalism. Nobody can do a damn thing to move it an inch so they keep picking on the scabs.
The controversy seems to be a result of Goldberg not being au fait with current progressive thinking. We're supposed to know that whiteness is historically constructed and that, back in the day, groups like Italian, Irish, and Jewish people were not taken to be White, although more recently they have been. This may just have been a failed attempt to be pedantic on Goldberg's point.
I'm actually more bothered by Joy Behar's claim that the banning of Maus was "a canard to throw you off from the fact that they don't like history that makes White people look bad." Like, really? It's pretty easy to tell the story of the Holocaust in a patriotic way: heroic, democratic Americans defeating the evil foreigner. We all love to see Captain America punch Hitler in the face, so surely patriotic Americans, white or otherwise, should want their children to see the camp survivors freed at the end of Maus. The modern thinking goes from the claim that Whiteness and its dominance is being socially constructed to a paranoid projection in which everything white people do is about defending Whiteness. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar: as Jesse Singal wrote recently, the Maus banning really does just seem to have been old-fashioned prudish censoriousness.
Since that post seems to be subscriber-only, the relevant bit is: "Everyone ran with the same phrasing for this story. Every news article said it was either 'banned' or 'removed from classrooms'. But eventually someone alerted me to the fact that this isn’t what happened at all. Maus wasn’t banned. It was simply not chosen as an anchor text for a planned eighth-grade curriculum on the Holocaust." (The post includes a link to the applicable meeting minutes.)
All racial classification is fake. Wether that's religious, ethnic or color based racial classification doesn't matter. Without whole nations buying into the myth of race, you wouldn't be able to have slavery or the holocaust. You can't dehumanize the "other" when you refuse to label them "other". If we label them just as people, the pure evil of their actions become clear.
Our forefathers enslaved and tortured people.
The Nazis exterminated six million people.
Rawanda mobs murdered thousands of people.
They're all people. That's all any of us are. It's so simple I feel stupid saying it. But no one says it enough.
"Things exist whether you give them a name or not."
What do you mean. Race? No it doesn't. Genetics exist. Skin color & hair type exist. None of it adds up to anything close to the concept of different "races".
I think the point is that if you hate *those motherfuckers over there* and use a handy proxy like skin color or whatever to distinguish "us" from "them," then "race" is as good a label as any for that.
Is skin color "race?" I dunno, but as you say, skin color exists, and has been and is a marker for hate and violence. Seems me like doing the well-awktually Comic Book Guy thing about the labelling misses the point.
I'm trying to follow your point. Yes, people label things. "Those shit heads from 80th street better not fuck with us from 79th street". And then "Oh! Those people are brown? And we're all pale? GREAT! Won't be any confusion about who's on who's team!" Just like sports. You're born into your uniform. But are you?
As a thought experiment what if it was NFL jersy's and not skin color? Let's say back in the day everyone from Boston was born with skin the color of the New England Patriots. And everyone from New York was born green like the Jets. (Or Giants blue. But fuck those guys. Giants suck!)
In Boston there's this guy Sam, born a "Patriot". His Dad was a "Patriot" back and back generations in this sci fi world. He marries a "Patriot". They have a son, Barney, who's born with the same "Patriot" skin uniform.
But Sam gets a job in NY and his family has to move. Barney goes to school. Nothing but Giants & Jets. He tries to fit in. His blue skin might pass for "Giants" blue. But instead he just wears baggy hoodies and tried to keep his "Uniform" hidden.
Barney becomes great friends with Bobby, who's a "Jet". He goes to Bobby's apartment on Sunday's to watch the Jets play. (Usually lose, but that's not the point!!). Bobby teaches Barney about about Joe Namath and the butt fumble. The mudd bowl. The fake spike.
Fireman Ed.
Barney & Bobby watch every Youtube about Jet history. First team to win a Super Bowl for the AFL! They beat Brady and those stinkin' Patriots in the 2010 playoffs! Fuck Brady and his perfect dimple!
Needless to say, despite being born in Boston with "Patriot" skin, Barney becomes a life long "Jet" fan.
His skin is blue. But he bleeds Green & White. So what is he? A Jet or a Patriot?
(What's my point? I dunno! I watch too much fucking football maybe??)
Me too. I DO wanna' know why he shot the video in the Ukraine. A bit weird. Another good 'raceless' warrior is Dr. Sheena Mason. She interviews Coleman on her youtube channel. Worth a look.
"Without whole nations buying into the myth of race, you wouldn't be able to have slavery or the holocaust"
I disagree.
North Korea practices slavery, its not based on race. The frozen shrimp you and I buy in the supermarket are processed by North Korean indentured servants leased by the North Korean government to shrimping boats.
According to the UN, in Haiti, still today, children are bought as indentured servants—this is slavery—not race based.
If do any study at all of the Holocaust, it's pretty clear that the Nazi program of Jewish extermination was racially based. You can read about The Wannsee Conference or watch the chilling movie Conspiracy and see how who was a Jew and who wasn't was strictly defined. You have to love the Germans for their thoroughness.
Why does this matter? As you say, racial oppression is a well-guarded perk in some corners of the discourse.
The problem of Jews and The Left is a thorny one. Many on The Left object to the idea that my Tribe is anything other than some different flavor of Whitey. Sure, maybe we were oppressed at one time, just like the Irish and the Italians and other more ethnic Europeans, but we're all just White now and any argument that we're due any special consideration is just white supremacy.
So far as I can tell, the Nazis were equal-opportunity oppressors. You didn’t have to be Jewish. You could be a gypsy, a homosexual, an anti-Nazi clergyman (from any religious tradition) or maybe even just someone the regime viewed as a trouble-maker for whatever reason. Or no reason. Pointing this out is not by any stretch anti-Semitic. Dead is dead in any case.
That German guy with the toothbrush mustache once said that his intention was "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe". Whether or not his idea of "race" was the same as Whoopi's, he clearly saw it as being about race.
It was extremely common for early 20th century Europeans to refer to nationalities and ethnicities as "races". The English race, the Polish, the French races. I grew up with a book from the 1910s, "The Story of the Irish Race" in the house.
Just saying, the word was used differently there and then (Europe) as opposed to what it means in the contemporary United States.
Yes, and they had the same goal for eliminating the Roma, for the same reason, and for killing most Slavic people and enslaving the rest. They had all kinds of evil ideas about race and who ought to be allowed to live.
Is it maybe a bit worse than this? Does that imply *non* racially motivated mass murder is a bit more ok? Like as long as we have the right motives - ending the lives of millions of people is somewhat justified? It feels like this is the way this is going.
I've heard much the same also made about slavery: that US slavery was worse because it was racist. As if going out to forcibly imprison other people's and turn them into property was somehow just a rather charming local custom that the Romans (and pretty much every contemporary society) got up to, AS LONG as they had a nice diverse, equal opportunity policy to chattel slavery?
I'm not sure I really even buy the idea that was happend in America was uniquely awful: it looks pretty much like a continuity of a monstrous, dehumanising and evil institution. There's some strange revisionism about slavery in the ancient world but aren't all the sources from them mostly written by aristocrats who were at the top of slave societies? Where do we have robust evidence that "people were nicer to slaves in the past?" that actually looks reliable account of disinterested parties? Is it not likely that we just want to elevate the relative cruelty of US Slavery because its effects are still more visible and lives more in our memory where it's appalling qualities are more palpable?
That's a genuine question and very happy to be educated on this!
Part of the unique awfulness was the original transatlantic nature of American slavery. There was nowhere to run to if you deigned to try to escape. Imagine being sent to another planet as a slave. For the limitations of world travel at that time, it might as well have been another planet.
That being said, so many of the slaves brought from Africa were first captured by rival tribes. So when did the slavery become uniquely bad? I suppose based on my first paragraph one could argue, on the ships.
I’ll bet not. But that’s happened elsewhere and at other times. I’m not by any means well versed in history but I can’t think of another instance of mass forced intercontinental relocation.
...Arab slave traders took millions of slaves east out of Africa starting before the Atlantic slave trade and continuing long after. Probably happened elsewhere, during other intercontinental relocations.
Also, the genetic record of Europe and elsewhere tend to show that the standard was for invaders to kill all the men and enslave the women. It's possible to argue that European enslavement of Africans is worse than that, but it's not obvious to me.
(On edit: British transportation of felons and other deplorable to the Americas and to Australia should surely count as well...different in degree, yes, but the trans Atlantic slave trade wasn't all huge ships with people shackled side by side, either.
Context does matter but things can be bad and horrible and wrong without being the worst thing ever.
Exactly, read any history: Vikings, Normans, Romans, Trojans, Persians, Greeks, Apaches, Mayas, Hawaiians, Miwuks, Aztecs, Mongols ... whomever, they all raided each other's villages, killed as many men as they could, raped the women, carried off the livestock, the children, and whatever loot.
This is just the human condition, and its happening right now in West Africa, and in Western China ... to more yawns.
Of course, there also was the ‘be brutally executed if one of your fellows offed the master’ factor to deal with - that would be a less good aspect of Roman slavery
4 guys that "discovered" Texas in 1527, were the only survivors of a shipwreck - they finally landed in what is now Galveston.
3 Spanish "white" guys and a slave Moor named Esteban
Were promptly captured and made slaves by the Native Indians. Those evil slave holding natives!
Blaming the past for slavery is like blaming them for being cavemen. Stupid evil cavemen!
The real tragedy if you must have one, is that in 100 years from Columbus... NINETY PERCENT 90% of Western hemisphere natives died from Eastern hemisphere diseases in the Columbian Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
Literally, Columbus showed up and left, and by the time 100+ years later that Europeans really came back to start exploring, the Indians were all wiped out from TB, fever, etc.
The only real disease that went West to East was syphilis.
I feel like the Spartan version of slavery might be in contention; they were cruel enough that even other Greek states (all of which were slaveholding states themselves) were like "maybe you should chill." Men had to stalk and murder a slave in order to become a full citizen of Sparta.
Ever see that Eddie Izzard comedy special where he talks about this? The joke is that Stalin killed millions of people, and Pol Pot kills millions, but nobody cares if you kill your own people. Hitler killed other people. Stupid Hitler.
Uh, like non-violent marijuana offenders who are imprisoned (and/or who've been handed a lifetime criminal record that prevents them from getting jobs) while white people can now shop for weed at veritable Apple stores? Yeah I think it's probably a good idea to let most of those people out and expunge their criminal histories, especially in states that have now decriminalized or legalized pot.
Yeah, just off the top of my head, some areas of Louisiana are incarcerating a ton of Black people for just that. They have parishes rather than counties and there are certain ones known for being extra vigilant if the person is of the right color.
https://www.laaclu.org/en/press-releases/new-aclu-report-black-people-three-times-more-likely-get-arrested-marijuana-louisiana
If they can't make bail, they are de-facto imprisoned until they cop to a plea or (lol yeah right) demand a jury trial.
Yeah ages ago lol.
Yes that's true, but you're also talking around the fact that black people are given higher bail for the same range of crimes. So there is a racial element whether conscious or not on the part of the court system. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/cyang/files/ady_racialbias.pdf
There's some sense to it for violent crimes, but less so for non-violent.
First of all he wrote "freeing black prisoners" and your comment suggests you treat criminal and prisoner as coextensive terms. Second, it's a good thing because prison destroys families and often entire communities for little benefit, and with overwhelmingly disproportionate effects on black families and communities.
But the burden is on you here, since you want the state to limit freedom in the most extreme way. You tell us why imprisoning "black criminals" is "a good thing."
You're not really one for complexity, I take it.
Hey, good luck. Hope you're doing okay out there. All the best.
Hot Take: You're both fine with complexity, but weight the wrinkles differently.
"Criminal" means someone who committed a crime. In an ideal world, only criminals would be in prison. But in the real world, not always.
You shouldn't "free" any criminals. The state shouldn't take away all their freedoms either. They should reform them. That's the whole point of the criminal justice system. We don't need to abolish the cops (or even defund them), but we need a better justice system. Anyone can see that.
And there's no such thing as "black" criminals. There's just people. Who do crimes. Usually because they have no better options. (With the exception of sociopaths, who have to be separated from the general population forever usually.)
Oh really? Do you have links to back this up? Just seeing the words "rehabilitation" and (American) "prison" or "jail" in the same paragraph makes me LOL. Which states are legitimately trying to rehabilitate prisoners? In the ones that might be doing it, I can assure you that the budget for that is miniscule.
Well, there are accused and convicted black criminals and they're highly over-represented in the criminal justice system including jails and prisons. There are laws and statutes still in place to ensure that this disparity continues or continues to worsen. We do need to reform the criminal justice system for sure. But many of the "crimes" for which many of these people are incarcerated are no longer crimes anymore.
Not the main categories I'm talking about they don't. In some serious categories they might (murder, for example) commit crimes at a rate higher than would be expected from their % of the population, but most other crimes whites commit equally frequently yet are far less likely to be stopped, charged, arrested and black ppl receive higher bail bonds, are charged more seriously and get stricter sentences, etc. for the same alleged crimes. I'm pretty focused on quality of life and drug crimes here.
Well, class and economic status are also strongly tied to race in the USA so that's probably true.
"There are laws and statutes still in place to ensure that this disparity continues or continues to worsen."
Can you cite an example of such a law or statute?
How many white people do you think get stopped and frisked.
No reply to this one I see. MarkS is the site's biggest 'sealion' apparently.
Your incredulous response actually shocks me.
https://www.vera.org/publications/for-the-record-unjust-burden
There should be a report in PDF format.
Well I couldn't find one. And the summary does NOT claim any racial disparity in CURRENT LAW.
So can you please just cite a particular law or statute (on the books today) that "ensures that [racial] disparity continues"?
Here you go: https://bfy.tw/SUDC
Stop and frisk.
Racial profiling by police.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/opinions/systemic-racism-police-evidence-criminal-justice-system/
https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/black-lives-matter-eliminating-racial-inequity-in-the-criminal-justice-system/
https://www.nap.edu/download/18613
Whoopi Goldberg is an unfettered idiot. Why anyone cares what comes out of a fool's mouth is a mystery. The world would bea far more pleasant place of we stopped giving a good fuck to what celebrities have to say.
I lost about 60 relatives in the Holocaust. There are probably 300 people who don't exist because of their deaths. Excuse me if I ignore the latest nonsense from old media.
The show she's on, The View, is widely watched and I think she is treated as its leading states-person.
Whoopi far preceded wokeness, and she don't like it.
Her eminence is value-based.
It's a chick show. I love it.
I’d say a lot more people watch the View than Maddow , including centrists and right-leaning people—mostly women—who are home during the day.
It was 15,000,000, but yes 6,000,000 we're Jews.
As a Jew myself, or at least a fervent supporter of Israel as I'm not religious at all....I wish people would just stop referring to the Holocaust and calling others "Nazis.". Calling someone a Nazi these days is like calling someone "bro," it's ubiquitous, it has no meaning anymore.
I'm convinced everyone will be called a Nazi at least once in their life, including Jews like Ben Shapiro.
*The former Soviet Union has entered the chat.* (It was far more than 15 million deaths.)
Depends on how you are doing the tallying, 15 million were exterminated in camps and through systematic programmes to eliminate certain people. A whole hell of a lot more if you are also counting casualties of war. Soviet casualties along from WWII were like 26 million if I am remembering that correctly.
True!
Ok, good, somebody else did it, and I don't have to be the guy saying, "Well actually the Nazis killed closer to 15 million people totally."
I was silly enough to bring up that point on Twitter yesterday. Rookie mistake
Yeah bad move. Nazis AND math? I have to think you were sort of asking for it.
Two equally white supremacist entities
“Do we need to know if it was about race to know that it was really, really bad, like as bad a thing as exists in human history? No. It doesn’t matter if the Holocaust is “about race.” The Holocaust is about six million bodies.“ Great essay, as usual. And in the main, I agree. However, as a Jew, I’m aware that once you get beyond the holocaust, public ignorance of Jewish history is quite thoroughgoing. E.g., how many people know what a pogrom is? How many people know the word ghetto comes from Renaissance Venice? Etc. The importance of that being not only the long-standingness of anti-Semitism but also its nature. Often it was conceived in terms of the impurity of the Jews. Ghoulish so-called practices like the blood libel, and in the case of the Nazis, belief that we were racially impure, in other words not Aryan. So while I agree you can have a conversation about the morally unspeakable nature and scope of the holocaust without referencing race, I think it does provide useful historical context.
Yes. Agreed. As a possible jew myself, (1/16th Ashkinazi on my mother's side according to her sisters most recent 23 and me, ha!), I agree that we can't forget the history. Which is the same point NIcole Hanna Jones is making with 1619. And I'm sure the Hutsi's want to remind all the Tutsi's about their history. (Is in the other way around? Sorry Rawandans!)
Seriously, we DO have to teach history about hatred, slavery and genocide. But if it's not done within the framework of......"All this stuff? Jewish, black, arab, Asian etc? IT'S ALL 100% UNFETTERED BS!!", then I think it becomes a merry-go-round we can't get off.
I know Jewish history isn't JUST "racial". But as much as the Jewish "people" have been mistreated through history, they're "Jewishness" isn't as important as their Peopleness.
I think that's Freddie's point. If so, I agree with him. I'm sure you're as proud of your Jewish history as I am ignorant of mine. Maybe I gotta' learn more. But I think the Bari Weiss's of the world gotta' be a little less proud. Race, ethnicity, religous or national origin. None of it is anything to be proud of. It's all just stories made up by our dead ancestors. There's no good reason I can see for us all not to just move on from these labels.
That's my view. I might be wrong.
Naturally, it's complicated (some Hutus were also targeted), but the simple version is mainly Hutus targeting Tutsis.
So the Hutus were the Star-bellied Sneetches? (Only on Freddie's substack can I reference Dr. Suess as an anti-racist activist. Ha!)
We're all star-bellied sneetches when that peddler with his machine comes to town.
Yes,"The Pale of Settlement."--that should be remembered A lot of pograms during the Russian civil war hardly remembered.
Indeed. It was a feature of Jewish life for centuries. Heck, there was a pogrom in Wales, of all places, in 1911.
At a bare minimum it would be good if people could name more than one camp. The Nazis had 40,000 camps, I’m told. If people could name four or five that would be nice.
30,000 Jews killed in the Ukraine in 1918-1920. The numbers just blot out the sun. Yes, so many more genocidal periods than the Nazi period. I think a good source is this one: Abramson, Henry (1991). "Jewish Representation in the Independent Ukrainian Governments of 1917-1920". Slavic Review. Cambridge University Press. 50 (03): 542–550.
Who did the Welsh hate? The Scotts?
The Welsh hate anyone named Scott — it’s science.
That notwithstanding, in August 1911, there was the so-called “pogrom of the valleys” near Tredegar, Wales.
Race is supposedly a "social construct", meaning that it has no biological bases...I have heard it put that way many, many times.
Yet one of the characteristics of a "social construct" is that it's open to change and interpretation. Yet here it's treated as a near absolute.
Suffering has become the ultimate status symbol and so many fly into absolute rage it someone's suffering is denigrated, which can include claims that another group has suffered as much. Seems to me that suffering-greed is a really iffy ground on which to build moral legitimacy.
I am hoping someone writes a comparison of how the faux pas of Joe Rogan, Whoopi Golderg, and Ilya Shapiro (Georgetown Law School guy) are shaking out.
BTW, Whoopi Goldberg went on Colbert and don't think she helped herself...
https://twitter.com/DanODonnellShow/status/1488508181605228546
Oh Lord. On Colbert she's saying "the Nazis lied" -- meaning, the Nazis just convinced people the Jews were a "different race" when in fact they were the "same race" and it was "white on white." She just can't think beyond her 21st century American view of racial categories. Like does she think the genocide in Rwanda happened because the Tutsi weren't seen as Black?
Anyway, whether the target group is defined by "race" or "ethnicity" or "religion" when you try to kill an entire group of people it's called genocide. That's what matters, that it was the slaughter of a specific group of people.
Racism is a farcical subset of tribalism which springs from evolved xenophobia.
Danger calls for control, and you can't control who you don't know/understand.
Rwanda was pure tribalism spread by radio.
Actually no, it wasn’t “pure tribalism.” The Belgian colonizers fed those flames; they barely existed before they arrived.
Africans are capable of just as much evil as whites.
Read some African history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa
Didn’t say they weren’t dude, what a bizarre comment
I understand your point. I do. Not all of those who were killed at the hands of Hitler were Jews. I think the reason it's important to say it was about race was because it was about genocide. Obviously any group can be dehumanized. That is the only way you can get to genocide. In fact, we're watching a massive dehumanization campaign go on right now with the "proles" on the Trump right. They are thought of and treated as human garbage to the point where they could be sent away in camps and people like Whoopi would cheer. That doesn't mean I'm comparing this in any way to the Holocaust but just to say that dehumanization is dehumanization, whether it's witches or during slavery and Jim Crow. It is something to be avoided at all costs. The left is the side that is obsessed with race and racism to the point where their dehumanization is about believing all of those people are white supremacists. To them THAT is all about race, the Trump thing.
But specific to the Holocaust, what's important to remember is how many times Hitler uses the word "race" in Mein Kampf, and why he believed the Jewish RACE needed to be exterminated and how he dehumanized them BECAUSE of their race. Any Trumper could, say, absolve themselves by begging Joy Behar to forgive them their sins. They could confess and say "I AM A WHITE SUPREMACIST please love me" and she would. Because it isn't about race - but about ideological compliance. You can absolve your way out of it. They do generalize that their whiteness makes them Trump supporters but it can be forgiven. Being Jewish never could have been.
You couldn't as a Jew go up to anyone in Germany and beg for their mercy. Too bad. You are Jewish by breed, by race and by blood. Ditto black people in the American south after slavery ended. There was no way out of that. They were born that way.
The other reason to remember it was about race is that in his own twisted warped way Hitler believed he was purifying the German Aryan race. He specified that there was one race that was superior to the others. The Aryans. So yes, it was all about race per Hitler's perspective. And in fact anti-semitism IS about race. Why do you suppose they never hired any Jewish actors in major motion pictures for most of the time Hollywood has been making movies and making stars? If you look Jewish you are considered not attractive (if you are female). As a half-Jewish person I know what that feels like to be judged because of my blood.
So it is important to remember it was about race. That is the key to unlocking the Holocaust. But it must follow that one race of people was dehumanized BECAUSE of their race. Both things can be worth talking about. In my opinion.
My point is not that the Holocaust happened to people who weren't Jews - whether the term should be capacious in that way is not my business. My point is that you can't layer additional intensity onto the Holocaust by calling it a race crime BECAUSE IT'S THE HOLOCAUST. There is no additional register of greater evil that it can be added to.
Why?
Is this comment meant to be satirical?
You mean it can't possibly get any worse by saying it was about race. I agree with that for sure. Meaning it is kind of the lesser bad thing than the worst thing about it.
I regret to inform you that to a great number of present-day Americans, not only is there a register of greater evil than the Holocaust, the Holocaust itself is small beans -- because it wasn't about race, gender, imperialism, or even class. It wasn't about any of the categories Americans have been taught to understand as morally relevant, and therefore isn't a real historical event at all but a kind of silly mistake. "How could Hitler confuse his fellow whites for people of color?"
Not to derail, but this reminds me about the bit in Louis CK’s newest special about measuring Holocausts with 9/11s. That guy is a friggin genius
Then you, Freddie, are equally upset about all the other genocides?
Hadn't noticed.
This looks like a Whoopi pile-on to me.
I get your point but I think an accurate description of intent is necessary to make a moral judgement. As an example, dropping atomic bombs on innocent people without the corresponding argument that it was to save more lives would entirely change the moral calculus of that event. And I'm not arguing that Whoopi was somehow trying to make the Holocaust less heinous with her comments, the only complaint I'd have is that she just was historically inaccurate. Her inaccuracy in this case didn't really change the morality of it to me (your point), but maybe to some who think white-on-white isn't so bad it could have.
Whoopi is right. Jews are not a race.
Hitler's view was incorrect, like many of his views.
Race is a social construct from the Old Testament: Chosen people.
"There is no additional register of greater evil that [the Holocaust]can be added to."
...so, I am actually not 100% up on the complete tally of war crimes committed by the Nazis, but I am hesitant to take the stance that 'the Holocaust was horribly unique and nothing will ever top it', such that, for instance, one might not ever say 'those nazis were *bastards* but at least they didn't do X.'
If only because some sick mofo will take it as a challenge.
"Not all of those who were killed at the hands of Hitler were Jews."
But they were all people. And all the American slaves? Also people. Rawanda? People. On & on. It's the same problem everywhere there's genocide or slavery. It's the exact same populations being abused and murdered. Human beings. My people.
"they never hired any Jewish actors in major motion pictures for most of the time Hollywood has been making movies"
I'm pretty sure this is not correct. John Wayne was Jewish, the theatre company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer ... pretty sure these are Jewish names. Jewish people created Hollywood. Barbara Streisand Jewish? I'm pretty sure that's a yes. Neil Diamond? Yep. Paul Newman, Kirk Douglass, William Shatner, Gene Wilder, Mel Brooks, Dustin Hoffman, Sammy Davis Jr., Jerry Lewis, Michael Landon, Leonard Nimoy, "The sons of Jewish immigrants from Germany and France, the Marx Brothers became zany masters of stage and screen." My favorite Spectator writer/actor Ben Stein? A definite yes.
While yes, Jewish people faced a lot of discrimination, Hollywood wasn't one of those places. Pretty much most of the western US hasn't seen much in the way of Jewish discrimination, not like we read in BariWeiss, a story relating that East Coast golf courses weren't open to Black or Jewish people until Donald Trump came along and opened the Trump golf courses and resorts to Black and Jewish people.
Andrew Sullivan just tweeted this about 15 minutes ago and I find this weird too.
“Antisemitism in America today is often a subset of anti-whiteness.” Trying to think my way through all the weirdness.
yeah that's... not correct
Nation of Islam disagrees
Yeah, anyone can see anti-whiteness is a subset of antisemitism.
(Not being sarcastic. "Anti-whiteness", when it is real at all, is far more like antisemitism than like anti-blackness. People don't accuse The Whites of being genetically inferior. They accuse The Whites of controlling the media and the banks and the government and betraying the rest of society by pursuing only their racial/ethnic self-interest etc.)
He said the opposite -- that the antisemitism is the subset.
Sullivan is right.....this is why Jews, along with Asians, are sometimes called "White Adjacent". It has to do, in part, with the mix of Jews' American success, and Asians', vis a vis their being probably the most maligned group in history.
Also, most American and European Jews are light-skinned.
The thing is, Jews and Asians are only "white-adjacent" in relation to black Americans, so saying this kind of thing amounts to giving up the ghost that the whole movement is defined around a kind of soft black nationalism or black ethnocentrism.
A lot of people do think the whole movement is based on that.
I'm pretty sure the KKK would disagree with that.
Even within white nationalism, the KKK is a pretty marginal player these days, last I knew.
I like Sullivan in small doses. But he really sticks his foot in it sometimes. I feel like he's trying to imply that BLM and "wokeness" et al, is in fact a racist movement at heart. (Which I don't really agree with but I think many people even slightly to the right of me might believe). But it's a really clunky way of making a clunky point.
I'm personally anti-white. And anti-black. Anti-Jewish, Asian, Lantinx. All anti all the time. Race is bullshit.
I read the linked CNN article, and apparently she said that Holocaust is white people hurting themselves. I guess that's one what of looking at it, but it really shows the shortfall of understanding everything through race. Just bizarre.
It seems like Whoopi was basically saying that she considers Jews to be white, and therefore the Holocaust was not motivated by race because there was no racial difference between the "master race" and the Jews. However, this way of looking at it is myopic in the extreme. It's quite obvious that Hitler considered the Jews to be a different racial group. He said so many times.
She isn’t. She appropriated the last name early in her career, using it as an opportunity for differentiating herself. However she didn’t bother to learn any history that goes with it
Right. If the claim is "it didn't adhere to America's 21st century understanding of race," then she's right. But that would point to race being arbitrary, rather than the center of human existence, as it is among the liberal media class
I believe she said it was about "ethnicity", as opposed to "race". Quick search shows article that try and say that race is about physical differences, while ethnicity more heavily involves culture. Personally I find this line of reasoning very confusing; if Jews are portrayed with large noses and curly hair in anti-Jewish propaganda, does it then become about race? Groups of people being subhuman by virtue of their birth isn't race?
On top of which Freddie is right, this is worthless hairsplitting.
Here's how Neo puts it, so very well:
"The root of much of this is the Marxist idea that people are marked solely by their membership in certain groups, that the individual actions don’t really matter to that designation because it’s all about groups, and that there is always an oppressor group (or groups) and always a victim group (or groups), and that the former are bad and the latter good no matter what they actually do, either as individuals or together."
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/02/02/blacks-cannot-be-racist-and-whites-cannot-not-be-racist/
I call it tribalist. With individualism the only antidote.
Well, I suppose the underlying question becomes: "Is there such thing as a Jewish race and is there evidence that racial rather than social characteristics were employed by the Nazis in carrying out the Holocaust?" I mean, it's widely known that millions of Poles (Roma as well) - ostensibly non-Jews - were killed among other groups. So for the narrative that it's about race to hold water, there must have been other "races" targeted as well. To put it another way, the Holocaust wasn't JUST about Jews.
Yes, Hitler was racist about Slavic as well as Semitic people. Africans too, if he happened to see any. He had plenty of racism to spare
He did consider Slavic people to be a different lesser race than the Aryans.
Personally (not really) I feel that all these so-called controversies are a bunch of huey. When people can't change the big things they will nitpick about small things and that is the sad truth about 21st century capitalism. Nobody can do a damn thing to move it an inch so they keep picking on the scabs.
The controversy seems to be a result of Goldberg not being au fait with current progressive thinking. We're supposed to know that whiteness is historically constructed and that, back in the day, groups like Italian, Irish, and Jewish people were not taken to be White, although more recently they have been. This may just have been a failed attempt to be pedantic on Goldberg's point.
I'm actually more bothered by Joy Behar's claim that the banning of Maus was "a canard to throw you off from the fact that they don't like history that makes White people look bad." Like, really? It's pretty easy to tell the story of the Holocaust in a patriotic way: heroic, democratic Americans defeating the evil foreigner. We all love to see Captain America punch Hitler in the face, so surely patriotic Americans, white or otherwise, should want their children to see the camp survivors freed at the end of Maus. The modern thinking goes from the claim that Whiteness and its dominance is being socially constructed to a paranoid projection in which everything white people do is about defending Whiteness. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar: as Jesse Singal wrote recently, the Maus banning really does just seem to have been old-fashioned prudish censoriousness.
Also, Maus wasn't actually banned, if we're using a reasonable definition of the word.
https://polimath.substack.com/p/sometimes-we-hold-the-line
Since that post seems to be subscriber-only, the relevant bit is: "Everyone ran with the same phrasing for this story. Every news article said it was either 'banned' or 'removed from classrooms'. But eventually someone alerted me to the fact that this isn’t what happened at all. Maus wasn’t banned. It was simply not chosen as an anchor text for a planned eighth-grade curriculum on the Holocaust." (The post includes a link to the applicable meeting minutes.)
All racial classification is fake. Wether that's religious, ethnic or color based racial classification doesn't matter. Without whole nations buying into the myth of race, you wouldn't be able to have slavery or the holocaust. You can't dehumanize the "other" when you refuse to label them "other". If we label them just as people, the pure evil of their actions become clear.
Our forefathers enslaved and tortured people.
The Nazis exterminated six million people.
Rawanda mobs murdered thousands of people.
They're all people. That's all any of us are. It's so simple I feel stupid saying it. But no one says it enough.
"Race is a fake idea, put it to bed"
- Coleman Huges aka. Coldxman
That’s pure nonsense. Things exist whether you give them a name or not.
It’s all double plus ungood. That’s not how the world really works, language just doesn’t have that kind of power.
But ideas do.
Meme on, bro!
Exactly!
"Things exist whether you give them a name or not."
What do you mean. Race? No it doesn't. Genetics exist. Skin color & hair type exist. None of it adds up to anything close to the concept of different "races".
I think the point is that if you hate *those motherfuckers over there* and use a handy proxy like skin color or whatever to distinguish "us" from "them," then "race" is as good a label as any for that.
Is skin color "race?" I dunno, but as you say, skin color exists, and has been and is a marker for hate and violence. Seems me like doing the well-awktually Comic Book Guy thing about the labelling misses the point.
I'm trying to follow your point. Yes, people label things. "Those shit heads from 80th street better not fuck with us from 79th street". And then "Oh! Those people are brown? And we're all pale? GREAT! Won't be any confusion about who's on who's team!" Just like sports. You're born into your uniform. But are you?
As a thought experiment what if it was NFL jersy's and not skin color? Let's say back in the day everyone from Boston was born with skin the color of the New England Patriots. And everyone from New York was born green like the Jets. (Or Giants blue. But fuck those guys. Giants suck!)
In Boston there's this guy Sam, born a "Patriot". His Dad was a "Patriot" back and back generations in this sci fi world. He marries a "Patriot". They have a son, Barney, who's born with the same "Patriot" skin uniform.
But Sam gets a job in NY and his family has to move. Barney goes to school. Nothing but Giants & Jets. He tries to fit in. His blue skin might pass for "Giants" blue. But instead he just wears baggy hoodies and tried to keep his "Uniform" hidden.
Barney becomes great friends with Bobby, who's a "Jet". He goes to Bobby's apartment on Sunday's to watch the Jets play. (Usually lose, but that's not the point!!). Bobby teaches Barney about about Joe Namath and the butt fumble. The mudd bowl. The fake spike.
Fireman Ed.
Barney & Bobby watch every Youtube about Jet history. First team to win a Super Bowl for the AFL! They beat Brady and those stinkin' Patriots in the 2010 playoffs! Fuck Brady and his perfect dimple!
Needless to say, despite being born in Boston with "Patriot" skin, Barney becomes a life long "Jet" fan.
His skin is blue. But he bleeds Green & White. So what is he? A Jet or a Patriot?
(What's my point? I dunno! I watch too much fucking football maybe??)
Nice shoutout to CH. Love that guy.
Me too. I DO wanna' know why he shot the video in the Ukraine. A bit weird. Another good 'raceless' warrior is Dr. Sheena Mason. She interviews Coleman on her youtube channel. Worth a look.
He did?! I did not know that. Yes I mentioned Dr. Mason elsewhere but didn’t know about the interview. I’ll look it up!
"Without whole nations buying into the myth of race, you wouldn't be able to have slavery or the holocaust"
I disagree.
North Korea practices slavery, its not based on race. The frozen shrimp you and I buy in the supermarket are processed by North Korean indentured servants leased by the North Korean government to shrimping boats.
According to the UN, in Haiti, still today, children are bought as indentured servants—this is slavery—not race based.
Fair point. I guess I meant massive movements where whole nations openly hate the "other" (like Nazi Germany, Southern United States, Rawanda etc.)
But for the record, I rarely eat shrimp and never frozen. ;). (Too current? Am I offending indentured servants?)
In all seriousness, we buy food from North Korea? That's fucked.
If do any study at all of the Holocaust, it's pretty clear that the Nazi program of Jewish extermination was racially based. You can read about The Wannsee Conference or watch the chilling movie Conspiracy and see how who was a Jew and who wasn't was strictly defined. You have to love the Germans for their thoroughness.
Why does this matter? As you say, racial oppression is a well-guarded perk in some corners of the discourse.
The problem of Jews and The Left is a thorny one. Many on The Left object to the idea that my Tribe is anything other than some different flavor of Whitey. Sure, maybe we were oppressed at one time, just like the Irish and the Italians and other more ethnic Europeans, but we're all just White now and any argument that we're due any special consideration is just white supremacy.
So far as I can tell, the Nazis were equal-opportunity oppressors. You didn’t have to be Jewish. You could be a gypsy, a homosexual, an anti-Nazi clergyman (from any religious tradition) or maybe even just someone the regime viewed as a trouble-maker for whatever reason. Or no reason. Pointing this out is not by any stretch anti-Semitic. Dead is dead in any case.
That German guy with the toothbrush mustache once said that his intention was "the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe". Whether or not his idea of "race" was the same as Whoopi's, he clearly saw it as being about race.
It was extremely common for early 20th century Europeans to refer to nationalities and ethnicities as "races". The English race, the Polish, the French races. I grew up with a book from the 1910s, "The Story of the Irish Race" in the house.
Just saying, the word was used differently there and then (Europe) as opposed to what it means in the contemporary United States.
Yes, and they had the same goal for eliminating the Roma, for the same reason, and for killing most Slavic people and enslaving the rest. They had all kinds of evil ideas about race and who ought to be allowed to live.
Is it maybe a bit worse than this? Does that imply *non* racially motivated mass murder is a bit more ok? Like as long as we have the right motives - ending the lives of millions of people is somewhat justified? It feels like this is the way this is going.
I've heard much the same also made about slavery: that US slavery was worse because it was racist. As if going out to forcibly imprison other people's and turn them into property was somehow just a rather charming local custom that the Romans (and pretty much every contemporary society) got up to, AS LONG as they had a nice diverse, equal opportunity policy to chattel slavery?
I'm not sure I really even buy the idea that was happend in America was uniquely awful: it looks pretty much like a continuity of a monstrous, dehumanising and evil institution. There's some strange revisionism about slavery in the ancient world but aren't all the sources from them mostly written by aristocrats who were at the top of slave societies? Where do we have robust evidence that "people were nicer to slaves in the past?" that actually looks reliable account of disinterested parties? Is it not likely that we just want to elevate the relative cruelty of US Slavery because its effects are still more visible and lives more in our memory where it's appalling qualities are more palpable?
That's a genuine question and very happy to be educated on this!
Part of the unique awfulness was the original transatlantic nature of American slavery. There was nowhere to run to if you deigned to try to escape. Imagine being sent to another planet as a slave. For the limitations of world travel at that time, it might as well have been another planet.
That being said, so many of the slaves brought from Africa were first captured by rival tribes. So when did the slavery become uniquely bad? I suppose based on my first paragraph one could argue, on the ships.
Maybe marching in a coffle across Western Africa wasn't fun?
I’ll bet not. But that’s happened elsewhere and at other times. I’m not by any means well versed in history but I can’t think of another instance of mass forced intercontinental relocation.
This all still happens today in Africa. According to the UN, slavery exists in Haiti ... yet no one cares a wit.
...Arab slave traders took millions of slaves east out of Africa starting before the Atlantic slave trade and continuing long after. Probably happened elsewhere, during other intercontinental relocations.
Also, the genetic record of Europe and elsewhere tend to show that the standard was for invaders to kill all the men and enslave the women. It's possible to argue that European enslavement of Africans is worse than that, but it's not obvious to me.
(On edit: British transportation of felons and other deplorable to the Americas and to Australia should surely count as well...different in degree, yes, but the trans Atlantic slave trade wasn't all huge ships with people shackled side by side, either.
Context does matter but things can be bad and horrible and wrong without being the worst thing ever.
Exactly, read any history: Vikings, Normans, Romans, Trojans, Persians, Greeks, Apaches, Mayas, Hawaiians, Miwuks, Aztecs, Mongols ... whomever, they all raided each other's villages, killed as many men as they could, raped the women, carried off the livestock, the children, and whatever loot.
This is just the human condition, and its happening right now in West Africa, and in Western China ... to more yawns.
Roman slaves could often buy themselves out too.
Of course, there also was the ‘be brutally executed if one of your fellows offed the master’ factor to deal with - that would be a less good aspect of Roman slavery
Can we please NOT try to argue about whose ancestors had it worst? It's pointless, it just drives the wedges of today's divisions deeper.
I dunno Mark, I think we’re edging toward a solution everyone can agree on.
What would you call the solution that everyone agrees on? The last solution? The solution finale? Something like that...
We'll workshop it.
4 guys that "discovered" Texas in 1527, were the only survivors of a shipwreck - they finally landed in what is now Galveston.
3 Spanish "white" guys and a slave Moor named Esteban
Were promptly captured and made slaves by the Native Indians. Those evil slave holding natives!
Blaming the past for slavery is like blaming them for being cavemen. Stupid evil cavemen!
The real tragedy if you must have one, is that in 100 years from Columbus... NINETY PERCENT 90% of Western hemisphere natives died from Eastern hemisphere diseases in the Columbian Exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
Literally, Columbus showed up and left, and by the time 100+ years later that Europeans really came back to start exploring, the Indians were all wiped out from TB, fever, etc.
The only real disease that went West to East was syphilis.
I feel like the Spartan version of slavery might be in contention; they were cruel enough that even other Greek states (all of which were slaveholding states themselves) were like "maybe you should chill." Men had to stalk and murder a slave in order to become a full citizen of Sparta.
Ever see that Eddie Izzard comedy special where he talks about this? The joke is that Stalin killed millions of people, and Pol Pot kills millions, but nobody cares if you kill your own people. Hitler killed other people. Stupid Hitler.
I guess your lens might see that differently.