Years and years ago I got into a Facebook argument with some academic. They were very passionate about the idea that only African slaves should ever be referred to as slaves - that is, that slaves in ancient Egypt or Rome etc. should not be called slaves, as that term should be reserved for the unique suffering of Black slaves in America. I found that… odd. Yes, certainly, the experience of African American slaves was unique and uniquely pernicious. But the word “slave” is not an honorific. It doesn’t award Black people any special status, nor does applying it to other types of slaves dilute the evil of the status. And anyway, it’s just a word. The history of African slavery in the Americas must tell its own tale; the vocabulary we use to describe it holds no power.
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.
“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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
“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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!