Someone whose job it is to faciliate remembering a genocide calls a group of people “fundamentally evil”. Must have not ever walked into the museum.

  • @UnderpantsWeevil
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    36 hours ago

    the mindset of the 40s and 50s, which was deeply Racist

    Racism wasn’t confined to that historical moment. Go forty years in either direction and you’ll find it in abundance.

    This would explain things like Germany politicians supporting yet another Genocide along racial lines and justifying that support by the race of the genociders, the support of Israel by the very same countries which supported the white colonialism in Appartheid South Africa and Holocaust rememberances completelly ignoring the victimization of people who are not seen as part of a “white non-christian” ethnicity.

    Israel isn’t just a nation of Jews, its a nation of a Western-friendly military camped just around the corner from one of the three most lucrative trade passages on the planet. NATO states “support” an independent Israel for the same reason they “support” Singaporean and Panamanian independence. We drape our endorsement of the country in liberal language (or, in the more modern moment, conservative language) as a rhetorical convenience for the sake of international propaganda.

    The modern learning of the lessons of the Holocaust would’ve been “Never again shall this be done to anybody”, but the 1940s/50s learning which is the one which clearly (in light of the actions of Israel and the support for it in many countries) ended up encoded in most Rememberances and is still interiorized by many was instead the Racist version: “Never again shall this be done to the Jewish People”

    If you get into the origins of the NATO block and the politics of the post-WW2 period, one of the first missions of the Allied nations was to guarantee that Germany - as a nation - never enjoyed the kind of regional military supremacy it had accrued in the early 20th century. That mission evolved into containment/destruction of the USSR. And the ostensible reason for the policy was as a condemnation of the Holocaust and the continued rights of Jews (and later Arab Muslims, White Afrikaners, and Cuban exiles as realpolitik demanded).

    But the root reason was containment of rival military powers and control of post-war territorial gains.

    • @[email protected]
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      6 hours ago

      And it all got sold to the plebes using propaganda heavy with race-based arguments and which left out the ethnic group that was just as targetted by the Nazis as the Jewish People - the Roma people, a.k.a. Gypsies - which has a long tradition of being been seen all over the West (not just Germany) as lesser than even the Jewish people.

      The elites generally don’t give a crap about ideologies, but the ideological trappings they chose to wrap their personal upside maximizing policies in (for example, the excuses that German politicians chose to give to yet again support a Genocide) say a lot about what they expect will work best with the riff raff.

      • @UnderpantsWeevil
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        35 hours ago

        The elites generally don’t give a crap about ideologies

        As a person raised Catholic in a wealthy Houston suburb, I’ve got to disagree. Lots of the business and social elites take their mysticism and mythology very seriously.

        they chose to wrap their personal upside maximizing policies in (for example, the excuses that German politicians chose to give to yet again support a Genocide) say a lot about what they expect will work best with the riff raff.

        There is definitely a big element of class warfare in the German endorsement of Israeli genocide. But when you get under the skin of the European antisemetic ideology, it isn’t far from what the 30s-era fascists genuinely believed. Jews are supposed to be this race of insidious, cannibalistic, goblinoids that invade your land, slaughter your men, defile your women, steal your riches, and enslave your children. The opinion of Germans towards Jews (in the moment) is simply above that of Arabs. So Jews genociding Arabs fits within the ideological rubric, just so long as the Germans can continue to purge these same “impure” Arabs from within their own borders.