Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan used a speech on human rights Saturday to accuse the West of “barbarism” for its stance on the Israel-Hamas war and what he alleged was its toleration of Islamophobia.
“Israel has carried out atrocities and massacres that will shame the whole of humanity,” Erdogan told a packed hall in Istanbul the day before the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“All the values relating to humanity are being murdered in Gaza. In the face of such brutality, international institutions and human rights organizations are not taking any concrete steps to prevent such violations,” the Turkish leader said.
The human rights declaration, proclaimed by the U.N. General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948, enshrines a standard for human rights and freedoms for all people.
The reaction of countries like Germany on this has lead me to conclude that the lesson learned from the Holocaust was not that violent cold-hearted racism is unnacceptable but rather that violent cold-hearted racism against a specific group which was targettted by the Nazis is unnacceptable, but it’s fine if it’s against other groups.
In other words: Genocide is still fine and the “Never again!” was only ever about who is included the “us” when the more violent, rabid, German-style Fascists go full genocidal, not about stopping such people or at the very least doing so when they go full genocidal.
Huh that’s the interesting observation. I feel like it could be a more general human nature? On Reddit and Lemmy, I constantly see people who are not racist against black people be racist against Asians. Almost like they didn’t learn that racism is bad, but that racism against black people is bad. Almost like they need to be taught separately for every group…
TL;DR - they’re still racist and prejuding individuals based on being in a “group” defined by some non-behavioural characteristic said individuals were born with, it’s just that progressive racism now classifies as “good” or “victims” some groups that traditional racists used to deemed “bad” such as Black people or Jewish people.
They’re still being prejudiced, and did nothing more than adjusting the presumptions attached to some race-defined groups.
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Modern Liberalism in the moral sphere is not anchored on Principle but instead it’s a different labelling of “good” and “bad” on top of the of putting people in groups, same as the Fascists just with different “good” and “bad” groups.
People are still being classified into “groups” by how they look, their gender, their sexual orientation, their religion and were they come from, and then assumptions about individual behaviour are being done based on those “classifications”, all of which is how racists think complete with prejudiced expectations that individuals are “good” or “bad” depending on the “classification” they’ve are deemed to be in based on things they were born with: the classifying and presuming never stopped, it’s just that some groups previously presumed “bad” are now presumed “good”.
Or to put things another way - it’s a rebranding of racism with adjusted “good” and “bad” classifications, not a change to a following of the principle that people should be judged by what they do, not based on non-behavioural characteristics they were born with and presuming that massive groups of individuals are all the same because of sharing one such characteristic.
Hence how you end up with things like it being deemed anti-semitism to criticise the racist genocidal actions of a government because they happen to fall into a classification now deemed “good” even though their actual actions are pretty much hard-core German-style Fascism, the very opposite of good.
By the way, this is not just a phenomenon in Germany, but I expected a lot more from the majority of Germans (or at least from the power elites in that country) and instead it now seems even the country that did the Holocaust kept the racism and just did a rebranding.
PS: This is also how you end up with funny things like for example, journalists who think of themselves as impeccably progressive writting opinion articles critical of “men who use sex dolls” (I kid you not) without noticing the clear parallels with articles written in the past by other people which were critical of homosexual acts - people whose thinking is anchored on principles see both kinds of articles as “criticising adults for sexual practices that harm nobody” hence an equally unacceptable criticism, but those who are prejudiced whilst using a modern list of “good” groups, think the homophobic articles are bad (because it’s not fashionable to be homophobic) but critizing other sexual practices not commonly deemed acceptable is just fine.