August 14, 2014 at 6:12 AM
" And let me break the news to you, Sims, you have no more of a claim to the use of those people [the victims of the Holocaust] than I do."
Sorry, Sparkles, I do. For an obvious reason.
" and, unlike you, I'm not enough of a total pig to try to use them"
Everything you've just posted here proves otherwise.
Now go do the world a favor and choke to death on a piece of matzoh.
Why would you think you have a claim on the use of the people murdered by the Nazis, or, since your comments prove that only those who were Jewish seem to matter to you, of even those people? Because you're Jewish?
Well, consider this, if you are going to claim some special status in regard to those murders based on your ethnicity, if you pretend that that gives their deaths some special meaning for you on account of your being Jewish, and that they can't mean the same thing to other people, that means that other people don't have as much reason to care about those people because they aren't Jewish. I will note in passing that you have established that you think it dishonors the memory of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust to bring up the non-Jewish victims of it, you clearly think you are justified in holding up those murders as more significant than other murders.
I will be incorrect enough to point out that making that kind of a distinction permits people to not care as much, or even not at all about the murders of people outside of their identity group.
To put it plainly, that is thinking not different in kind from that of the Nazis, it establishes a hierarchy of value on the deaths of people according to ethnicity, and in that it places different values on different lives.
If you believe it is all right for someone to value people of your own ethnic, or other identity group above that of people of other groups, then you don't need to care as much about those other people. And, as an honest reading of their writing proves, that was exactly the thing that Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley, Enrst Haeckel said and it was also said by a line of people asserting Natural Selection in the human populations, and the short distance in time and space up to and including those scientists who Hitler and the other architects of the Holocaust consulted. And in the post-war eugenicists who preached the same ideas only not using the "E" word. Including such luminaries as Nobel prize winners,Watson and Crick and Shockley and even such vulgarians as Charles Murray and Robert Herrnstein. And even some who still flirt with the "E" word, such as Richard Dawkins.
I don't have any special claims on the victims of the Nazis, there is a difference between using them to promote a racial and ethnic hierarchy and respecting that they are all equal and equal to all of the others murdered through scientific racism and eugenics. etc. Citing their equality is an act of respect, not expropriation. I certainly don't have any special claims on the gay men who were murdered by the Nazis because I'm gay.
Those people belonged to no one but themselves, they certainly didn't belong to the people who took their lives. It is epic narcissism to think you have a right to the life of someone else. It is especially bad to stake that claim when they've already had their lives taken by other narcissists.
Update: Well, that's what makes me The Thought Criminal. I think the forbidden and I say the forbidden when I think it needs saying. And with what was said to me, I think pointing out what that means needed saying.
Update: 2
- Hey Soarky--what do call somebody who denies the centrality of the Jews and anti-Semitism to the Holocaust? It's on the tip of my tongue.ReplyDelete
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Holocaust denial is the denial that the Holocaust occurred or that the Nazis didn't commit the murders of millions of people, including Jews, targeted on the basis of their identity. "Centrality" is a rather ambiguous word to use because there were a number of groups specified for murder by the Nazis and even before 1919 when the Nazis began. Alfred Ploetz, one of the major figures of Nazi science already called for the murders of the "unfit" in 1895 when Hitler was six years old. I believe he was still holding that the Jews were one of the most developed cultural groups at that time. Oh, and, for the record, Ploetz got the idea of killing off the "unfit" directly from his reading of Darwin's The Descent of Man and Haeckel's History of Creation as a member of the "Freie wissenschaftliche Vereinigung" before then. I've long wondered what another member of that group, Charles Proteus Steinmetz, made of that idea and how he thought it applied to his severely disabled body. Only people with that way of thinking always figure how to make exceptions for themselves and those they value more than others.Jews were targeted from the start of the Nazi campaign but they were certainly not the only group targeted for death. The scientific and industrial murders began with the disabled in 1939, as was planned at least six years before the war began. That wasn't only a practice run, that was part of a program which included The Jewish People but also included a group you've made light of, The Roma, and the Pols and any number of others. The Nazis were merely pushing the history Darwin looked forward to when he eagerly anticipated the day when the "civilised men" would exterminate the "savages" only he thought it would be groups like the Melanesians and Fuegians before it happened among European populations. I'm only admitting that he said what he said.
Update 3: steve simelsAugust 14, 2014 at 9:16 AM
The Final Solution. To the Jewish Problem.
Repeat after me, shithead: To the Jewish Problem.
Now go fuck yourself. Royally.
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You simply don't understand what the Nazis were doing and the insidiousness of treating people as if they were fitting subjects for some crude forms of mathematical logic.
Jewish People were placed in a large subset by the Nazis, based on their biological identity. They were part of a larger set consisting of other subsets of those the Nazis held were BIOLOGICALLY UNFIT TO LIVE, the fitting enemy in a WAR AGAINST THE UNFIT. I'd give you the German terms for those but I'd have to look up the spellings and the effort would be lost on you. You don't seem to care about the people forced into those other subsets who were no less the targets of applied Natural Selection, that is mass murder, by the Nazis. So, feel free to continue to prove my point.
The practice of placing people into those kinds of subsets reached its most malignant and influential form in the eugenics movement, which, in turn, reached its most extreme form in the Holocaust. And there was no one more responsible for that practice than Charles Darwin who people like Galton and Haeckel credited as their inspiration, not to mention people like Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmeyer, not to mention people like Charles Davenport. And, in his endorsement of Galton and, especially and most effusively, Ernst Haeckel, Darwin confirmed the validity of their claims to be carrying on with his work. Just as Leonard Darwin did in eugenics during the decades after those two died.
Update 4: OK, I just checked my e-mail and I'll make an exception to doing this while I'm supposed to be working.
Six million dead Jews, just a statistical anomaly.
Wow. You're an even bigger asshat than Sparky. Quite an accomplishment.
Simels, perhaps you don't understand how quotes work. I am looking and don't find that quote in anything I said. I think perhaps your creative lying has gotten the better of you again. Only there doesn't seem to be any better to you. Though perhaps you are attributing your habits of thought to me. Clearly, to you, people in the groups murdered by the Nazis, other than the group you identify with, are merely unimportant details, not worth mentioning and that any mention of them is an offense against you. The problem is, Simels, that people who don't belong to your group won't, then, feel any qualms if they also want to think of people in your favored group in the same way if they don't happen to share that identity with them. Who would you be to say they are wrong if you do exactly the same thing they do? And that is exactly how the Nazis thought.
I would be very surprised if I said that the murder of anyone, including six million people, descended to to the category of being a "mere" anything. That's the kind of thinking you're engaged in, turning the other people objectified into elements of a set that is then ignored as "merely" unimportant. That is exactly what the Nazis did to Jews as well as all of those other people, it is what Darwin did to the Tasmanian victims of a successful genocide by the British, and many other named ethnic groups whose eradication he eagerly anticipated, explicitly and by name (really, Simels, read The Descent of Man and the things he cites enthusiastically). As I said, it is the same kind of thinking, it's merely the names and identities of who are reduced to nothing by it that are different.
Last Update: No, Simels, you misrepresented what was said by leaving the preceding sentences out, it didn't mean what you said it did by leaving that out. And I do not let people do that on my blog.
steve simels has left a new comment on your post "The Putrid Campaign of Epic And Narcissistic Expro...":
"Jew were merely the largest such group." Six million dead Jews, just a statistical anomaly.
Wow. You're an even bigger asshat than Sparky. Quite an accomplishment.
Simels, perhaps you don't understand how quotes work. I am looking and don't find that quote in anything I said. I think perhaps your creative lying has gotten the better of you again. Only there doesn't seem to be any better to you. Though perhaps you are attributing your habits of thought to me. Clearly, to you, people in the groups murdered by the Nazis, other than the group you identify with, are merely unimportant details, not worth mentioning and that any mention of them is an offense against you. The problem is, Simels, that people who don't belong to your group won't, then, feel any qualms if they also want to think of people in your favored group in the same way if they don't happen to share that identity with them. Who would you be to say they are wrong if you do exactly the same thing they do? And that is exactly how the Nazis thought.
I would be very surprised if I said that the murder of anyone, including six million people, descended to to the category of being a "mere" anything. That's the kind of thinking you're engaged in, turning the other people objectified into elements of a set that is then ignored as "merely" unimportant. That is exactly what the Nazis did to Jews as well as all of those other people, it is what Darwin did to the Tasmanian victims of a successful genocide by the British, and many other named ethnic groups whose eradication he eagerly anticipated, explicitly and by name (really, Simels, read The Descent of Man and the things he cites enthusiastically). As I said, it is the same kind of thinking, it's merely the names and identities of who are reduced to nothing by it that are different.
Last Update: No, Simels, you misrepresented what was said by leaving the preceding sentences out, it didn't mean what you said it did by leaving that out. And I do not let people do that on my blog.
As I recall, the Nazis were big on promoting the superiority of the "Aryan race," and that superiority was not limited the Jews. There were several groups which were deemed unfit for Nazi society; Jews were merely the largest such group.
ReplyDeleteThe very concept of "race" itself was a classification system of "superior" and "inferior" derived from science, and the only place to get that would have been evolutionary theory.
Eugenics was widely accepted as a science until the Nazi's discredited it with their experiments and their "Final Solution." That their motivation was eugenics and evolutionary theory is really beyond argument.
Unless you don't know what you're talking about.
No argument that Simsy's being an ass, per usual.
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure I disagree with the centrality argument, though, given how Hitler detailed in Mein Kampf his own transition from rejection of anti-Semitism to embracing it, the Nuremburg Laws targeting Jews, and of course, Wannsee. The Nazis certainly wanted to eliminate all inferior peoples, but there was a special focus on removing Jews from their society through whatever means necessary, which, uh...evolved.