"The
memory and use of the Shoah has been cheapened by show-biz and
Hollywood and popular novels, it has certainly been cheapened by its
introduction into the stand-up routines of unfunny comedians."
The fact that you can make that comment proves you're an insane anti-semite and total asshole.
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I HAD REJECTED ABOUT FOUR comments yesterday from Steve Simels who, for some reason, has been trolling me and libeling me for about a decade in this manner because there was no use in repeating what has been repeated. But this is a good example of what's wrong with the word "antisemitism" which has become used to mean whatever someone wants it to mean and so it risks meaning nothing at all. And at least half of those uses are lies.
How could my point that the use of the mass murder of six-million Jews by the Nazis by show-biz and Hollywood and novels, cheapening the memory of that enormous crime against all of us and blunting its power to effect our conduct and our speech be an act of "antisemitism"? Yet that is typical of the use of it by such as would call objection to such use "antisemitism." It is especially interesting in light of what Deborah Lipstadt is reported to have said in the Religion News Service article I linked to.
Last year, Lipstadt defended a 30-second get-out-the-vote ad from the Jewish Democratic Council of America that juxtaposed imagery from 1930s Germany with footage of neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia; Trump speaking at a rally; and the Pittsburgh synagogue where 11 Jews were massacred in 2018. A shul defaced with graffiti was presented alongside photos of 1930s graffitied Jewish shops.
She explained that she was not comparing the former administration to Nazis. “Had the ad contained imagery of the Shoah,” she said, she would not have defended it.
I think in that there is the very real knowledge from a real historian that there are some things too sacred to use that way EVEN IF IT IS AN OTHERWISE GOOD CAUSE. It is too casual, it is too informal, it is insufficiently careful and risks the normalization of something that should never be normalized.
I would disagree with her about Trump's antisemitism due to his daughter having been nominally converted to Judaism and supposedly bringing up her children to have a nominal Jewish education. That may say something about her, it tells us little about Donald Trump who reportedly has a bizarrely non-paternal relationship with even her, his favorite daughter and even more tenuous relationships with his grandchildren. I think Deborah Lipstadt may be imagining he is more like her than he demonstrates he is.
Donald Trump's many comments and manner of talking about Jews is full of typical negative stereotypes that have incited violence against Jews and resentment which led to other violence. Compared to the comments Ilhan Omar has made critical of the Israeli government and those who promote its funding and support by the American government, Trump's comments must certainly count as worse than anything I've seen on video from her or read in the media.
But this is about the use of the Shoah, commonly called the "Holocaust" the attempted genocide of Jews by the Nazis which, like the middle-passage and American slavery, the genocide against the original human inhabitants of the Americas. the Shoah is too serious, the memory of its victims too sacred to be used cheaply by a movie producer, director or writer, from some unfunny person who practices that lazy, commercial innovation in show-biz of the later 20th century, comedy that is temporarily shocking but which isn't funny.
The latter might be the worst because it not only cheapens the memory of those murdered, it habituates its audience into thinking that their murders, those which continue are of no real importance that anyone not targeted needs to feel any horror about or opposition to. THAT IS AN ALL TOO COMMON MODE OF HUMAN THOUGHT, IT IS ONE OF THE MOST EFFECTIVE TOOLS OF GENOCIDALISTS, INDIFFERENCE AND, ESPECIALLY AMUSED INDIFFERENCE. If you pour over the transcripts of the Rwandan radio station, Radio from a Thousand Hills as I once did you will find that the genocide programs used similar jokes even as they were instructing the killers where to find victims.
I am left thinking of the use of lynching in American comedy, even as the campaign of lynching terror used against Black Americans was horrifically common and it was impossible to get a federal anti-lynching law through the United States Senate. I have commented on that before giving specific examples from beloved and idolized humorists. The same could be made about joking references in movies and comedy routines and popular songs about killing Indians, something actively promoted in the movies and certainly part of the ongoing attempts to murder them. If you want an example of the intersection between the two, at the very same time Hollywood was promoting a positive image of those engaged in that genocide, the Nazis were gathering statistics from American attempts to finish the job through the Darwinian science of eugenics to help inform their own "racial hygiene" programs. [I've written posts about all of these things.]
The Shoah should be mentioned only in the most serious of ways, in total honesty and in the context of other such crimes because it doesn't stand alone, even at the time its perpetrators were engaged in other eugenic mass murders, Hitler had clearly stated his intention of killing all of the Poles, explicitly giving the order to do so to his invading troops. Its use in even supposedly worthy fiction, movies, novels, TV shows is almost impossible to get right. Any non-documentary movie or show-biz use of it will certainly get the history dangerously wrong, even a documentary movie will inevitably be insufficiently long and nuanced and so risk distorting it. No one well researched history book will be sufficient without its supporting documentation and consultation with other serious authors on the topic.
I don't know but I suspect I would go much farther than Deborah Lipstadt in what I've concluded from the Shoah and other genocides of the 20th century and earlier. My conclusion is that we are morally obligated to take the history of those with total seriousness. At the very least seriously enough to really make the attempt to make sure they are not repeated. I think Nazis, white supremacists and others whose ideology of racial and ethnic and gender inequality is inseparable from their ideologies are justifiably and necessarily and totally prevented from promoting their ideologies.
Any ideology that calls for or supports genocide is certainly rightly suppressed from metastasizing again, we have an absolute and eternal moral obligation to the victims of those in full knowledge that what happened in the past can happen again. There is an absolute moral obligation to the victims of the Nazis to legally condemn that ideology to death. We have an absolute moral obligation to the victims of American white supremacy and genocide to condemn that ideology to intellectual death. You can throw in the various Marxisms that have proven in the real test of time to be at least as murderous and oppressive as Nazism.
The post-war idiocy of the secular liberal democracies, that we are never to learn even the hardest of lessons from the worst of our history is its definitive refutation. It is a lesson that no genuine egalitarian democracy of good will could accept and remain that.
The idiocy of free-speech, free-press absolutism that privileges even the worst of lies and ideology over the lives of individuals and millions of people is one of the most morally bereft and stupidest of all failures to learn the lessons of history. Yet that is what the law in the United States developed into, especially during the Warren Court, the willful refusal to acknowledge that not all ideologies are equal, that there are some, the contents of which, call for their eradication because they are too dangerous to risk them regaining power.
Tellingly those almost always call for the eradication of entire races of People. Any alleged liberal democracy that puts ideologies and words above the lives of People contains a fatal defect. American liberal democracy and that of most Western governments does contain that fatal defect and today's resurgence of fascism and neo-Nazism on top of those that arose in the early 20th century shows that the first lesson was not learned.
The holding that we are to allow Nazis, white American supremacists and others the right to try to do it again, this time more effectively and for longer because it would be wrong to violate rights that they would be the first to wipe out if they got power is among the stupidest as well as the most universal of delusions among the educated population of the West at the present. As we are finding in the current resurgence of fascism and neo-Nazism the free-speechy, free-pressy means of countering those has not only not worked IT HAS BEEN OF ENORMOUS USE TO THE BILLIONAIRE AND MILLIONAIRE SPONSORS OF THAT RESURGENCE.
The idiotic American and British 20th century advocacy for free-speechy, free-pressyness included one of the dumbest of ideas that it would bring about the glorious socialist if not Marxist revolutions "We must allow Nazis free speech lest the same laws that are used against them will be used against the dear old commies," to paraphrase something I heard more than a few times coming out of idiots on the alleged left. It was particularly stupid coming out of Americans on the left because the whole time they were worried about the free-speech-press "rights" of Nazis, the American equivalent, white supremacy, had a lock on the Senate and ran a number of American states. The total unrealism of American Marxists, that they had any hope of actually gaining power and putting their brand of Marxism into effect in the face of the reality that if America was ever going to do anything other than egalitarian democracy it would be fascist in character justifies the real American left leaving the Marxists on that scrap heap of history they sometimes talked about.
There is absolutely no reason for people in the Post-WWII period to tolerate anything about Nazis but the truth about their ideology, that it was and is an ongoing danger and it is an absolute moral obligation to suppress it to the fullest extent possible. It should be countered with the truth but, as can be seen in its resurgence, even the ocean of truth waged against it has not blunted its power to endanger people now. It must be actively suppressed, online and broadcast and cabloid promotion of it must be stopped. The same is as true of the lies of the American white supremacists and other genocidal ideologies.
I've gone over a lot of this before, I suspect I will be going over it again, soon.
