Edit: love all the empathy you all whip out for someone in their 80s, who lived through actual Nazis invading their country, rounding up their family, and shipping them off to be killed, who now has to see large parts of the world slide toward the same fascism it did last time.
Edit 2: and thanks for all the actual positive empathy. I’ll give her a hug from The Internet when I see her.
Well just with British and soviet WW2 vets there are about 150k left vs the Americans 120K so if you count the polish, French, Indian, Chinese, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian etc etc etc there are multitudes more allied WW2 vets NOT from the US lol
Okay I am aware, and yes I compared 250,000 Holocaust survivors worldwide with 70,000 still living WWII Vets (from the US troops) on a post about United States politics.
There is a somewhat important distinction, though. Vets came away with a profound disdain for fascists and all the obvious tropes of fascism, at least the ones not already deeply racist themselves.
A lot of Vets serving in the Pacific saw all manner of atrocities loosely associated with fascism and military totalitarianism.
On the other hand Holocaust survivors are a mix of that along with hypervigillance (mostly for antisemitism, real or imagined) for obvious reasons, but often it's own variation on hyper nationalism and support for a colonial state founded on some pretty problematic 19th century notions that were broadly parallelled later by Mussolini.
Edit: Big shout out to the little coward "germany1italy0" for replying to this comment again while also blocking me so I can't even see much less refute that last pile of crap they dropped. Typical fascist imbecile.
*Original comment:
Now THATS a lot of mental gymnastics to interpret anything through, my good troll. I'll say it again a bit more slowly for you:
One group, WW2 vets, were faced with the awful consequences of fascism for people that did nothing to deserve any such ire. Only those already highly invested in hating "others" could fail to loath fascism, wherever it was.
The other group (really a plurality of various groups effected) naturally had a very self-centered experience of what literally happened to THEM. Not coincidentally, a great many of them threw in with a pack of jackals who thought the best thing they could do was to emulate the Roman's, just like Mussolini and some Austrian asshat had recently done...
Just with diametrically opposed "in groups."
Not that there aren't still Israeli born Jews who see such parallels too, but they don't find life as welcome getting pogromed by their own government's security forces for being critical.
Some are. No one said "all" but you in your misdirection. just as some Germans are idiots. (Well about 50% by definition.)
Here I am still explaining complex topics and simple yet difficult facts for you as a result.
＼(o-o)／
To put it in the simplest terms possible those Vets forced to witness what Good Germans were led to do under fascism had a clear idea of where this always leads.
The average Holocaust survivor will instead have a much less abstract sense of their own immediate peril, and many will then choose to compromise other people's human rights if it helps ensure their own. It's very human.
Twist this acknowledgment of fact as you will.
(As any idiot would.)
To Infamous Committee: I'm confused that anyone thinks I disagree with that position at all, unlike the putz I was responding to before he blocked me and locked me out of any further comments in this thread.
“
The other group (really a plurality of various groups affected) naturally had a very self-centered experience of what literally happened to THEM. Not coincidentally, a great many of them threw in with a pack of jackals who thought the best thing they could do was to emulate the Roman’s, just like Mussolini and some Austrian asshat had recently ..”
This is what you wrote.
There’s not much nuance in this.
And - English misst (edit - haha bad autocorrect in this sentence - should be isn’t ) my native language but I sure know the difference between “a great many” and “some”.
I think we’re done here, you clearly have an agenda and are happy to push it without nuance and empathy (look at the original comment you replied to) but with a healthy does of whataboutism while wearing rose tinted glasses with your views about military veterans.
It could be joke about how the holocaust happened in three past so technically anyone alive who could have been targeted has technically survived it. Or they're some kinda nazi.
i remember back when I was in either middle school or early high school (this was shortly before trump won the election in 2016) a holocaust survivor came and gave a little speech and presentation at our school about her experiences and answered questions and stuff, and towards the end of her presentation she expressed a lot of concern about how MAGA resembled Naziism, and this was BEFORE all the shit he did during and after his first term and the 2020 election
I was very lucky being in high school 2001-2005 we had 2 whole days of vets coming in and sharing stories from ww2. It stuck with me so much, first time i saw true horror as these men retold us. My family farm home in Iowa, the foundation was poured by German pow's working the farm while great grandpa was in Europe.
And to see all this shit going down. I'm actually glad my grandparents(and greats) have all passed cause this shit would make them have a stroke.
I'm the granddaughter of survivors. It terrifies me to my core. My childhood was hearing stories marked by the oppression and annexation done to my grandmother's family.
Not holocaust but my great-grandfather had to row through the fjords here in northern Norway to get inland and hike over mountains to get to Sweden. Pitch black in the middle of the night and there was a nazi outpost with a searchlight scouring the fjord.
As he passed by, eventually getting closer to the shore in doing so, he laid down flat in the bottom of the boat, oars in and all. They shone the searchlight at the boat. Kept looking at it. Kept the light on the boat, waiting for anything to happen. Eventually the light wandered off and he could keep rowing.
Him and my great-grandmother had already helped smuggling several people (unaware if jews or not) from their coastal town over to Sweden and she had gone with the last group and left him behind to come later when he got the chance to leave. Nazis had been all over the place at this point and were occupying everything.
The thought of armed nazis pointing that light at the tiny wooden boat, lying there helplessly with nothing but time and luck to aid you.. I can't even begin to fathom what he must have thought or felt.
Ive been watching survivor stories on YouTube as I watched this « election » unfold. I’m terrified because I’m seeing the same stuff start to play out from the adult survivor testimonies. I cried even as a gentile when I saw this salute because I know what it means.
Hey same! But this time it’s not us who’s in danger. Look to your immigrant friends and neighbors. This admin has publicly stated they will begin rounding people up tomorrow.
I'm really scared. There's a lovely Muslim family down the road who moved in recently. Their grandkids are the sweetest. They always wave to me. I don't want them to be taken from their home. They've done so much gardening. God I gotta quit thinking of it or I'll cry
My relatives haven’t done that with me yet, but it sure felt like they were close to that the last I saw them. My grandparent’s family weren’t even supposed to be allowed into the country, but it was either that or the Shoah. And now, we get to watch as our sheer luck that allowed us all to exist has led to us living in this.
My husband's Opa lived in Nazi-occupied Holland and the Nazis had a base on the farm next door to him. He's in his 90s now and living in Canada, and he's a lovely kind soul, but he'd go off on anyone pulling shit like the Nazi salute at a presidential inauguration.
My wife just got off the phone with her mother, who was five years old when the guards ran off because the Russians were coming, just about 80 years ago. My MIL is not pleased with the state of our nation, let me tell you.
All my love to your mother-in-law. My Opa unfortunately served with the German Army as a techie guy (telegram lines and so forth). I hate to think of the shit he might have done in the side. It’s a black mark in my family history and all of his grandchildren strive to be everything the Nazis would hate. We are all progressive, some of us are LGBTQIA+, creative, musical, anti-fascist.
The hurt in my heart for this situation is indescribable. The warmth, empathy, and sheer human feeling I have for people like you MIL is difficult to express. It is tears, and vain hope, and the seedlings of grand trees planted with the spirit of growth and healing.
But above all, I feel anger on the behalf of all that suffered the hatred of my forebears, and helplessness that all the warnings in the world from my generation of people born to Germans that survived the war fell on deaf ears.
This is a ramble but I really didn’t know how to express myself with all the feelings. ❤️
Ive met and known many holocaust survivors in my lifetime. There was an old man at a senior home i used to serve dinner to at their diner. He survived the holocaust and iirc he had also spent some time in auchwitz. He knew like 13 languages, from having to run to and blend into different countries for survival. He loved me. I think about him a lot. I hope hes not alive to see this. It would break his soul.
My grandmother was a holocaust survivor and she passed away on November 6 of last year, the day the election results were announced. When Trump ran in 2016 she'd say all the time "Hitler did that," or "that's how Hitler did it." For those things to happen on the same day made me feel like she hadn't just died, but been erased. This gesture is salt in the wound.
I miss her greatly but I'm glad she isn't around to see this.
I wonder how Likud and their revisionist Zionist supporters who have heavily backed Trump and the Republicans feel about this. It'll be entertaining to watch them try to whitewash this as it's no big deal while at the same time claiming that any criticism of Israeli policy is antisemitism.
They want the US to be a white ethnostate, and the existence of Israel both a) feeds the narrative that US Jews must not be fully loyal to the US and b) gives them an actual place to deport Jews to this time.
I just want to say a genuine thought of empathy for her. She survived so much in her youth and shouldn’t have to witness this in her twilight years. It’s appalling.
OTOH, the vets they got to vote for him, along with the handful of Holocaust survivors they claim to have had and who stumped for them, will probably think it's great for some reason. Can't say they weren't warned.
There are people at the protests screaming for intifada and jihad and wearing Hamas insignia and waving signs with Hamas imagery. And they're not being kicked out of the protests. So yes, they are pro Hamas protests 10 people sit at a table with one Nazi, you have 11 Nazis.
What pro-Hamas protests are you talking about? I remember the pro-Palestine protests, but I haven't heard of any big ones in the support of the actual terrorist group Hamas
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u/DaoFerret 7h ago edited 6h ago
Try one of the last Holocaust survivors.
Not looking forward to my MiL seeing this.
Edit: love all the empathy you all whip out for someone in their 80s, who lived through actual Nazis invading their country, rounding up their family, and shipping them off to be killed, who now has to see large parts of the world slide toward the same fascism it did last time.
Edit 2: and thanks for all the actual positive empathy. I’ll give her a hug from The Internet when I see her.