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Does it matter? At the risk of Godwinning myself, Hitler was friends with a young Jewish girl, and personally intervened to protect a Jewish man who had been h
by PhasmaFelis 4y ago
Does it matter?
At the risk of Godwinning myself, Hitler was friends with a young Jewish girl, and personally intervened to protect a Jewish man who had been his commanding officer in WWI. Obviously Dahl was nowhere near Hitler's level of hatefulness, but the point is that being kind and generous to a handful of Jews you know personally is perfectly compatible with being an anti-Semite. Especially when you also openly describe yourself as an anti-Semite. He was not a genocidal monster, but he was racist.
It is not unreasonable to judge a man by his own words.
- teddyh 4y agoI though he was accused of being anti-semitic, not racist? Are antisemites racists? Or, put another way, are jews a race? I didn’t think they were, and that’s why we had a special word “antisemitism” to describe this phenomenon. Words are slippery things. I prefer to judge by actions, not words.
- PhasmaFelis 4y ago> Are antisemites racists? Or, put another way, are jews a race? They're an ethnic group, so yes. (They're also a religious group. It's confusing. But anti-Semites don't usually care much about the distinction.) > Words are slippery things. I prefer to judge by actions, not words. You don't think "I am an anti-Semite" is evidence of anti-Semitism? That seems very naive. Is it not racism until one physically attacks people?
- teddyh 4y agoPeople use words sometimes confusingly and/or provocatively. I would really prefer to hear something Roald Dahl actually did which can be considered antisemitic before I want to seriously consider him to be an antisemite, is all I’m saying.