3 ms·

Are blacks less intelligent than whites? How many jews were really killed in the holocaust? These are absolutely not settled questions but what university will

by Lorento 11y ago

Are blacks less intelligent than whites? How many jews were really killed in the holocaust? These are absolutely not settled questions but what university will allow that kind of research? Who will publish it if the results support something that's illegal to publicly state? Even academics put their careers ahead of integrity when it would result in losing their career as well as being widely condemned.

pluma 11y ago
Personally I find the entire "the holocaust was only about Jews" meme appalling. Yes, it disproportionally affected Jews, but it also affected a lot of non-Jews (as well as people who did not self-identify as Jews). Presenting it as a purely Jewish tragedy is disrespectful to all the non-Jewish victims. The more important thing is that it was about humans. Humans did these things to other humans. You should not feel any better about what happened if you're not personally related to any of those who caused the suffering than you should feel any less offended if you're not personally related to those who suffered. The Holocaust was a failure of humanity. As was every single genocide before and after that particular one. Turning it into a "Nazis killing Jews" story allows us to artificially distance ourselves from what happened: "I'm not a Nazi, so why should I care?" or "I have nothing against Jews, so what does it have to do with me?" ("I only hate gay people"). In Germany we have a huge problem with this. We pretend to have dealt with our history, but we vehemently oppose the idea that the "monsters" who committed that "great evil" were normal human beings. As if that would somehow make them innocent. It does quite the opposite, actually: acknowledging that it was "just" humans doing those things to humans can help us understand what made ordinary humans "like us" end up doing something that horrible to other ordinary humans. We're actually seeing something similar with East Germany: because everybody knows East Germany was an "Unrechtsstaat" (literally the opposite of a "Rechtsstaat", or "state of law", but also implying "organized injustice") their mass surveillance and censorship was fundamentally different from our mass surveillance and censorship. There's absolutely nothing we could learn from them because by definition we're nothing like them and any attempt to portray East German life as anything other than constant suffering and oppression "trivializes" the injustice of its government. Creating taboos around these problems doesn't solve them, it just hides them. The US hasn't solved its racism just because the current president has darker skin. Acknowledging physiological differences between sexes or even ethnic groups isn't sexist or racist. Treating people unfairly because of these differences (or assumptions about the extent of those differences via stereotype pigeonholing) is.

by Lorento 11y ago

pluma 11y ago

Personally I find the entire "the holocaust was only about Jews" meme appalling. Yes, it disproportionally affected Jews, but it also affected a lot of non-Jews (as well as people who did not self-identify as Jews). Presenting it as a purely Jewish tragedy is disrespectful to all the non-Jewish victims. The more important thing is that it was about humans. Humans did these things to other humans. You should not feel any better about what happened if you're not personally related to any of those who caused the suffering than you should feel any less offended if you're not personally related to those who suffered. The Holocaust was a failure of humanity. As was every single genocide before and after that particular one. Turning it into a "Nazis killing Jews" story allows us to artificially distance ourselves from what happened: "I'm not a Nazi, so why should I care?" or "I have nothing against Jews, so what does it have to do with me?" ("I only hate gay people"). In Germany we have a huge problem with this. We pretend to have dealt with our history, but we vehemently oppose the idea that the "monsters" who committed that "great evil" were normal human beings. As if that would somehow make them innocent. It does quite the opposite, actually: acknowledging that it was "just" humans doing those things to humans can help us understand what made ordinary humans "like us" end up doing something that horrible to other ordinary humans. We're actually seeing something similar with East Germany: because everybody knows East Germany was an "Unrechtsstaat" (literally the opposite of a "Rechtsstaat", or "state of law", but also implying "organized injustice") their mass surveillance and censorship was fundamentally different from our mass surveillance and censorship. There's absolutely nothing we could learn from them because by definition we're nothing like them and any attempt to portray East German life as anything other than constant suffering and oppression "trivializes" the injustice of its government. Creating taboos around these problems doesn't solve them, it just hides them. The US hasn't solved its racism just because the current president has darker skin. Acknowledging physiological differences between sexes or even ethnic groups isn't sexist or racist. Treating people unfairly because of these differences (or assumptions about the extent of those differences via stereotype pigeonholing) is.