Holocaust Remembrance Day

Thank you for this post Lou. This is truly a day to solidify the idea that we are all one in this world. That hate and prejudice have no place in this country and the world entire. However this presidency plays out, and it's unsettling and disheartening so far, we understand that history teaches us one thing: tolerance.

 

So Trump is Hitler, because he didn't mention Jews, although the Holocaust is a genocide of the Jews - which should have been evident to anyone.

It would be empty virtue singling anyway without mentioning the fact that not only Jews were victims the Holocaust but the Romani too, with maybe up to a million of them murdered.

The Romani were extremely poor people, so nobody came to their rescue, nobody helped them, not even opera-loving sisters. And of course nobody remembers them today.

And not all Jews were targeted anyway, the Karaite - descendants of rabbinic Jews with their back to basics Judaism were excluded, and Jewish citizens of neutral countries, and for example Jewish officers of the Polish Army.

 

Don't think that post said anything about Trump being Hitler.

 

Well, as you point out with the Jews, not all of the Romani(gypsies) were targeted by the Nazis.

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005219

Umm, proper Karaite Jews were not targeted, simply because they could not be targeted. They were living in Egypt, Turkey, and Iraq at the time. You seem to have latched on to the Karaylar-Karaite/Crimean-Karaite Jews...All, at the time, 18 of them living in German controlled territory.

Further, the Karaylar-Karaite Jews were not given a completely "free pass" either. They still had to submit to German ancestry and racial biological tests to prove that they were indeed free of Jewish "blood."

Gee, were not the Germans nice not to target American Jews, or Ethiopian Jews, or Palestinian Jews, or etc.

It is impossible to target Jews in territories the Nazis did not control.

 

It should have been Jewish citizens of neutral countries living in Germany and occupied territories. Only in Poland there were hundreds of them.

After Soviets recaptured Crimea in 1944, they counted 6,357 Karaites there.

 

Meh...Karaylar-Karaite Jews among those Jews massacred at Babi-Yar and other places in the Ukraine.

 

Trump's main advisor, Steve Bannon, runs white supremacist sites, believes in that direction, and also has anti-Semitic areas on his sites and different works.

 

He wouldn't let his son go to a certain private school because Jewish kids went there as well.

 

Do you have any examples?
I think you will be surprised how hard it is to find them.

It would be easier to blame Bannon and his ilk for their rabid pro-Israeli, pro-settlers stance.

But do you know that Trump's daughter Ivanka has converted to Orthodox Judaism? Not the usual liberal or Reform or Conservative Judaism. But the real-deal Orthodox Judaism.
And that his grandson is circumcised and raised as a Jew?

Jewish Trump's advisers:
- Jason Greenblatt,
- David Friedman,
- Jared Kushner,
- Boris Epshteyn,
- Stephen Miller,
- Steven Mnuchin,
- Lewis Eisenberg,
- Michael Glassner,
- Ivanka Trump.

 

Well said Otto. Hence the two party apparatus in the US continues to rotate off its axis. The "I am superior" mentality helps no one, least of all one's beliefs on the current political landscape. I'm on the left but am aware of the political media posturing by my own party can spread misinformation to the masses. We should not, wherever your allegiance, use conjecture and falsehood to support our beliefs.

 

This is an interesting article.... Semi-related to American policy as of late and Trump's strong-man authoritarian stance.

http://johnpilger.com/articles/why-the-rise-of-fascism-is-again-the-issue

 

You can't deny Steve Bannon's white supremacists leanings. Breitbart is his site.

 

The end justifies the means. Just because someone is "something" doesn't mean that they can have views that go against that "something." I'm a born and raised Catholic. I have mixed feelings about the Catholic church, and in certain situations, depending on what the solution, end, to something would affect the Catholicism in general does not bother me nor would affect my opinion or decision on a given situation. Some groups use Christianity or religion as a political weapon to sucker votes out of people when they don't believe it but pander it to the masses who do. Some people use religion to sway influence or opinion to gain something when they might not be whole-heatedly behind what they are selling.

 

That's my point. Just because someone is Jewish or gay, doesn't mean that they have to sway to a certain belief. They could use their status as a means to achieve some other end that may go against someone's set of morals or the morals of their group.

 

And for American Fascism, look up the story of Marine General Smedley Butler, and that says it all.

 

Its John Pilger so there is a strong anti- american slant.

I am ambivalent about Trump's Holocaust day statement. It was wrong to explicitly mention the Jews as victims. However, he did draw attention to the fact that there were an awful lot more civilian victims of than the six million European Jews exterminated by the Nazi final solution.

Civilian losses in WW2 are estimated as C 50 million of which a half died from war related disease and famine and the other 25 million from military action. The extermination programme started with Operation Barbarossa in the context of a campaign where soldiers were released from the normal laws of war, political officers shot out of hand and with wider aims of enslaving the rural population and starving urban Russians. The Germans inflicted half a holocaust on Soviet prisoners of War. Some 3.3 million soviet PW (60%) are estimated to have died in captivity. (Karlshorst Museum)

However, the trend seems to be for Holocaust to be positioned as the central event of WW2 and Jewish suffering elevated in public consciousness to the exclusion of all others . There is ample money for holocaust memorials and museums across the world. In the UK the government announced £35m for a new permanent holocaust museum. That is more money than has been spend commemorating the centenary anniversaries of WW1, Waterloo 200, Agincourt 600 and Magna Carta 800 put together. Around 15% of the existing floor space of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) is already given over to a substantial holocaust exhibition over two floors, with a single small room for exhibitions about other genocides of the C20th. Britain had at the most a peripheral role in the holocaust, but a much larger one in the management of the Palestine mandate - which gets a single case in the basement ! As an occasional lobbyist for the cause of battlefield preservation I raised this disparity with politicians and the director general of the IWM and was told that the money had been donated to the UK for this purpose.