London teacher fined $717 for posting Hitler picture on Facebook: http://dlvr.it/8dgC4j
It gets worse:
Mahmudul Choudhury, 35, was reported to the police by a Jewish student who he had previously friended on the social networking site….
The Hitler photo shared by Choudhury was accompanied by the caption, “Yes man, you were right… I could have killed all the Jews, but I left some of them to let you know why I was killing them. Share this picture to tell the truth a whole world’.
sigh
This tag was found on a kosher store in Saint-Maur-des-Fosses (Ile-de-France).
Anti-Semitism today is the same as yesterday …it is the mask which changes!
Well, I think it’s cynical and fucked up of you to assert that exploiting the deaths and torture of millions of Jews, Romani and others victimized by genocide as motivation for Americans to get behind a war is justifiable.
Also the wording of your ask confuses me because I am all for the dehumanization of Hitler.
And I think you should use the submit option because the word limit makes it difficult for me to fully grasp what you are getting at.
This is a continuation of a conversation I had with another user the other day about how antisemitism is a big problem in Poland.
Yeah, that sounds really messed up. What business to goyim have running Jewish restaurants near a concentration camp from the Holocaust? The fact it’s a common trend over there also strikes me as messed up. it’s like they’re profiting off our genocide and suffering
It’s since been erased I think but this was written on a board in my hallway and I added the blue. But seriously. Terrifying.
The cultural figure of The Nazi is revealing.
The Nazi is powerful and accepts no bounds on his power. The Nazi has elegant taste in fashion, design, art and architecture. The Nazi is physically beautiful. The Nazi is unmitigatedly evil.
The Nazi is not real.
The Nazi is a character, an ideal villain for a movie or video game; an edgy outfit for the runway, the street or maybe Halloween; a rhetorical flourish for winning arguments. The perfection of the Nazi’s evil joined with his boundless might, refinement and beauty produces a perfect fantasy of taboo power and desire. While the taboo nature of the fantasy scares most people away from sincerely identifying with Nazis to the point of adopting Naziism, it does make the aesthetic of Naziism supremely attractive.
The Nazi is a profoundly gentile fantasy.
The Nazi does not exist for Jews, who carry in their communities the memory of the ghettoes, the train cars, the death camps, the depilation and tattooing, the showers, the furnaces, and the consumer goods made from our flesh, our fat, our hair. The Nazi does not exist for Jews, who in living memory saw a third of their population incinerated by Naziism. The Nazi does not exist for Jews, whose children, seventy years later are plagued with nightmares of uniformed men coming to kill them, or their family, or to take them away. The Nazi does not exist for Jews, who seventy years later are still confronted with death and destruction by this nightmare at our places of worship, our cemeteries and our community centers. The Nazi does not exist for Jews, who in the Diaspora must live alongside Nazis because our governments do not care, see them as useful tools, or tacitly – even openly – approve of their ideas and actions.
The Nazi does not exist for Jews because we are familiar with Nazis and Naziism in their naked, absolute reality.
But what exactly does The Nazi reveal? Certainly it demonstrates that most people lack in compassion for the victims of the Holocaust and their families. When presented with The Nazi, most people see a villainous character, an alluring taboo fantasy. For those peoples whose families and communities were decimated by the many genocides carried out within the Holocaust, we see a caricature of our suffering.
More specifically, The Nazi lays bare the antisemitic grain of society. In the Nazi mind the Jewish people are the ultimate evil, we are the people who open the gates to other undesirables into society so that we might degrade the master race in spirit and body such that it is weakened and ripened for Jewish dominance. The Final Solution, the Holocaust, was thus orchestrated not simply to cleanse Nazi-controlled lands of Untermenschen, but to annihilate world Jewry specifically. In the gentile mind, Nazis and Jews are an unbreakable dyad – one cannot be mentioned without reference to the other; the Holocaust and Jews are similarly unsplittable – the Porajmos, the mass-murder of Jesuits, various Slavic peoples, LGBT+ people and others classed as “subhumans” are not what most people have in mind when the Holocaust is mentioned, but the Shoah nearly always is (Jews, incidentally, are well aware that it was a mixed-multitude liberated from the camps). Therefore, the Nazi is not merely a caricature of the suffering of those who endured the Holocaust, but a slap in the face of those who numerically bore the brunt of the Nazi’s program of extermination designed specifically to wipe us from existence and grind our memory to dust.
The gentile fantasy of The Nazi – wherever it appears, whoever expresses it – demonstrates gentiles’ inability to experience compassion for Jews in the capacity we are Jewish. Stripped of everything, enslaved, burned to ashes, rendered for soap, in the moment of our most acute suffering we continue to be alien, inhuman in that we are Jewish. Seventy years after a genocide we have only begun to recover from, the image of The Nazi set against the sustained reality of Naziism is a reminder that we are welcome nowhere in the Diaspora. It is a reminder that there is no gentile-dominated state, no nation, no class, no people. no party, no organization that does not see Jews as essentially foreign, unassimilable to its composition.
The Nazi demonstrates that The Jew – another infamous character in gentile fantasy – is condemned to wander, and must always have the bags packed.
this really touches on a lot of what is going on in Lady Gaga’s Alejandro video: the fetishization of the taboo Nazi aesthetic.
So people brought up the Nazi imagery in Lady Gaga’s Alejandro and I thought it was worth discussing. The people who brought it up obviously didn’t care about Jews or Romani or Nazism, they did it only to silence us about Minaj’s video (i.e. you don’t care about Lady Gaga since she’s white!) Which I find funny because as much as tumblr hates Lady Gaga and has discussed how problematic she is I haven’t ONCE seen goyim SJ bring up the Nazi imagery or antisemitism/anti-romani sentiment in that video-and then they only decide to bring it up just to silence us because they don’t otherwise care? Cute.
Also the video is over four years old at this point—and all the other examples I saw people bring up are also old—but some of them have been discussed before (for example, I’ve had critical discussions about Harry Potter’s and Agent of Shield’s Nazi references). In 2010 tumblr was even worse about addressing antisemitism, so of course you didn’t see anything about Alejandro.
ANYWAY, to be perfectly honest I didn’t notice the Nazi imagery when the video came out. I was much less versed in antisemitism/anti-romani sentiment and Nazism then than I am now. Also, the video is A LOT more subtle than Nicki Minaj’s. While Nicki Minaj’s video literally mimics Nazi propaganda videos, with banners and clearly visible arm bands and military imagery mirroring Nazis exactly, Alejandro is less cohesive and more subtly evokes Nazi aesthetic. But once you notice it, it becomes obvious. I’d also like to bring up the fact the video DID cause an uproar…for it’s appropriation of Catholic religious imagery. So again that shows you the media’s priorities. To be fair, that imagery is more overt than the Nazi imagery.
Now for the video analysis.
One of the first very obvious Nazi references in the video is the high stepping—that is reminiscent of the Nazi “goose-step” – but it only lasts a few seconds and is only preformed by the man in front
Compare to the Nazi goose step.
Like in the video, one man leads in front.
Other armies have used the goosestep, but it’s most strongly associated with Nazis because it emphasized their uniformity and conformity. It is even thought to have played a role in brainwashing people as doing tasks in unison encourages conformity.
The aesthetic of their clothes is reminiscent to Nazis:
I missed this the first time I watched the video, but you can see that dude is wearing a red armband in the darkness.
After several viewings I also made one out on this guy:
The arm band in the first picture might not seem so subtle—but this shot lasts less than second and this dude is only shown twice in the video in the corner of the frame and the lighting is very dark. Again, this is subtler and much easier to miss than in Nicki Minaj’s video.
The back up dancers’ haircuts also look like Hitler youth cuts:
But there’s also a lot of really unrelated imagery in the video. Like her nun-esque out fit and rosary weirdness and stripping and boob guns?
Plus these random bellbottoms??
The video also combines Nazi imagery with steampunk which garbles it a bit more:
However, she also combines it with S&M which is a common association with Nazism among kinksters and pornographers.
Then she gets this weird cat-walking army that wear clothes vaguely reminiscent of Nazi uniforms.
(this man is wearing a replica of a nazi uniform)
So yeah, in a word, like usual Lady Gaga is trash and in this video decided instead of appropriating PoC to use Nazi images. What’s worse about it is the video very much promotes Nazi imagery as sexy and cool. It’s subtle so that the connection can be subliminal. Some people have these weird fetishes/sexual associations with Nazism and this video reinforces those in a subtle, subconscious way that is actually very alarming and dangerous. The Nazi imagery appears to be dark and seductive, edgy and interesting—which disturbing to say the least.
So add being antisemitic, anti-romani and romanticizing Nazism onto Lady Gaga’s list of fuckery.
stand up for jews everywhere. call nicki out on this. tweet at her telling her that what she did was wrong. we are constantly erased. antisemitism is constantly erased. that’s not ok. do not sweep this under the rug and act like it isn’t a huge…
Yeah please don’t forget that the nazis targeted homosexuals, disabled people, black people, roma & sinti and communists too! Jewish people where of course a primary target but don’t forget that they ultimately hated everyone who wasn’t a straight, cis, able-bodied ‘aryan’.
Please don’t add this commentary to posts about Jews and Rroma. Our two cultures were almost entirely destroyed. It’s not the same.
You know I’m real fucking sick of people on tumblr comparing different people’s suffering. Like enough already, all suffering is suffering, no matter how worse. Btw Jewish people have been persecuted for two thousand years. Slavery lasted for several hundred years! Are Jewish people worse off? Does the suffering of slaves wash away because Jewish people had worse? No. So can we stop?
Hey is this your conversation? No? Then leave. You don’t know what you’re talking about.
This isn’t about comparing suffering, but I do have to say that it bothers me how you reacted because in so many cases discussions about WW2
and Nazi crimes are only about the Holocaust. Don’t get me wrong, I think that is a hugely, if not the most important part of it. But I specifically mentioned Roma & Sinti in my post only to have you tell me not to mention this in a post about Jews and Rroma? I respect the opinions of the people involved in most cases but here I really have to say that my small comment is not an insult to the bigger picture & as the video makes mostly references to the Nazis themselves and not primarily to the camps it is a good moment to remind everyone that there where more victims than the Jews.except literally every time Jews and Rroma talk about the holocaust, someone comes in “but what about the other people?” like no, stop, we are the only people who learn from a young age how to recognize even the most obscure nazi imagery in order to be safe. Like 2/3 of the European Jewry was wiped out and a higher fraction of the Rroma population. It is about us, we were “the Problem” that needed “the Final Solution”
what connection do non-jewish, non-romani lgbt and disabled people who don’t live or didn’t grow up in countries occupied by nazis have to the holocaust? little to none. just like american women have little to no connection to genital mutilation in other countries, and gay ppl in the US have little to no connection to homosexuality laws in Uganda. it’s not part of your culture or history. this is why queer ppl wearing the pink triangle is fucking offensive. y’all try to reclaim shit that happened in other cultural contexts as “queer history” or “disabled history” and it ignores cultural divides. i’d argue lgbt and disabled people who live in or are from germany or other countries subjected to or involved with nazi concentration camps may have a connection to this history—but those outside these cultures? no.
meanwhile, jews like me are americans because our grandparents and great grandparents immigrated here to escape the holocaust. many of us have family members who were killed. it’s not at all comparable whatsoever. there’s a reason why jews and roma recognize nazi imagery and fear nazis on a level many other groups implicated by the holocaust do not. we were also the only groups targeted by true genocide: nazis had the explicit aim to eradicate us as groups and we were sent to extermination camps en masse and often killed on sight. this is not true of most other groups persecuted in nazi germany.
Regarding this post:
Well, in the US Jews are usually seen as white—not always, though—and it didn’t used to be that way. Earlier in US history Jews were not racialized as white at all. We became more and more assimilated into whiteness later on, I’d argue in part to buttress the United States’ narrative about being antithetical to Nazi Germany and the savior of the world in WWII). Whiteness is a strange construct. It differs from place to place. Overtime, Jews have become more and more assimilated into whiteness in the US, but it wasn’t always that way. Racial Others are oppressed if they are not racialized as white. Most people in the US are pretty uncomplicatedly white or PoC, but Jews occupy a weird space in-between, where we are mostly seen as white, but are seen by Neo-Nazis and white supremacists as enemies to the white race—also, there are situations where we are still racialized as other. But I would argue that most of the time in the US we are racialized as white.
HOWEVER, Jews are not racialized as white in Europe to this day and they certainly were NOT racialized as white in NazI Germany. That’s what that second quote is about. People continue to act like Jews are an example of white victims of genocide when this completely contradicts the history of antisemitism in Europe and how Nazis and Europeans racialized Jews. Nazis wanted to purify their country by killing or phasing out non-white others. Their entire goal was to exterminate or cordon off undesirables. Jews were at the top of that list. They also targeted Romani and sterilized Black children. Nazis were enamored with the Aryan I.E. white race. Nazi ideology is white supremacist ideology. It’s also colonialist ideology: they saw the entire world as the German Empire and other countries as arbitrary lines in the sand of their Fatherland meant to be erased.
It baffles me to be honest, that people continually act like Jews were white victims when all of the Nazis’ rhetoric was all about white supremacy and the pure white Aryan race. Their whole system of determining who was Jewish or not came down to blood: how many grandparents you had who were Jewish. And the Holocaust did not poof into existence out of nowhere. Pogroms, oppression, executions, segregation, and discrimination toward Jews happened throughout European history leading up to the Holocaust. All of this is tied to white supremacy in Europe. In the US, they don’t teach this. Probably partially due to the fact that US invented eugenics and race science, which Nazis derived their ideology from. And also because the US doesn’t care about Jews and also has their hands dirty when it comes to the history of antisemitism. They just care about teaching WWII in a way that makes the US look good. And I’d argue the assimilation of Jews into whiteness is part of that narrative.
That in a nutshell was what I meant.
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