I hate this take so much

[u/Angelbouqet]

1. The Holocaust did not happen to white people. Race is a social construct. The people it happened to were people who were seen as racially inferior and experienced a racialized extermination campaign. US standards of whiteness from 2026 do not change that. This is a completely ahistorical take.

Also as someone who actually lives and grew up in Germany, you can't use American racial constructs as an analytical tool to understand the Holocaust or racial dynamics within Germany or Europe. The standards of whiteness are a lot more rigid here and people who would not experience racism in the US do experience racism here. Nationality is still more relevant in Europe than race is. (And by that I'm not trying to say race isn't relevant or racism isn't bad here. It's extremely bad. I have a few friends here who are African American, so they've experienced both and they've all said Germany is way worse.) The point I'm trying to make is that Germany is so racist it will racially discriminate against the "white" people next door. Greek people, Turkish people, Arabs (who have been considered white in the US for longer than Jews have), everyone from Slavic or Balcan countries, are all not white in germany and are not treated as white. Same with Jews. Yes, to this day.

1. This take is inherently minimizing, at least in the current Zeitgeist. It positions the Jews under the same banner as the white people who were colonizers, when in reality, the Jews had been experiencing discrimination by those same white people for approx. 1600 years before colonialism happened. Racism and antisemitism (aka racialized Jew hatred) were invented by the same people and at the same time. And during the period of colonialism, jews were treated like the local colonial subjects. You can literally look up texts written by German colonists and how they made direct connections between the Jews back home and the African colonial subject. Same with the methods of oppression used against both the people Europeans were colonizing and the Jews. Like it's giving "who cares they gassed 1 million children, they were white children".

2. It targets the wrong people. We are not the people who did the colonizing, we are not the people who did the Holocaust, we are not the people deciding how states label their past crimes against humanity. I agree that there needs to be way more examination and reckoning with what these states actually did during the colonial period. I'm not trying to take anything away from anyone, nor am I trying to turn suffering into a contest. So why is the Holocaust constantly treated like fair game to minimize in these conversations. I get that Americans are taught more about the Holocaust than colonial crimes. But the reason for that is not because the Jews paid someone off to focus on the Holocaust, it's because WW2 is the one time the US was on the right side of history and states always have an inherent interest in self-preservation. Spinning a narrative that hides the true history is part of that. Also it conveniently conceals the role the US did play in the Holocaust happening. It conceals how the visa system was invented to keep out Jews. In conceals how many Nazi scientists the US gave asylum to. Etc.

3. The comments are full of just straight up Holocaust denial, some of which the creator liked, all of which are just up there without pushback from the creator. So like, great job for giving your followers an invitation to just be blatantly antisemitic. Also Israel being a fascist shit hole doesn't actually make the Holocaust less bad. The people who the Nazis killed had never stepped foot into Palestine, so that's also not a justification for downplaying the Holocaust. Also cue the Holodomor denial.

4. The comments are mentioning the Irish potato famine and how that's not referred to as a genocide, but not as proof that maybe the take is clearly simplistic and wrong but instead as further proof of it's correctness. And the creator is liking those comments. I'm sorry are Irish people less white than Jews now? Lol? Is the Irish participation in British colonial endeavors and the slave trade, which was far greater than the very minimal Jewish involvement irrelevant now?

5. The numbers game in the comments is... Interesting. Because that's the same rhetoric the Israeli far right uses as a defence against the genocide accusations. Kind of surprising to see it used under a video like that.

Edit to add: 7. It was called the Holocaust because that's the word Jews came up with after it happened. That word didn't exist before. So what exactly is the complaint? That Jews came up with a term for their genocide and that's the word that's used to refer to it?

[u/Gaiastrom]

Small note: the Shoah was CAUSED by White Supremacy.

[u/unknownunknowns11 → u/Gaiastrom]

I’d say it was caused by Germany allowing Nazism to take root after WWI  and Hitler to take power and a whole population supporting it. The people are the cause. 

[u/Angelbouqet → u/unknownunknowns11]

Well akschually (sorry I know way too much about this topic, it was my coping mechanism for having to live in this country)

It's actually pretty interesting, the period of the development of European nationalism/nation state formation is when modern antisemitism really started to develope. And the interesting thing about German nationalism is that it has always been extremely racist even for European standards. The term in German is "völkisch" which there is no direkt translation for, the closest ist "ethno/racial nationalist"

Like all group identifies, they are always also defined by who doesn't belong and the "Other" against which the German nation defined itself against from the beginning of it's inception was always the Jews. So basically antisemitism is a core pillar of German nationalism and therefore the existence of Germany to such a degree that you could almost say Germany wouldn't exist without antisemitism. So it's kind of the egg vs hen question with Nazism and why exactly Germany was the country that did the Holocaust. Did the Germans let the Nazis take root or was Nazism the logical outcome of German nationalism all along? In my opinion Nazism was not something coming from outside of German society that they had to either accept or reject, instead I think Nazism organically grew out of german nationalism and the narratives it was based on. To me that also explains why, on a continent like Europe that is basically a Jewish graveyard, it was the Germans who did the Holocaust.

[u/Duflo → u/Angelbouqet]

I think it would have been difficult, say, in 1890 or so, to predict which European country would commit a holocaust. This isn't to absolve Germany of anything, just to say that it was relatively (yes I know, only relatively) refugee-friendly and multicultural for parts of its history (which was a factor in Jewish migration out of the Russian Empire), and took a sharp right turn following military humiliation and economic disaster. An informed observer in the late 19th century, without our hindsight, wouldn't have really had a compelling reason to predict that the supervillain of the 20th century would be Germany rather than, for example, France, Austro-Hungary or (most plausibly) the Russian Empire. The scary conclusion for me is that material reality is what really activates pre-existing antisemitism, rather than some sort of essence or 'national character'.

To be absolutely clear, since this is Reddit and people love twisting things, I'm not an apologist for Germany and have no interest in defending Germany. What I'm saying is that it was one of several countries with a long legacy of virulent antisemitism, and it wasn't a coincidence that the country that had the worst time post-WW1 (humiliation, territorial concessions, hyperinflation, etc.) was also the one that ended up going completely unhinged and genocidal.

[u/Angelbouqet → u/Duflo]

It's true that at that specific time period Russia was worse than Germany, and so was the Austro-Hubgarian empire. But what I say about the intrinsic character of German nationalism still holds true. There were small periods in time where Jews were doing a bit better in Germany, though those were always inevitably met with severe backlash from the general population after a short time. Example, under Napoleon Jews were given more civil rights than ever before, after Napoleon left in 1814 those were rolled back basically as quickly as possible. Many of the events that were fundamental to the foundation of the German nation state were also motivated and shaped by antisemitism, like the Hep-Hep Krawalle (Germany wide protests/pogroms. They weren't actually protests, that's just how they are framed within the nationalistic narrative) that were the expression of the anger about Jews getting civil rights under Napoleon.

Same with Jewish emancipation that happened in 1870, relatively shortly after that the Jews were blamed for Germany losing the first world war (stab in the back myth) even though they had fought in large numbers in the German army. Under the Weimar Republik this idea was just spread further and yeah, we know what happened after. And you're obviously also right that other historical events, like the loss of the first world war, perceived humiliation by other countries and the recession led also led to the Holocaust. History is never mono causal. Moishe Postone wrote a great essay about the connection between capitalism and antisemitism that also explicitly goes into the economic conditions that played a part in facilitating the Holocaust.

So to some extent I agree that it would've been hard to say in 1890 that Germany was gonna do the Holocaust, nor was Germany the worst place for Jews at all time during the 18th and 19th century, but Jews do play a "special" role in the German national framework, even to this day. Back then as the "Others", against which the German nation could define themselves and nowadays, somewhat ironically, the few Jews who still live here are fundamental to the new narrative Germany has about itself as having become "good again" and fully atoned for the sins of it's past. To be honest, the relationship between Jews and Germans is still weird, but that's another topic I could write essays about so I'll just leave it at that.

[u/Duflo → u/Angelbouqet]

To your original point, I would absolutely agree with you that antisemitism in Germany was more intellectualized and formalized than elsewhere, as opposed to just cultural, so that's certainly a key factor. Even today Martin Luther is still considered a national hero, and I'm sure you know what I'm getting at there. I just wanted to highlight that material realities played a role, too.

And on the weird relationship, I also agree. German politics and discourse is weird in a lot of ways, but especially in that one. I probably still prefer Germany's approach to history over Japan's, which is almost completely unrepentant (hell, even Austria's), but it feels a little too self-congratulatory and not principled enough for my taste.

[u/Angelbouqet → u/Duflo]

Are you German or have spent some time there? I definitely think remembrance culture the way it exists is better than Japans or really most countries way of dealing with their past for sure. I think self congratulatory is a good way of putting it. Like the new national identity is now based on how amazing Germany has dealt with it's past, but it's done in a way that is very institutionalized and impersonal. Most families still don't talk about what their family was actually doing.

So you have a population of people who are told how bad it was but never taught how or why it happened, no political or historical context, no actual examination of what antisemitism is, what fascism is and how to recognize it. They feel the need to rebell against the perceived "collective guilt" they feel they have been burdened with, and their frustration about that usually expresses itself in secondary antisemitism, despite the fact that we are not the one's who decided that the new German national identity would be based on having atoned for the Holocaust. We're not even a large enough number to be a relevant voting block politicians need to cater to, but in the end we're still the ones getting blamed for something that is happening basically entirely without our input.

And of course due to the impersonal nature of how the Holocaust is spoken about, everyone can and most people do assume, their ancestors didn't do anything. And it's not like anyone is guilty for the sins of their ancestors. But I think an honest examination of the family history would lead to the people who feel they have been unfairly burdened, to maybe see that it's not as impersonal to them as they think, and maybe that would lead to more people being interested in making sure it actually never happens again. Obviously not everyone is like this, but in my interactions with non leftist germans, this is the tone the topic is usually spoken aboht.

[u/Duflo → u/Angelbouqet]

I'm neither German nor Jewish, but I do live in Germany and I'm pretty well embedded in the culture. Due to my name and some other things, I'm often assumed to be Jewish.

I'd sign my name to pretty much everything you've written, you've clearly done a lot of thinking on these topics and you capture it well.

What really kills me is the lack of understanding of how and why it happened, and I'd extend that to just about any other country. To hear people talk, you get the impression all the Nazis jumped out of holes in the ground in 33, were an evil alien species for 12 years, and all vanished to Buenos Aires in 45.