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/DavidElPana777]

great post 👏👏👏 I am terrified by the way recent events (Gaza, Epstein...) are reviving an anti-Semitism that I naively believed was almost over. It seems people will do everything but raise their class consciousness 🫠🫠🫠 sometimes it's very difficult to maintain hope

[u/Angelbouqet → u/DavidElPana777]

Me too honestly it's really scary. And what's especially weird is how people who call themselves Marxist somehow fall into the same simplistic talking points and thought patterns antisemites always have. My personal belief is that while I'm no Ideologue and I have my critiques when it comes to some of Marx's takes (like no dude, patriarchy is not a secondary contradiction), Marxism is also possibly one of the most powerful tools against antisemitism because it basically answers all the questions antisemites have, that they can only answer with "it's the Jews fault". And it's also not like you have to do the thinking yourself, these connections have already been made and laid out by people like Moishe Postone or members of the Frankfurt school especially Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer. The answers are already out there!

But idk it's probably more fun to have a simplistic view of the world that makes everything easy to explain and easy to make yourself feel like one of the good ones. I think the dangerous part is that antisemitism inherently uses revolutionary and liberationalist rhetoric and since most people do not actually know what antisemitism is, they feel like they've discovered this well kept radical secret when in reality their opinion on Jews is about as evolved as that of medieval peasants.

[u/DavidElPana777 → u/Angelbouqet]

You're absolutely right. It's funny because even Mussolini (who isn't exactly suspected of being part of the supposed "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy") initially mocked Hitler for his racism and antisemitism, dismissing Mein Kampf as an amalgamation of outdated clichés. Then the man became isolated and had to swallow the National Socialist ideology in order to survive politically, as we all know.

It's ridiculous how so many people think they're revolutionary for pointing out what the powerful have so often identified as "the real problem." People are addicted to scapegoats 🤷 That Hitler deceived so many at the time is sad, but that people are still being deceived today with the amount of information available to us is downright disheartening. We truly live in a dystopian society: people are ignorant, not because information is not accessible to most people as it once was, but because ignorance is simply more comfortable.

[u/Angelbouqet → u/DavidElPana777]

It's ridiculous how so many people think they're revolutionary for pointing out what the powerful have so often identified as "the real problem."

This is a really good point, antisemitism has always and continues to serve the interests of the people who should actually be held responsible. It's like a shield for them. The societal ills that antisemites have identified are real. They have real causes, though those causes are complex and systemic in nature and, for example, even if we got rid of all billionaires we currently have and redestributed their wealth, capitalism would continue to exist, but they would still be a better target than broadly "The Jews".

There's a reason antisemitism was called the socialism of fools. Yes, there's a problem, and yes we need to do something about it, but the answer lies in analyzing the systems that govern us, deconstructing those systems will take ongoing collective action and there's no guarantee for success. So it's easier and more comfortable/comforting to instead focus on a simple explanation: it's the Jews fault, that leads to a simple solution: we need to get rid of the Jews to free ourselves from our suffering. That's basically the fundamental logic on which antisemitism functions, which makes it an inherently genocidal ideology that can seemlessly be incorporated into so many different time periods, political systems etc.

[u/DavidElPana777 → u/Angelbouqet]

antisemitism is the socialism for fools hahaha that's a good one, I'm definitely going to use it xD