it minimizes what happened, it pretends what happened was simple, solitary, not an enormous breakdown of culture and humanity but just, like, some racism that got out of hand and aren't we glad that's over?
THAT IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO SAY FOR WEEKS NOW.
you are a genius. it's like the problem i have with the fetishization of hitler - yeah. sucks. dude was a bad man. but it wasn't just hitler - one person alone could not have done what happened. and i think people want to forget that, because they want to think it can be isolated into "good" and "evil". i've often said WWII is the closest thing to a war we've had with a clear cut "good" and "evil" and that's why we like it so much - certainly WWI, korea, etc. not to mention all the wars before (hello, crusades!) are so murky in their inceptions and motivations that we don't like to think about them. or we try to paint them in a way that makes it fall into that dichotomy
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I think there is a real danger in allowing an event or era to belong to just one community, or just one person -- the Jews claimed the Holocaust, and it allows this self-segregation and fetishization of persecution, where it defines Jewish culture and makes defensiveness and accusations the default response to all criticism. Stuff like that, it invites discrimination against the group claiming the history, and it marginalizes the experiences of other groups.
Er, I'm a little confused by this. Are you saying that the results of Jewish people claiming the Holocaust are Jewish people fetishizing their own persecution, defining their culture by it and responding to criticism (presumably by non-Jews) with accusations and defensiveness?
tangent of a question: do post-holocaust jewish converts get to claim the holocaust to the same extent that jews whose ancestors were threatened and/or killed by it do? to the extent that the holocaust can be possessed by the jews as a nation (which i question, because i agree with the above comment - it's oversimplification to the point of danger), is it related to blood relation to its victims or to modern identity with the group?
what i find interesting is that the conception of "the holocaust", the way we have it today, especially with american jews, is very different from the way it was conceived in say, 1950. there are a lot of political reasons for this involving the fact that suddenly western germany was separate from east germany and oh, the fights over berlin! but
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Oh, I think it is definitely used as a tool. There are a lot of things that make me uneasy about Jewish culture (outside of the religion), the biggest being the fact that it's largely based on victimization and privilege as a result of that victimization, which is manipulative and, quite frankly, racist -- there's this idea that your membership in a particular race/religion alone entitles you to something -- and also kind of irrelevant at this point. How long are we going to operate on the assumption that Jews are endangered as a result of the Holocaust? And what effect does that assumption have on Jewish people, and non-Jewish people? Is it really a helpful or right assumption anymore?
Because to be honest, I think the the Holocaust, or the ideas of the Holocaust, affect gays, women, and the mentally ill far more than they affect Jews right now. Those groups are still fighting for full citizenship, for the right to be protected, to make decisions about their own bodies, to make decisions about their own lives -- are those
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Oh, I think it is definitely used as a tool. There are a lot of things that make me uneasy about Jewish culture (outside of the religion), the biggest being the fact that it's largely based on victimization and privilege as a result of that victimizationUm, whoa
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this is really, really interesting, actually and i'm glad you brought it up. i took a course in WWII (which is kind of my time period) from the preeminent japanese historian in the us. it was eye-opening, because we looked at the history of the war in a completely different way than i have ever been taught before - each week, we looked at how the war affected/interacted/etc. with a different country. we started with germany and ended with the us, but in between we did everything from france to ethiopia to japan to singapore. it was absolutely fascinating. i did a project on Unit 721 (man, i think that's it), which was the japanese equivalent of mengele's concentration camp experiments - except worse, if you can put this stuff on spectrum. i mean, they were fucking twisted
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the thing is, we tend to ignore the pacific war. (do you know how many times the war has been renamed?
I've never even been sure that the Pacific war should be considered part of Hitler's War, because it wasn't at all, politically. It was just one of those confluence of events things. And WWII is Hitler's War.
That's another question, too: we don't want to forget history, but to what uses are we putting it, so that the memories are doing some good for the future? For instance, right now what's the story that's really being told about "the greatest generation," and to what end?
how can we counteract the concept of collective forgetting, and create collective remembering, in an age of personal history.
To do any good, I think it would have to be collective, in that an entire society would have to come together to remember collectively. Then again, that sort of thing builds incredibly strong bonds, but it also fosters nationalism is all it's lesser forms. Double-edged sword and all that.
Especially while living in England, my 'german' history was considered very shameful by others, yet to me, it's always been quite the oposite. My grandfather was sent to the Russian front, where they sent those whom they assumed were not sympathisers with the regime. By a miracle, he was one of the few who survived. When the war was declared over, he and his friend walked back to the far south of Germany at night to avoid being taken prisoners of war.
How could the history of my German grandfather be any more shameful than that of my English one? I simply fail to see it, and find it wrong that people assume that I should disown the stories from one side of my family purely because of their nationality. How is that right?
So I'm afraid that no. I can't help you with your conundrum. I think we have to decide for ourselves what our history is.
When I was in Hebrew school, we were taught that 11 million people were killed in the Holocaust and six million of those were Jews. Or, in other words: we were the majority, but we weren't the only ones, and this was a problem for Jews, but also for many other people in the world.
I don't think you're taking anything away from this by self-identifying. If anything, I think you're contributing things that are very important.
a) i think it's awesome your hebrew school mentioned the others murdered, because they were, and too many books just skip over the fact.
b) i think i've been thinking about eli weisel's "the holocaust is unique" contention along with his "it belongs only to the jews" belief a little too hard.
c) i also think i am seriously craving a historiography course. when i get my americorps grant, i think i might just take one.
d) it's funny because you don't really think of the concept of "owning" history - or memory or anything really intangible like that - until you are accused of being insensitive toward the people it really belongs to. (this hasn't happened to me, i am just saying.)
i think i've been thinking about eli weisel's "the holocaust is unique" contention along with his "it belongs only to the jews" belief a little too hard.See, I would absolutely disagree with the "it belongs only to the Jews", because I think that does obscure the experience of the disabled, Roma/Sinti, gay and lesbian people, and the various other groups targeted
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Yes, there were white Irish slaves and forced laborers shipped to the Caribbean in the 17th century, and there were white indentured servants in the US. That history is real too, and their descendants "own" it as part of their heritage.
And one of the facts lost in this is that there may have been more Scots sent to forced labour than Irish. Unfortunately, the Irish experience is better known.
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THAT IS WHAT I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO SAY FOR WEEKS NOW.
you are a genius. it's like the problem i have with the fetishization of hitler - yeah. sucks. dude was a bad man. but it wasn't just hitler - one person alone could not have done what happened. and i think people want to forget that, because they want to think it can be isolated into "good" and "evil". i've often said WWII is the closest thing to a war we've had with a clear cut "good" and "evil" and that's why we like it so much - certainly WWI, korea, etc. not to mention all the wars before (hello, crusades!) are so murky in their inceptions and motivations that we don't like to think about them. or we try to paint them in a way that makes it fall into that dichotomy ( ... )
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Er, I'm a little confused by this. Are you saying that the results of Jewish people claiming the Holocaust are Jewish people fetishizing their own persecution, defining their culture by it and responding to criticism (presumably by non-Jews) with accusations and defensiveness?
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Because to be honest, I think the the Holocaust, or the ideas of the Holocaust, affect gays, women, and the mentally ill far more than they affect Jews right now. Those groups are still fighting for full citizenship, for the right to be protected, to make decisions about their own bodies, to make decisions about their own lives -- are those ( ... )
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I've never even been sure that the Pacific war should be considered part of Hitler's War, because it wasn't at all, politically. It was just one of those confluence of events things. And WWII is Hitler's War.
That's another question, too: we don't want to forget history, but to what uses are we putting it, so that the memories are doing some good for the future? For instance, right now what's the story that's really being told about "the greatest generation," and to what end?
how can we counteract the concept of collective forgetting, and create collective remembering, in an age of personal history.
To do any good, I think it would have to be collective, in that an entire society would have to come together to remember collectively. Then again, that sort of thing builds incredibly strong bonds, but it also fosters nationalism is all it's lesser forms. Double-edged sword and all that.
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If you lost family in the holocaust, no one - truly - will be offended if you call it part of your personal history.
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How could the history of my German grandfather be any more shameful than that of my English one? I simply fail to see it, and find it wrong that people assume that I should disown the stories from one side of my family purely because of their nationality. How is that right?
So I'm afraid that no. I can't help you with your conundrum. I think we have to decide for ourselves what our history is.
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I don't think you're taking anything away from this by self-identifying. If anything, I think you're contributing things that are very important.
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b) i think i've been thinking about eli weisel's "the holocaust is unique" contention along with his "it belongs only to the jews" belief a little too hard.
c) i also think i am seriously craving a historiography course. when i get my americorps grant, i think i might just take one.
d) it's funny because you don't really think of the concept of "owning" history - or memory or anything really intangible like that - until you are accused of being insensitive toward the people it really belongs to. (this hasn't happened to me, i am just saying.)
e) where is my drabble????
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i think i've been thinking about eli weisel's "the holocaust is unique" contention along with his "it belongs only to the jews" belief a little too hard.See, I would absolutely disagree with the "it belongs only to the Jews", because I think that does obscure the experience of the disabled, Roma/Sinti, gay and lesbian people, and the various other groups targeted ( ... )
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And one of the facts lost in this is that there may have been more Scots sent to forced labour than Irish. Unfortunately, the Irish experience is better known.
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