Thread by @tamanosou

Sooooo .... during the Holocaust the third reich had two pretty awful policies which I want to say a few words about.

1. they made it basically illegal for Jewish people to have nationality
and
2. they were all about "living room" for Germans and used that to justify invasion.

The second part basically gave them the excuse to put Slavic peoples in labor camps and by labor I mean constant heavy lifting from dawn to dusk on a diet of about 600 calories. With that said, if you were sent to a labor camp you had a chance albeit small of survival.

Later on - and this sealed the deal in the Nuremberg trials - it became clear that *even* in the so-called labor camps Nazis were just wholesale murdering people. And I realize I'm not saying anything revolutionary or surprising here but this is where we get back to point 1.

I posted retweeted from a Holocaust memorial site today a post about a Polish doctor who did actually survive and ... seeing as I'm a. not a Nazi, and b. knew an actual Jewish doctor from Poland who survived the Holocaust I did make the assumption that this guy was Jewish.

So now Polish tweeters are big mad at me because how DARE I assume a Jew could be Polish. There might be a more nuanced and less racist and anti-Semitic take than that and charitably I think their deal is the whole "living room" thing...

... but the several who have taken issue with the tweet basically made it sound like they were mostly upset that I dare assume that any Pole ever for all time could possibly be Jewish.

So if we agree with the Nazis that Jews don't get nationality then sure they're right, but pretty sure the whole point here was to NOT AGREE WITH NAZIS.

On the other hand I do totally get annoyance with erasure particularly given the brutality of the third Reich towards Poland.

But this being twitter - and again trying to be charitable here - these guys are not coming off in the best light. The other piece to this of course is in the past several years Poland has been asked to reckon with its complicity in the Holocaust so, lots of conflicted feelings.

This isn't really a simple deal because of course it isn't but for the same reason I'm not going to get into Poland's whole history with this these guys really should have just walked past my retweet. EVEN if it turns out I was wrong.

I'm not sure actually what religion this doctor was and so it's weird to insist based on the information provided that he wasn't Jewish. We know his nationality, but we know neither his ethnicity or his religion.

Again, for SPECIFICALLY NAZIS being Jewish or Polish was an either/or sort of thing and that's more or less how they justified detaining specifically Jews. (Also how my great-grandfather got a bunch of people out which is another reason I'm pretty mad about this.)

But let's say, I was totally wrong and let's say it is absolutely clear that the doctor in question was not Jewish. Does that somehow negate his suffering or the genocide either of Slavic peoples or Jewish people or LGBTQ+ or "political dissidents?"

Even if we go so far as to say that my not immediately assuming someone listed as "Polish" was definitely not Jewish rises to the level of erasure acknowledging someone's life and suffering does not negate the suffering of others. This is not a misery contest.

And to be honest, I'm REALLY concerned that these accounts were so proactive in insisting the doctor was not actually Jewish. Why is being considered Jewish so bad? Why are they so insistent that Poles are not only not all Jewish but that Jews and Poles are *distinct*?

It remains possible that these tweeters who pointed out that he's listed as Polish but not specifically as Jewish did so innocently. It's possible that they simply meant to highlight erasure. But it doesn't seem that way. Maybe it's just twitter, maybe it's Antisemitism.

On top of that there has been a rising tide of pretty virulent Antisemitism across Europe in the past decade at least. And yeah, Europe's been Antisemitic since forever, but in the early 2000s I noted some pretty scary stuff coming out of Hungary and as I tweeted earlier ...

... where did the Parisian Jewish community go?

So this is sort of a "First they came for," issue here. You may not yourself be Jewish or Black or whoever the scapegoat du jour is. (Although, those two groups are basically always "it.") But the canary in the coal mine is dead.

And yes I've been hysterically ringing the alarm bells for most of my adult life now, but wiser and older people than me have also being pointing to the new rise in fascism. Again, when a regime comes for Jews or Black people they will get to you sooner or later.

So it deeply concerns me that these accounts are so insistent on separating individual humans who lived, suffered, and often died in a huge methodical genocide into specific groups and then assigning a relative value to them.

Again, I know there's a whole political-economic undercurrent to it and it's hitting right when women's rights in Poland were basically dismembered and on and on and on but

1. in politics you can multitask

and

2. it NEVER helps you to throw a group of people under the bus.

So I did want to just block those jerks and move on because it's a huge can of worms and these are not people who are going to be able to discuss it in good faith, but the fact that they were so scared of being associated or grouped with or considered Jewish is itself concerning.

It's fine to not be Jewish; not everyone gets to be God's chosen people. It's fine to say, "oh, I'm not Jewish." But freaking out that someone dare to consider that you might be ... indicates that something is very wrong with you and society as a whole.

So ..... looking forward to all the hate follows. Send all complaints to John Oliver and Seth Meyers. And I shall continue my family tradition of fighting fascism regardless of who it targets and whether or not I happen to be a member of that group.