Thread by @DivestSPD

ICYMI: Safe Seattle accused us of trying to do a Hitler on the cops

We've been caught. They got us dead to rights.

Our event was originally titled "Cut the Tall Trees" but we thought "No Charity for Cops" would be subtler.

(1/17)

Don't want to dwell on this too much. Generally speaking, one shouldn't let hateful trolls occupy too much of your time.

OTOH, SS is a good stand-in for the Defund movement's opposition as a whole, & there is value in understanding your opponents.

(2/17)

First off, trivializing the Holocaust by making frivolous comparisons is antisemitism. Full stop.

Beyond that, the perpetrators of most ethnic & political mass murders throughout history portrayed their acts as pre-emptive:

(3/17)

Ex.

-The Turkish government maintained it had to murder the Armenians in WWI b/c they would ally w/ the Russians.
- The Nazis claimed that the Jews were an existential threat to the Fatherland
- Colombian death squads were called "self-defense units" (4/17)

We make fun of SS for its silly fantasies about being Resistance fighters, but these kinds of delusions are no joke.

They're disturbing and dangerous

(5/17)

If you see yourself as a hero locked in a life-and-death struggle against the greatest of all evils, anything you do is therefore ethically permissible—up to and including violence.
(6/17)

Ofc, SS are too cowardly to commit violence themselves. That's what SPD is for.

They *are* "the Dutch," i.e the ones who ratted out Jews to the Nazis.

Here's some recommending that they report the homeless as being armed so police will murder them.

c/o @ericacbarnett

(7/17)

In the past this Savior complex has led to all sorts of vigilantism by SS, which they've had to crack down on lest they get deplatformed and David Preston lose the one thing that gives his sad-ass life meaning.

tinyurl.com/yyfrgq9a

(8/17)

And while we're on the subject of Nazis, they had this concept called Lebensunwertes Leben, meaning "life unworthy of life."

This term undoubtedly includes the unhoused whom SS spends its days villifying & legitimately dehumanizing.

(9/17)

Nazi vocabulary had many colorful synonyms for the same thing, ex. "untermensch (subhumans)" and "useless eaters."

All meaning a class of unpersons that had to be killed for the sake of racial and social hygiene.

(10/17)

We're not going to accuse SS of encouraging genocide against the houseless b/c we're not hysterical weirdos who engage in pointless hyperbole.

However, there is a clear connection between the devaluation of the lives of the unhoused and actual, real violence. (11/17)

Here in supposedly liberal Seattle even supposedly liberal Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonists demonize the homeless on one day, then grandstand about the right's monstrousness the next. (12/17)

And that's the baseline.

There's a troubling consensus in this city that the lives of the unhoused are worth less than the lives (or even the property) of the respectable, taxpaying citizens. (note: Many SS posters don't even live in the city)

(13/17)

We're in a situation where people think nothing of weaponizing the police to harm or kill our unhoused neighbors (14/17)

Other Seattleites, who aren't so brazen in their contempt for and desire to harm the unhoused, gladly consent to the daily systemic violence against them in the form to cuts to treatment and social services, over-policing, etc.

(15/17)

And these attitudes in enable disproportionate police violence against the city's houseless population.

The DOJ found that 70% of uses of force were against the unhoused, mentally ill and or those under the influence of drugs or alcohol. (16/17)

What's even more galling and ironic is SS are the exact same bunch opposing the solutions (Tiny House villages, Fort Lawton) to the problem they are obsessed with.

It's almost as if they prefer the less effective, crueler approach of using SPD to address houselessness

(17/17)