I fucking hate the cult the West has built up around its role in WWII, the war they idolize because it was about that one time they fought (more brazen and mask off) imperialists and genocidaires, rather than poor villagers with scavenged weapons somewhere in Africa or Southeast Asia. Not just because it sweeps some inconvenient details under the rug (ie, what sociopolitical and economic developments in America/Europe led to the Nazis in the first place) but because there hasn’t been a single war or geopolitical rivalry since that hasn’t tried to shoehorn in non-existent parallels, leading up to the big-brained take that a militant Islamist group comprised hardened orphans in a walled-off ghetto is somehow the Third fucking Reich in this scenario. It’s somehow even worse when they learn about the unsavory aspects of the (Western) Allies’ conduct because they can use that to justify war crimes so long as it gets the “bad guy” in the end.
Compounding this is a profound ignorance of the Israel-Palestine “conflict” as well since I’m sure anyone who isn’t a disingenuous fool would know about the Israeli settler-colonial system and put two and two together treating the occupied Germans and Japanese as an “undesirable” indigenous population to be displaced would have similar if not worse results. There were already Wehrwolf terrorist cells in occupied zones where the west treated “former” Nazis with kids’ gloves and poured in that sweet sweet Marshal Plan aid, just imagine how bad it would have been in that aforementioned hypothetical scenario.
There, I was holding in that rant for a while.
Remember when the population of Germany was forced into a concentration camp 1/20th the size of the country while foreign ethnonationalist settler colonists claimed all of the rest?
Yeah Japan and Germany didn’t become “terrorists” states after wwii because the us sunk a fuckton of money in rebuilding them, not to mention also completely controlling their political states, whereas you have Palestine which is just bombed, bombed some more, and bombed again.
Id be remiss if I didn’t point out Germany’s and Japan’s goals in ww2 were directly influenced by the actions of the west against them (id argue the oop is being willfully ignorant by not counting imperial japan and nazi Germany as “terrorist states”)
In ww1 Britain launched a devastating blockade and would seize all incoming food (Germany was a food importing country) a direct result of this was Hitler’s belief of victory in the east in order to secure resources the homeland lacked- oil in the caucuses and grain in ukraine
As for Japan, it was forced to open itself to western influence by gunpoint and it had a first row seat to the century of humiliation. To Japan the message was clear- conquer or die.
That isn’t even a little bit what happened with Japan, and its sus as hell thst you would imply so. Yes Japan had been opened by force. But the weren’t witnesses to Chinese humiliation, they were eager participants, and what drove them to attack the US was the US demanding they get out of the humiliating China business.
Yes, but the message “conquer or die” was absolutely clear. I’m not saying Japan is smol bean forced to do imperialism, but they tried to just resist on their own at first but were smashed and decided they will be rather the winners in the classical manner of opressed becoming the opressor. Look who and how started under a sonno-joi slogan and then those very same people became so westernized even fucking Kipling thought they are going way too far.
Culturalism is a stain on society and some serious education needs to be done to rid the world of its brainworms.
Twitter OP: “There are two unique factors here: Hamas and Islam”
Samir Amin, Eurocentrism:
The (culturalist) arguments…advanced, in this respect, are confused, despite their apparent precision. They are, moreover, perfectly reversible, analogous to those previously advanced to explain the backwardness of China in terms of Confucianism, then fifty years later to explain the take-off of that country in terms of the same Confucianism! Superficial historians have explained the success of the Arab civilization of the Middle Ages by way of Islam, while contemporary journalists, even more superficially, explain the stagnation of the Arab world by the same Islam. Culturalism has no possible univocal response to any of these great historical challenges. In fact, it has too many, because it can prove any formulation and its opposite.
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were not terrorist states
Eastern Europe, China, Korea, the Philippines et al. disagree.
They legitimately have no idea of scale and magnitude. Ripping off Finkelstein a little, who recently said (paraphrasing) “What does any of this have to do with the Holocaust? ‘The worst massacre of Jews in one day since the Holocaust’ is the line from Israel. Hamas militants killed about 1200 Israelis on Oct 7 compared to the Nazis who were gassing and cremating over 10000 Jews PER DAY at Auschwitz. These events are incomparable.” (That’s from memory, but it was something close to that).
This is just the “famous” atrocities that every American is surely aware of from school and media. They don’t learn much about the SS units in the East that went village to village in Latvia, Lithuania, etc., rounded up every single Jew in the village, had them dig their own mass graves, then machine gunned them in a way to ensure their bodies fell into the pit for minimal clean up on the Nazis’ part. All civilians, every Jew, from grown men, women, children, literal babies. They documented it all too. Every day just a list made by the officer in charge like male Jews, female Jews, children Jews, total number tallied up to send back to HQ. And of course they found these Jews very easily because their neighbors gave them up and in some cases the SS showed up to do their murder and found the villagers had already done it for them. Far too many of those killers never faced an ounce of justice either.
And of course the Japanese were known for their extreme cruelty. Taking women from conquered lands to use as sex slaves (which some descendants of those slavers deny still).
To compare Hamas, a basically powerless group all things considered, to state powers that carried out efficient operations to subjugate and exterminate or enslave entire populations would be a great joke if they weren’t so serious about it. Of course it’s no stretch at all to say Israel would fit right in with Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, imperial Japan.
I really hate libs. On this specific subject more than any other one (the Holocaust) I just fucking despise how anyone who has read the first hand accounts from the victims and the perpetrators themselves could ever cheapen those atrocities and attempt to cynically weaponize the suffering of these millions of people who suffered and died. It’s honestly fucking enraging. I dunno. That’s the worst part of being effectively just an observer. Those of us who in good faith engage in the available accounts of atrocities know the horrors and we approach discourse thinking the libs 1) also know (they probably don’t) and 2) they actually care about any sort of justice (they don’t). Sometimes I’m just listening to the way they drop these accusations and the pieces really connect in my brain for a moment like “wow, this giant, square headed MFer is actually comparing Hamas militants to SS death squads” and I’m filled with burning anger and desire to see them pay for this callousness, their total disregard for truth and humanity. It’s easy to read stuff and take it all in as just stats and figures. I think it’s important for people to read the first hand accounts and understand the horrors.
I mean, you don’t even need a book lmao, has this person not heard of uhhh hitler.
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