Sometimes your gods donāt ever talk to you. Donāt let anybody tell you that thatās not normal, or that theyāre better devotees or more religious or any of that horseshit. Your friends arenāt āmore openā to the gods or anything like that. Your gods are not pissed at you. Silence from the gods is not an indicator of āsomething wrongā and if anyone tells you otherwise, they can fuck themselves with a pinecone.
OMFG, let me tell yāall a story about this shit. When I was a wee bby pagan, just starting to realize āoh, crap, Loki is a thing in my life,ā I shared my beliefs with a friend at the time. A person I thought was my BFF. She had always had pagan/witchy leanings and she seemed supportive, so I thought I was safe with her.
As time passed, though, she began to get more and more involved with āfaeries, ghosts, and Celtic godsā and would tell me all about their adventures in the astral and how easy it was to see/talk to them. And if I would just open my mind, or focus harder on empty air, or take some other pieces of advice, I could do it, too.Ā
She would tell me all these stories about how great her spirit entities were and when I asked her to cool down because it was making me self-conscious and anxious about my own spiritual relationships, she launched into ātutoring to help me get better.ā Which only made things worse, because I am not wired like that, but she made me feel guilty/like a bad devotee for not being able to do the things she did. And the fun times got even funner when she took it upon herself to communicate for me andĀ āchannelā Loki whenĀ āhe needed to tell me something, especially if he was upset.āĀ
I donāt know how much of this was conscious on her part and how much of it was unbridled excitement to share something without really thinking of how it might impact me combined with a desire to make herself seem helpful and ālegit,ā but it has eternally skewed my sense of whatāsĀ āgood enoughā in regards to spiritual communication. Every time I think Iām on solid ground, some other insecurity this planted rears up and catches me by surprise. Itās, honestly, part of the reason I doubt what communication I do get so much.
TLDR; everyone relates to the gods in different ways. Donāt ever let someone tell you that theyāre more open or in-tune or whatever. Donāt let someone screw you up like that. Itās not worth it, and the effects of buying into that bullshit last way longer than youād expect them to.
Polytheist movement: This is O-P-P-R-E-S-S-I-O-N I canāt believe this is happening!
Muslim: *exists*
Big Name Poiytheists: *talk about murdering Muslims and how monotheists should be stripped of rights*
Big Name Polytheists: I am against sexism.
Woman: *wears a pussy hat*
Big Name Polytheists: *constantly use āpussy hatā in a derogatory fashion, call everyone who disagrees with them ācucksā*
Big Name Polytheists: Hey you know what would improve my public image? Associating with actual facists!
The Pagan/Heathen Community: Yeah we donāt want to talk to you anymore.
The Polytheist movement: I am going to write pseudo-intellectual thinkpieces about how I am Right and everyone else is Wrong and also I am the Most Oppressed because no one will talk to me.
the wholeĀ āold testament is the wrathful god!!!! new testament is the loving god!!!ā thing christians do is so wild to me because likeā¦..christianity introduced the concept of eternal damnation.Ā
and if anything saysĀ āunhinged and in need of a severe chill out session and also a reality check,ā itās the entire concept of being tormented in hell forĀ the rest of time.
This is your periodic reminder to stop feeding, petting, grabbing, and otherwise harassing the wildlife. In addition to the danger you put yourself and other people in, when you habituate a wild animal to human food or contact you set them up for disaster. A fed animal is a dead animal.
Pretty much this. This situation happened because the sea lion was habituated to people and brave enough to start looking for food to steal (my best guess is the edge of the kidās dress looked like the paper wrapping on a sandwich). Donāt fuck with the wildlife, because it fucks up the life of the wildlife.Ā
Itās treated as an all-purpose symbol of evil, not a series of historical events to be reckoned with.
When White House press secretary Sean Spicer suggested on April 11 that atrocities carried out under Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were in some way worse than those of Adolf Hitler, his statement placed him firmly in the bosom of a fine American tradition. Spicer may have sparked national outrage and calls for his resignation ā a sign that, at least in some quarters, it was understood that what he said was beyond the pale. Yet the historical record reveals him as the latest in a long line of American officials making questionable Hitler comparisons similarly rooted in ignorance or thoughtlessness.
During the opening months of the first Gulf War in 1990, President George H.W. Bush asserted that Saddam Hussein had used human shields on strategic targets, a kind of ābrutality that I donāt believe Adolf Hitler ever participated in.ā Five years later, New York City Congress member Charles Rangel equated Republicansā social policies toward minorities with the treatment of Jews under Hitler, and his fellow representative, Major Owens, declared Republicans āworse than Hitler.ā
The impulse to Hitlersplain existed across much of the 20th century, starting as far back as Rep. John Robison of Kentucky, who claimed that FDRās New Deal ātreated our citizens worse than Hitler treated the Jews in Germany.ā Posted into the congressional debate record in 1939, Robisonās indictment predated the Holocaust itself ā not that that made the argument any less foolish.
Nor did Spicerās comment represent his first foray into Holocaust-related controversy. A January statement issued on International Holocaust Remembrance Day had previously rattled historically minded listeners by addressing the tragedy without referencing Jews at all. What might have started as a gaffe was underlined the next day, when Spicer emphasized the many groups of people who had died at the hands of the Nazis. āDespite what the media reports,ā he said, āwe are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered.ā
The Holocaust occupies a peculiar place in American political discourse. Hitler serves as shorthand for pure evil, and the Holocaust is taught in schools, memorialized in a DC museum, and remembered in films like Schindlerās List as the epitome of inhumanity in the modern world. It is, in some ways, everywhere.
Key elements of it are nonetheless missing when it comes to US Holocaust literacy. Knowledge of the basic facts of Hitlerās murder of 6 million Jews is sufficiently thin that Spicer-level ignorance persists. America has processed the Holocaust in a very American way, lionizing the liberation of camp survivors without doing a very good job of recalling the remaining details.
In combination with the willful denial of committed anti-Semites ā some of whom see Trump as a fellow-traveler ā a superficial understanding of the Holocaust can be toxic. The repeated embrace of ignorance by those in power eventually bleeds over into denial.
In the 1940s, skepticism ā followed by a revelation of horrors
During World War II, despite eyewitness accounts, many Americans remained skeptical about reports of the Holocaust. When the last Nazi concentration camps were liberated in spring 1945 and the public saw newsreel footage and photos of emaciated prisoners and piles of corpses, those reports were brutally confirmed.
That April, Allied Commander General Dwight D. Eisenhower paid a visit to the camp at Ohrdruf, Germany, afterwards cabling to his superior, General George C. Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army, that he wanted āto be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to āpropaganda.āā He called for a contingent of press and elected representatives to visit the same month, and these accounts formed the core of the first chapter in postwar American interpretation of the Holocaust.
Still, American journalists did not at first fathom the machinery of genocide set in motion by Hitlerās executioners. The Nazis had tried to conceal their actions, dismantling extermination sites at places like SobibĆ³r and Treblinka ahead of approaching Allied forces. Hiding all signs of Treblinkaās existence, workers razed buildings, removed train tracks, plowed the earth, and brought in sand from a nearby quarry to cover what was left. Even at Auschwitz, fleeing Germans detonated the crematoria to destroy evidence, evacuating most prisoners on a forced march westward.
Though Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, months passed before US journalists understood that Buchenwald and other sites reached first by American soldiers had served as antechambers to the Nazisā most nefarious acts. By summer, some groups began to assert that six million Jews had been murdered, but it would take years to piece together how the system had grown from the first permanent Nazi camp at Dachau in spring of 1933 to the creation of extermination factories to implement the Final Solution.
The Iron Curtain went up before the extent of Nazi atrocities were fully understood. The need to reclaim Germany as an ally to face the threat of communism in the East led to diplomatic efforts not to offend Berlin. Jewish American publications and organizations protested that in everything from the reduction of Nazi war crime sentences to the US failure to demand the return of Jewsā stolen property, an emphasis on the Soviet foe was leading the government to paper over Germanyās crimes for political purposes.
In addition, survivors who made it to America were sometimes reticent about their experiences, leading to a public aware of spotty examples and the fact of mass killings but with no real handle on the Holocaust.
When the Holocaust entered popular culture, it was often sanitized
Into this mix of public ignorance and anti-Communist anxiety came popular representations of the tragedy. On this front, nothing compared to the worldwide popularity of the publication of Anne Frankās The Diary of a Young Girl, which ended up selling in excess of 30 million copies and being translated into more than 70 languages. In many ways, Anneās story ā universally known, historically a little opaque ā came to represent the American interpretation of the Holocaust.
The diary of an adolescent girl trapped in hiding during Nazi occupation first appeared in English in the US in 1952. Though it contains only bits of Jewish identity, such as the familyās Hanukkah celebration in 1942, Anneās entire existence is sharply circumscribed by the danger posed by Nazis and collaborators. Much of the power of the book comes from historical events not directly discussed. Readers do not hear from Anne after she is deported to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. They do not see her sick with typhus. They never have to watch her die.
When the playwrights Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett adapted the diary into a 1955 play for American audiences, they steered the story even further from the history that had birthed it. Goodrich and Hackett deliberately minimized the Jewishness of the Franks in favor of a more universal story that could reach a larger audience. Gone were the Gestapo at the door and the Franksā Hanukkah celebration. In their place was an upbeat finale in which Anne declares her faith in humanity. The script won a Tony award for best play, and the Pulitzer for drama.
The 1959 movie that followed pulled Anne Frank deeper into the realm of the generic. For those who knew some background history, her story was always freighted with additional meaning; for those who did not, she became an inspirational spirit defying her somewhat vague captivity. It was possible to watch the play or see the movie and learn almost nothing about the Holocaust.
Anne Frankās adolescence and images of concentration camp liberation were seared into American consciousness, but absent greater historical context the Holocaust quickly became an all-purpose symbol rather than a series of historical events to be reckoned with. The Nazis were transformed into cardboard villains, and the Jews of Europe became victims of the camps, without the US public gaining any understanding of the evolution of the camps or exactly what was done in them.
On the heels of the Anne Frank movie, more complete depictions of the Holocaust made their way into American culture. War correspondent William Shirerās The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the benchmark popular synthesis of the Nazi era, appeared in 1960 and addressed the Final Solution directly. Shirerās opus sold millions of copies despite running more than a thousand pages, and reached even more readers through serialization in Readerās Digest.
The abduction of Adolf Eichmann from Argentina by Israeli agents the same year and his subsequent trial before the District Court of Jerusalem provided additional grounding in the minutiae of the Holocaust for those who paid attention. Months after his capture, the former German lieutenant colonel faced more than a dozen charges, including ācrimes against the Jewish people,ā for his role in orchestrating the Nazi deportation and murder of European Jews.
Eichmann sat in the dock behind bulletproof glass for a trial that drew international attention. Hannah Arendt went to Israel to cover the proceedings for the New Yorker, the Associated Press sent out updates that wound up on front pages of local newspapers around the country, and portions of the trial were broadcast to dozens of countries.
Historian Deborah Lipstadt notes that a poll conducted after the Eichmann trial suggested 77 percent of Americans had heard about the trial and approved of it. Nonetheless, questionnaires in subsequent years indicated a lack of even basic knowledge about the Holocaust.
As late as 2005, less than half of Americans could correctly identify Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka as concentration camps. Given a choice of numbers, only one in three could identify that 6 million Jews had been killed. (Options ranged from 25,000 to 20 million.) In by far the worst performance among citizens from seven countries surveyed, nearly 40 percent of Americans got both questions wrong. Spicerās ignorance of the Holocaust may be more representative than we would like to admit.
By the mid-1960s, other marginalized groups began to use the Holocaust as a metaphor for their own suffering. The Holocaust became a means of insisting on the acknowledgment of abuses that had been less visible or less acknowledged. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan compared married womenās subjugation and death of the spirit in domestic settings to āa comfortable concentration camp,ā suggesting that American wives had become similarly dehumanized and victimized.
During the same decade, the idea of a āBlack Holocaustā emerged to draw attention to centuries of atrocities endured by African Americans under chattel slavery and its aftermath; the notion took on material form in 1988 at Americaās Black Holocaust Museum, in Milwaukee. Even when the vastness of the suffering merited the analogy, the specificity of the Holocaust as a Jewish event was further obscured.
Conflicts that erupted in the wake of World War II also shaped how Americans came to view this history. After troop deployments in Korea and then Vietnam, which continued into the 1970s, the Second World War retroactively took on additional meaning: a battle against an inarguably evil foe who was utterly defeated. By the 1970s, it had become less clear if Americans were still the good guys.
The Holocaust was not the reason the US entered World War II, but the incontrovertibly noble mission of saving European Jews allowed the public to avoid too much contemplation of complicating events like the US failure to offer refuge to those fleeing Hitler, the Allied firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, and later, the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
However, studio productions remained perhaps the biggest cultural culprits in rendering the Holocaust memorable yet generic. Heroes and survivors often became more vivid than the dead. Schindlerās List, for example ā though it rocketed the Holocaust back into American consciousness ā is about a repentant Nazi who saved in excess of 1,000 Jews far more than it is about the dead or their murderers.
The United States has been built on optimism and centuries of historical amnesia, and it is unlikely that those things will change anytime soon. Blaming the public for failing to comprehend the context and complexity of the Holocaust is hardly fair when even those philosophers and writers most connected to it have been unable to come to terms with its meaning.
In the end, it remains incomprehensible that a society steeped in Enlightenment culture and intellectual sophistication could shape its technology, bureaucracy, and citizens into a monstrous apparatus willing to work against its own strategic needs during wartime to execute the disabled and eradicate Jews and Roma from the face of the earth. It will never be possible for anyone to fully fathom or be accountable to this history.
Ignorance abets denial ā and ādenial liteā
What society can less afford to tolerate is actual denial, which thrives on ignorance as well as on the kind of generic memories used to preserve the Holocaust in pop culture. Denial can take many forms. Best known and least common, the strongest form of denial holds that the Holocaust is a hoax, thereby casting racist radicals and the alt-right as victims of an elitist global conspiracy. Stoking fears of crime, disease, degeneracy, overt denialists tribalize individuals into opposing communities, sow hate and fear, and foster violence.
More subtle is a kind of ādenial lite,ā which questions the numbers actually killed or relativizes the death of Jews in the Holocaust by comparing them to losses during other historical conflicts. In one variant of denial lite, emphasis is redirected to additional victims of the Nazis, such as Catholic Poles or Soviet residents who starved during the siege of Leningrad. In other cases, the staggering toll of communist repression in Eastern Europe or Soviet occupation of the Baltic states are trotted out, as if fully acknowledging Nazi genocide would somehow lessen the significance of other atrocities.
Spicerās comparison of Assad and Hitler ā to Hitlerās advantage ā was foolish and received the scorn it deserved. It may have been rooted in ignorance, but at some point repeated inadvertent denial becomes indistinguishable from the intentional kind. For Spicer to unwittingly compound his errors again and again signals that the truth is not worth the effort to learn, or to keep in mind.
By balking at distancing itself from overtly anti-Semitic supporters and flirting with ādenial lite,ā the Trump administration as a whole has unsettled historians. Sebastian Gorka, the counterterrorism adviser to the Trump administration (whose job appears to be in jeopardy), has been accused of extremist tendencies for ties to a Hungarian group identified as Nazi collaborators by the State Department. Chief strategist Steve Bannonās apocalyptic views on race, and his admiration for the Nazi propaganda of director Leni Riefenstahl, should make anyone familiar with Holocaust history nervous.
The proximity of such people to presidential power makes it harder to tell how much Trumpās, or Spicerās, rhetoric should be chalked up to incompetence, and how much to malice.
Not since Pat Buchananās presidential campaign as a Republican in 1996 have accusations of white supremacy so dogged a serious contender for the presidency. Trumpās penchant for retweeting white nationalists, Richard Spencerās early support, and David Dukeās enthusiasm over Trumpās candidacy were followed by echoes of anti-Semitic propaganda in a campaign ad. In such a setting, Spicer saying Hitler was more restrained than Assad because he āwas not using the gas on his own peopleā comes across as especially ominous, relying as it does on the notion that Jews remain essentially alien.
So it was with a sense of relief that many heard President Donald Trump spout more appropriate boilerplate language last week for the US Holocaust Memorial Museumās āDays of Remembranceā event at the Capitol Rotunda. āThose who deny the Holocaust are an accomplice to this horrible evil,ā Trump said. āAnd weāll never be silent.ā
His performance was an unusual success, by his standards, in that he managed to avoid distorting history, sympathizing with deniers, or delivering unintentional slurs against his audience. But his speech will likely be forgotten more quickly than his failure to separate himself in any meaningful way from the troll army of supporters who spent the campaign posting images of ovens and stoking anti-Semitism.
Americans have vowed "never again,ā but what does that mean? That we will not allow literal Nazis to rise once more? That we will stop anti-Semitism? That we will not permit another genocide? That we will protect vulnerable peoples when they are targeted by governments?
While the US has already failed to greater or lesser degrees at each of these, the āagainā in ānever againā implies the ability to recognize that future dangers might well resemble past tragedy. At a minimum, those at the highest levels of American politics must learn the basics of Holocaust history and be accountable to its indelible facts.
I'm a little saddened by this week's Women at Warp when they were discussing a later Lwaxana Troi episode, where she was getting married on the Enterprise. I get that Lawaxana is mostly comic relief, and therefore her decision to show up naked to her wedding would, in passing, seem like just something funny, but in that episode it isn't. It's a statement of agency and power, and to have a "like ya do" joke over that decision just feels like discounting the choices of an older woman: that her asserting her identity and values is for comedy. Yeah, I know that scene was amusing, and that it wasn't really about sexual agency (the topic for the week), but I'm still not sure it warrants jests.
I'm hearing the weirdest shit in here; where are people getting this stuff from? "That's the whole deal- the warriors go to Valhalla and get to have sex with Freya."
Is there a word for the feeling you get when you read something that translates a word differently than you have ever heard it before and it feels like the bottom of your stomach just dropped into free-fall as new dimensions of thoughts and understanding collide in an illuminating terror as you realize possible implications of what you just recognized?
I need that word badly. I also need the emotion name, if different.
Hereās part of the sentence that hit me so hard:
āā¦a propaganda strategy that proclaimed the āpositiveā qualities of Kampf, intolerance, and speakers capable of 'convincingā audiences with their 'sermons.āā
Tell me my brain is not processing this correctly; is this an Oxford comma list? I feel dizzy.
I have worked with all sorts of people to help them out and get them access to resources, a better life, and better perspectives. Iāve dealt with WP people. Ex-felons of all sorts, including 1st and 2nd degree murder charges and various sorts of criminal sex offenders. Iām highly against the death penalty.
One of my few spots of optimism is that I think people can reconsider and reform, but Iām not really interested in debating and playing soft so long as they have the systematic power and means to inflict harm, and the intent to do so. Once people are safe, thenĀ we can have discussions and try to coax people out of things. Until then, I am more worried about people in danger of losing their rights or getting killed than I am of Hurt Feelz and bruised jaws.
I have a friend who grew up in the South. Grew up being taught the usual WP shit. And he believed it; even got tats with WP ick.
And then he joined the Army to try to get out of the hell hole he was from. It took some time, but even he remembers a day when it all had sunk in; all the shit he had swallowed. The day when he saw some of his tattoos and what they represented and was mortified and ashamed. The day he realized that the black guys he was serving with were far more his brothers than the WP fucks he had grown up with; his Army family would die for him, and he would gladly do the same for them. To affirm his new beliefs he saved up and got rid of the tattoos that would remove well and got bigger, heavier tattoos to cover and change what wouldn't.
But when he left the Army, he also realized that he could never go back to the South. He couldn't be around the people who thought like he had. They wouldn't listen. Their only goal would be to try to "fix" him. To make him feel like he had done something wrong.
So he's avoided going back for anything. People can change. They can learn. But change takes time, and time is not on our side right now.
iām loving all this violent response to nazis stuff thatās going around but i also want to say like be careful out there because not all nazis are fucking clowns like richard spencer. most of em carry weapons and will not hesitate to cut your ass up and leave you dying in a dumpster. if you donāt know how to fight, donāt take one on without backup. and even if you do know how to fight, watch yourself. i donāt want to see any of you getting killed
Irl these are the same āpeopleā who put up their shitty swastika stickers around towns and hide poisoned razor blades behind them so people cut themselves and get sick if they try to peel it off with their hands so donāt like underestimate what those animals are capable and what theyād be willing to do to you.
yo that reminds me to remind you never to peel off facist propaganda with your hands, thatās what your pocket knife/boxcutter/antifascism stickers are for.
donāt trust facists please be safe.
