Open Mic for the week of 7/31/2023

DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

The line is wrong. It’s almost always the Jews first.

It literally was not with the actual N.azis.

The people they went after first were, as the poem says, the socialists(/communists). And, as the poem leaves out, gay people and pacifists.

The first organized book burnings in May 1933 were against gay people, specifically, the Institute of Sex Research, which had a rather large library of work about gay people.

That actually was an organized event that had other marches across German linked with it, and was set to lead to other book burning of other ‘unGerman’ books, and to quote Gobbels giving the speech that night: “Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, Erich Kästner.”…and you may notice that none of those people are Jewish…or gay, for that matter. They were, however, all pacifists and possibly socialists. And all of them were pretty anti-N.azi.

Likewise, the Feburary 1934 Reichstag fire was blamed on communists, not Jews.

While antisemitism was always a part of the N.azi platform, they did not actually direct their violence at Jews until _after_ they seized power. I’m not entirely sure why, perhaps the Jewish population was large enough that they didn’t want to make complete enemies of it?

Before the N.azis seized power in late Feburary 1934, their violence was directed at ‘unGerman’ people in a more general sense, which a large chunk of were just their political enemies of Socialists, Communists, and anti-N.azi people. Which, yes, also included someone Jews, but not specifically. It was more an excuse for ‘Why this book is unGerman’.

The first organized anything against Jews was April 1st, 1934, and was a…one day boycott of Jewish businesses, which seems weirdly mild of the N.azis. (And then that same month they banned Jews and Communists from the government and banned Kosher slaughter and all sorts of stuff. They actually did real things, it’s just funny they started with a trivial one-day boycott.)

But the first people they sent to the concentration camps were, indeed, the socialists, which happened on March 22, 1934, which is before the rather tame boycott of Jewish businesses a week later.

(Although arguable the ‘first people that the N.azis came for’ were the queer people they murdered while raiding the Institute of Sex Research, almost a full year earlier.)Report

DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

Philosophically, it was motivated by white nationalism. (‘White’, of course, means whatever people the people in charge want it to mean, because races are not real. Here, they invented the term A.ryan to exclude Slavs, because who even knows.)

White nationalism just generally includes antisemitism.

But we weren’t talking about who they hate most. We were talking about who they ‘came after’ first. And fascists always warm up on the smallest, weakest minorities (In addition to their actual political enemies who could get elected and replace them, which is presumably why they went after open socialists and pacifists.) before going after the larger ones. Jews were a large enough group that they were not first, and the N.azis waited until they had consolidated power before going after them.

(Is it literally impossible to turn the stupid filters off on this site?)Report