I genuinely do not understand this unrelenting insistence that we compare every horrendous thing the United States does to the Holocaust, when there are much better comparisons to be made toâŠwell, the United fucking States.Â
The United States has a long, sordid history of separating families: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the families impacted by slavery for generations after being stolen from their homes and sold to the highest bidder, for one. The Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools, where Native children were ripped from their families in order to have their language, culture, and beliefs stamped out of them through forced assimilation and conversion to Christianity, for another.Â
The United States has an awful history of putting people in detention centres: Japanese and Native Alaskan internment camps during WWII, Fort Cass, Fort Snell, and other Native American internment camps that Indigenous Peoples were forced into throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, not even to mention Guantanamo Bay, and the camps so-called dissidents in the places like the Philippines, Vietnam, and other nations Americans had occupied were put into.
The United States has always been horrible to its immigrants, specifically non-white and/or non-Christian refugees. My own grandfather, an immigrant form India, couldnât become a citizen of the United States despite being a college lecturer and the spouse of a US citizen due to Asian Exclusion, and had to continuously enrol in university courses he never actually took despite the fact that he was teaching them, just to stay in the country on a student visa. The one truly valid comparison to the Holocaust era you could make would be to the United States turning away Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe aboard the St Louis and sending them back to their deaths because that same law used to keep my grandfather from becoming a citizen had been put in place specifically to keep more Jews and Asians from coming into the country.
Like, the United States is not âbecoming Nazi Germanyâ all of a sudden. This is not some aberrant âUnAmericanâ behaviour. This is the United States being the United States, doing what the U.S. has always done from the moment of its inception.Â
Also, as one of my FB friends said on this topic recently:Â âNazi Germany was not famous for cruelty toward asylum seekers, it was famous for making millions of asylum seekers and then murdering millions including many from my family.â
There is no good reason to constantly trot out bad Holocaust comparisons when we know damn well this is the same inhumane bullshit America was fucking built on. Hitler, Nazis, and The Holocaust are not just shorthand for âthe government being really bad.â It was a specific atrocity that devastated the Jewish and Romani communities of this world, and you donât need to constantly devalue it and re-traumatise Jews and Roma over and over again when you can just as easily condemn the heinous way asylum seekers at the US border are being treated by saying the United States is still in the business of systematic oppression and has not learnt anything from its own appalling history.Â
Iâve said it before and Iâll say it again: non-Romani goyim donât get to drag out the proverbial corpses of our people and use them in a macabre puppet show in order to give their issues weight.
^plus non-gays and able-bodied people pls
No.
We have explained this a million times over: Only Jews and Roma were target for total annihilation by the Nazis, and are therefore the only groups who have intergenerational trauma related to the holocaust. Some LGBTQ and Disabled people certainly were targeted (though not in the same way), but there plenty of individuals fitting that description who werenât at all. In fact, there were gay and disabled people in Hitlerâs inner circle, so to suggest members of those groups outside of Jewish or Romani contexts are entitled to reference the Holocaust like we do is really in poor taste.
Basically, with disabled and LGBTQ individuals who were not Jewish or Romani, there were plenty of instances where people just just chose to overlook it. However, if an LGBTQ and/or disabled person was Jewish or Romani, there was no looking the other way; they were killed.Â
Please stop inserting yourselves into our trauma, kthanksbai.
Tag: united states
That was super nice of them.
And now Iâm mad that nobody told us we were given cows. Cause thatâs really f*cking nice and nobody mentioned it at all.
American media tends to disregard that anyone donates to the US. And then Amurricans complain about money going abroad because ânobody helped the US in our disasters.â
>.>
Also, do you know how much a cow costs? O.O
It isnât just a matter of how much a cow costs, its a matter of considering that Masai life is based around their cattle. Its their wealth, their food, and a significant part of their religion. Hereâs a quote from Wikipedia:
âTraditional Maasai lifestyle centres around their cattle which constitute their primary source of food. The measure of a manâs wealth is in terms of cattle and children. A herd of 50 cattle is respectable, and the more children the better. A man who has plenty of one but not the other is considered to be poor.[37] A Maasai religious belief relates that God gave them all the cattle on earth, leading to the belief that rustling cattle from other tribes is a matter of taking back what is rightfully theirs, a practice that has become much less common.[38]â
So its not just âthey gave us 14 cowsâ, its that they gave us something that is very important and significant to them, it is more than just a kind gesture that definitely deserves to be known and its a genuine shame that more people donât know about it.
Wait, you guys DONâT KNOW that we offer help to the US when you have disasters???????
Shit, down here in Brazil we not only offered to send tracking units and doctors to help in 9/11 but we wanted to send a whole lot of donations to help with Katrina (we have experience with floods down here so we knew what kind of medicine to send to prevent outbreaks).Â
We alone had like 2 army airplanes full of medicine and non-perishables like baby formula, diapers, bottled water, mosquito nets and other stuff thatâs needed to fight opportunistic diseases that hit flooded areas, enough to assist a good few thousand people at least, ready to go the day after it hit, but your government refused the donations.Â
The same thing happened to the Canadians and Europeans who offered help, the US embassies around the world told us all to give money to Red Cross.
And so we did, we all gave hundreds of millions of dollars to them, and then this happened:
Red Cross scandals tarnish relief efforts
âBreathtakingâ Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid
So please, donât you go spreading misinformation and prejudice against the rest of the world, WE DID OFFER HELP AND ORGANIZED IT EVEN FASTER THAN BUSH DID, BUT YâALL REFUSED IT.Â
Oh wow I had no idea this happened itâs really not talked about in media at all wow this is something good to know about wow
Iâm so angry.
I didnât know that other countries tried to help after 9/11 or Katrina. Like, thatâs something we, the people, should hear about and we donât.
Please donât blame us for the shitty decisions our government makes. We donât have as much control over our government as we would like to think and they keep a lot from us.
Spread this shit.Â
After Katrina, Cuba donated several hundred blankets. Think about that. A country that is suffering economically due directly to the US embargo offered to help us when we needed it by sending what they could. And once again, it was refused. We have a government that is so self-righteous that we refuse to accept disaster aid in order to maintain this facade that we are the most generous nation on earth.
Okay, Katrina thing.
Only Texans really knows this? and even then itâs not wide spread.
Mexico sent their army.
They sent their army for relief efforts. Didnât call ahead, they drove all the way to San Antonio with doctors and food and all sorts of supplies.When people actually got a call from them saying âHey, weâre sending people up.â
The people who answered said âWhat? We canâtâŠâ
âToo late, already there.â
This was while the government was turning down help.So yeah, other countries send relief.
Forest fires up in Washington last year? Firefighters from Australia came up to assist.
Like⊠we donât hear about this shit. At all.
I can second the above with the fires.Â
Most the time, when people say âoh FEMA or something sent people right?â re: fires, its actually people from other countries showing up and kinda ignoring the government telling them to fuck off and staying on behalf of local departments because we REALLY need them.Â
If thereâs a huge ass disaster, and the government is sitting there with a thumb up itâs ass, help is offered and most the timeâ shit, it gets there!
But then the feds do something really fucking dirty.
They insist they were the help, if itâs talked about at all.ÂThey insist those people putting out fires were federal people, because to most people a firemanâs a fireman. The people handing out water and food, a relief worker is a relief worker. So on and so forth.Â
We had people come up when the fires were so bad a while agoâ not the Australians, but i think there was like a German group of like 3 guys that flew themselves over? They came out of sheer âthis is horrible and weâre helpingâ and my dad [local fire chief] had them working with our guys and the feds lost no time telling every news outlet that it was THEIR people doing all the fire knockdowns and structure work when these guys were running into buildings and grabbing people, pets, and peopleâs important documents because they knew papers were a pain in the ass to replace.Â
What you gotta understand is that our government is very intent on selling us and the rest of the world [as much as possible] the idea of a powerful and self reliant country. All our reporting on disasters, starts with the scaremongering and then moves to âbut our people can handle it because weâre the best at handling thingsâ and then they move on before the idea itâs out of control comes to mind. The average person outside of the disaster has no idea, if they have never been around such an event or met someone who regularly deals with these things, they will kinda probably nod along with that. Because we have no real scope on the scale and impactâ by design. Our media intake is very controlled to slant everything to the âeh, we can handle it and everyone else out thereâ they need our help because theyâre not so good at handling disasters like we are.â
People who know better, reading international news, interacting with international social groups, looking outside their sphere of communityâ we know better but that kinda slant is really hard to break from because of that grip American media has on information.
So, taking that knowledge, we further have restricted reporting on certain disasters because theyâre considered unimportant.Â
Hurricanes are considered important, earthquakes are only considered important if it wrecks something the government cares about or somewhere a couple million people live that theyâll upset the national money flow/they can throw money at someone to make the news care, floods are only important if itâs in a similar manner to earthquakes but since they occur annually theyâre rarely reported on nationally, mudslides that kill people or leave hundreds homeless arenât important to the government even through they happen constantly, wildfires that consume most of the nation/continent each year generally are unimportant until they consume a town or threaten a government interest/money flow location.
Terrorist attacks are always important because people will talk about them.So, when we do get help for any of the above, itâs possible that most people may have no idea about whatâs happened, let alone that helpâs been sent. Or if people know something happened, the details are vagueâ the news donât care to give the nitty gritty. Youâll know something happened and people are suffering and âgee, isnât it good youâre not themâ and then now the weather.
So, yeah, basically no one really knows we get help.
International response to Hurricane Katrina:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_response_to_Hurricane_KatrinaÂ
We got HELLA help, but nobody really talks about it
American Media really fails regularlyÂ
Hurricane Sandy, Quebec sends power line crews down to assist in restoring power. Â California gets rid of water bombers due to budget cuts, Canada sends theirs down to help fight wild fires. Amazing what living on the border and having outside TV News does to your information flow.
After Katrina, Denmark offered to donate water purification units so people wouldnât get sick from drinking contaminated water, but the offer was declined.
A private Danish company built a mobile satellite phone booth and drove it around the poor neighbourhoods in Mississippi and Louisiana so people could call their families and insurance companies for free (apparently there was a deadline for reporting damages but people couldnât call in because their mobile phones were dead and landlines were down).
American propaganda is not a thing of the past, nor is it a new thing. It has been around forever, telling stories of exceptionalism and self-reliance while our government tries its hardest to refuse the help of others and offer its own to them, to try and force other nations onto their back foot and remain aggressively benevolent in international matters, so that it can lord that shit over them in negotiations and the media in general.
I guarantee you America would have a less jingoistic, less xenophobic populace overall if this sort of information were actually reported to us. If we werenât always fed the lie of helping the world without any gratitude or help in return. If the media didnât present us as world police and instead as a part of the community, as other countries try hard to include us as, then maybe Americans would actually act like theyâre part of a fucking community.
But global citizens are hard to monger fear and distrust and xenophobia and nationalism with. Theyâre hard to control with propaganda and hate. Theyâre hard to keep ignorant and docile and saying âthis is fineâ while the empire burns.
A lot of Americans wonder why our country is seen as a worldwide bully. Shit like that, my friends. Shit like that. Its hubris is seemingly limitless.
C O M M E N T A R Y
âŠmakes me wanna start a news broadcast in the U.S. that reports on good stories and truth in the news.