Holocaust Remembrance Day

[sonia]

Pointing to what sovay said about the banning of Maus in Tennessee. "Some people's children must be protected from knowledge that others are never permitted to live without, but then, some people's children are really people."

Also, Let's talk about Maus, Tennessee, and failing a test.... 9 minute video by Beau of the Fifth Column. "Children will want to know how an entire country went off the rails like that."

My parents got me "children's" books about the Holocaust, well, books about children's experiences of the Holocaust, and we went to Holocaust memorials in every country we visited starting when I was 5 years old, and of course my mother talked about her Onkle Kurt who-died-in-the-Holocaust, and my aunt on the other side talked about growing up without extended family because they were all killed in the Holocaust.

I bought Maus as an adult, and it is staying on my bookshelf.

I remember. Not just in a "that happened back then" way, but in a "watching it happening now" way that's full of dread.

minoanmiss posted a brief, powerful poem "You won't be forgiven anything".

Relatedly, because many disabled people were killed in the Holocaust, You Are Not Entitled To Our Deaths: COVID, Abled Supremacy & Interdependence by Mia Mingus. Via sheafrotherdon.

Comments

[silveradept]

It used to be that it was taught that the Germans were bad people and the U.S. were good people and there would never have been any such thing like that happening in America, because, well, yes, we'd done slavery, and Jim Crow, and many of our prominent people supported the Nazis, and we still have them and their supporters in the country, but the law said everyone was equal and we had our conflict about all of that in the past.

Now that the curtain has been torn down and everyone has seen how easy it still is to be an authoritarian and to elect them, they've had to go to the backup strategy of trying to Memory Hole anything and everything that talks or teaches in plain about how it happened and how easy it will be to happen again. And to remove from the public sphere any hint that other people, other than them, might both exist and have value as people.

[sonia]

I like Beau's idea that the people doing the erasing are embarrassed that they didn't notice in time that it was happening again. Shame covers a lot of ground as an explanation.

[silveradept]

It's possible, but a lot of the accounts I see are from people who seem much more interested in erasure and denial that alternatives exist to what they were taught or what their own life is like than in being ashamed at not noticing where the direction of everything has gone.