Dawn French under fire on Instagram

Excellent point - thank you.

That's just what they are doing - trying to manipulate the past to their own advantage.

George Orwell once again knew what was what.
'Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.'

The Holocaust refers to the mass genocide of Jewish people, who were targeted simply because they were Jewish, regardless of age etc. They were subjected to ever growing restrictions, laws, placement in ghettos and eventually the Final Solution. There are multiple sources, on the web and in books which support this definition.

The deaths of others, which were no less horrendous, were due to wider Nazi ideologies, often based around their specific ideals of family and the importance they placed on creating a strong Germanic race.

The classification of prisoners in concentration camps gives a good idea of how they viewed different groups of people, where each group was given a different coloured star depending on the type of prisoner they were, e.g. yellow for Jews, red for political, pink for homosexuals. Jewish and Roma prisoners were specifically marked out for systematic murder, whereas the other groups of prisoners were not (although many did die in camps through malnutrition and disease).

I find it disgusting that people with specific ideologies and agendas but no knowledge of the history of this era, past what they have googled (and judging by most of my students, not got past Wikipedia) are trying to rewrite definitions and history. I'm a History teacher and have specialised in this area - it worries me what some of my students will be reading when we study the Holocaust later in the year. Thank you for this thread, it's been incredibly enlightening about what is going on, and the debate surrounding it. There have been some great links posted that I will use too.

That's correct @soupfiend . Many millions of people died horribly - but the vast majority of slavs etc who died, died in their own countries during battle, or as part of Nazi terror campaigns to ensure compliance etc.

Only Jews were deliberately sought out, rounded up, packed into cattle trucks and transported without food or water often hundreds of miles to slave camps (where they were worked to death) or extermination camps.

Only Jews of all ages - from newborn infants to the very, very elderly were slaughtered just because they were Jewish.

Most people in most nations invaded by the Nazis had a dreadful time, but most of them weren't deliberately targeted because of their religion or ethnicity. (Anyone who as even as little as 1/8th Jewish was hunted down- so a single jewish great-grandparent could condemn you) - even Jews who had converted to Christianity many years before, or were atheists)

I thought I had read somewhere that it was about 20 million slavs, 6-10 million jews, millions of gentiles, gays, disabled people in the millions. However my understanding is that their focus was Jewish people, others got lumped in along the way, not necessarily targeted in the same way

So much of what is called trans history is actually the history of individuals who were trying to escape the strictures of rigid sex roles or that of cultures imposing a 'not a true man but not a woman, either' status on gay men. TRAs always seem weirdly glad that all this pain and persecution was meted out to misfits as it provides some kind of bogus evidence of trans monolithic status.

I have no doubt that some people who would now be considered trans were sent to the camps but that would be because those people were also gay or politically unsound or bohemian or some other aberration to the Nazis. If you were trans (it feels very ahistorical using that term in this context) and a good Nazi then you would be fine up to the point where you fell foul in another way and then it might be used against you.

I was finding that quite interesting until I read this. " In the wake of a U.K. court decision in 2020 limiting trans rights, an editorial in the Economist argued that other countries should follow suit, and an editorial in the Observer praised the court for resisting a “disturbing trend” of children receiving gender-affirming health care as part of a transition."

And I agree with @AnnieRegentthat it was an ill-advised tweet by JKR.

JKR has clearly held back from an unparalleled amount of defamation directed against her. In that context she intervenes incredibly rarely. She went after Rivkah Brown because Brown is a commissioning editor and reporter on the notoriously toxic Novara Media which, despite the fact that they shouldn't be touched with a bargepole, have a wide reach, and sufficiently wide that people in the organisation do get platformed by the BBC.

I'm a big fan of hers, but I think JKR's tweet here is a bit sloppy in its phrasing. She's using a popular style ("did you really mean to type this, was this a fever dream" etc), I think meaning to say "did you seriously mean to accuse me of something so stupid" (i.e. supporting nazi gender views) but it can be read as "nazi treatment of trans people is a fever dream you had". Regardless of the technical points of Nazi treatment of various groups, I don't think she was getting at the second interpretation at all. I think she meant to say it was a dumb tweet. (Which it was.)

Who knows?

Maybe her lawyers have been in touch with both?

Maybe there are jurisdictional issues.

Maybe these trans activists should grow the fuck up and debate like adults instead of defaming famous authors.

A more interesting question is why JKR choose to get legal on this smaller English account rather than Alejandra Caraballo (based in USA where they anti-SLAPP legislation, 160K followers) whom she had actually been interacting with on this matter and generated millions of impressions.

Rivkah Brown has almost 50,000 Twitter followers.

If you look at the people who have quote tweeted her forced retraction, doubling down on the claim that JK Rowling is a Holocaust denier, some of those quote tweets have had tens of thousands of retweets, presumably from people who agree that she is a Holocaust denier and many of whom are openly whingeing that Rivkah can't afford to defend a defamation lawsuit even if she is telling the truth.

Now, I'm fairly certain that if Rivkah wanted to defend herself in court, all she would need to do is set up a Go Fund Me and tweet the link to all her followers asking them to chip in a fiver each, and by the end of the day she'd have raised a significant amount of cash with which to mount a legal defence.

Which begs the question, why doesn't she? If she's so sure that what she said wasn't a libellous crock of shit?

Well that's very interesting, isn't it?

You can look at the history of any Wikipedia article, it's one of the tabs between the title and the lede.

ETA: that article has been semi-protected for over three years. The talk page is interesting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:The_Holocaust

More of a slapdown.

As a parent observed in the Alex Jones case: speech is free. The lies, you pay for.

Got to wonder if any of the people lashing out on twitter have actually listened to the podcast!

SLAAP

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_lawsuit_against_public_participation

The pattern seems to be one tra comes up with a novel idea that, if you squint and spin, then transpeople are...whatever batshit theory you want to fly with. The rest of the tras think that'll do, don't bother engaging their own brains, often muddle the idea further (chinese whispers) and the notions propagate, getting dopier all the while. Much as they pile onto the latest person, organisation, dog deemed guilty of wrong think or of being insufficiently pure in whatever line is currently dominant.

It'd probably be incredibly easy to get them to earnestly believe and promulgate any old shite, once you've got a critical mass or one or two key players to go along with it.

I have also seen trans activists claiming that JKR's tweet is not visible in the EU because it has been blocked there due to the EU's laws about Holocaust denial.

Which is weird, because I viewed it and screen shotted it from the EU.

The German law on Holocaust denial was exactly what I saw the TRAs quoting as 'evidence' of JK's Holocaust denial in the original comments on Dawn French's Instagram.

Sorry wrong thread

WTF is happening on the active page? Mass spamming

Two comments:

1. The article I read about Dawn French was muddled and suggested that she criticised JKR for being so forthright and a hint about sympathising with Radcliffe and Watson. She posted a fairly long article not a short sharp Tweet. Has anyone seen it?
2. Wikipedia: It looks as if the Trans lobby has bombarding Wiki to update and modify it's entry for the Holocaust to give more emphasis to their views. Do we know when these additions occurred?

Pretty astonishing take from someone who is herself Jewish.