Meet the Other Phone. Flexible and made to last.

Meet the Other Phone.
Flexible and made to last.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Dawn French under fire on Instagram

105 replies

DungareesAndTrombones · 17/04/2024 19:17

She posted a link to a podcast with Fearne Cotton where she briefly mentioned JK Rowling and then something else about cancel culture and the comments section is rife with people telling her JK is a holocaust denier and that she sides with people who want to eradicate trans people from the face of the earth.

I mean 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

OP posts:
Thread gallery
14
soupfiend · 19/04/2024 18:22

MissScarletInTheBallroom · 18/04/2024 09:27

Interestingly - back on Wikipedia - this article explaining the Holocaust and this article explaining Holocaust denial both very much focus on Jews as being a primary target.

However, this article about Holocaust victims says that 17,000,000 people were killed in the Holocaust, of which 6,000,000 were Jews and 11,000,000 were Gentiles. Apparently the biggest group of people killed by the Nazis were Slavs, mainly Soviets and Poles. Other groups such as disabled people and Romani people were killed in the hundreds of thousands. There were somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 gay victims. I would expect this number to be small given that gay people make up a small percentage of the general population and many gay people would not have been out in the 1930s.

So it seems to me that there is some confusion over what the word Holocaust actually covers. Does it mean primarily the Nazi genocide of Jews? Or is its definition expanded to cover everyone killed by the Nazis?

I think I struggle with the expanded definition, particularly when it includes large numbers of Soviet civilians and POWs. Not because their deaths weren't tragic, but because we killed plenty of people in the war too. My own grandfather dropped bombs on German civilians. It kind of goes with the territory of being at war.

So when we are talking about the Holocaust specifically, or genocide in general, I think it's probably best to adopt a narrower definition to ensure that it is meaningful. I would include gay people in the definition, because it is clear that they were specifically targeted by the Nazis because of their sexuality in the same way that Jewish people were targeted because of their religion and ethnicity. But if you want to make a case that trans people were also specifically targeted because of their gender identity - a concept which did not exist in the 1930s - I think the evidence is quite poor.

Edited

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

Emotionalsupportviper · 20/04/2024 10:25

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)

dontevenblink · 21/04/2024 11:40

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.

RainWithSunnySpells · 21/04/2024 15:34

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

Emotionalsupportviper · 21/04/2024 19:13

RainWithSunnySpells · 21/04/2024 15:34

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

Excellent point - thank you.

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

New posts on this thread. Refresh page
Swipe left for the next trending thread