That’s not how I read it. I’m pretty sure she’s baiting the lawmakers who passed this fucking abomination of irrational nonsense.
When asked about requiring the library to have a holocaust denial book, the bill’s author said “that’s not what the bill says…”. But it’s exactly what the bill demands.
Gina did the right thing. She pointed out that the law has two sides: the insane, and the illegal. I think she’s to be commended for it.
You have some pretty great designs right now! I’m trying to figure out if I should get the ladies Paul Bunyan in purple or green. Born in Wisconsin, grew up in the Twin Cities, I’m a bit torn! Maybe I just splurge and get both shirts?
And joining the BBS, hope you stick around!
Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is in that demographic
I’m just going to point out that nobody’s mentioned Aktion T4 and the disabled yet.
Only because I was starting to get depressed seeing how many categories of “degeneracy” the Nazis would have classified me under.
Oh, I know. But nobody mentioned it. And I didn’t go into detail because I didn’t want to be seen as dumping on you, but I will now because screw it:
I don’t mean that anyone here is ableist… far from it. But still, when people talk about the groups the Nazis went after, they always seem to forget that the Nazis practiced their Solution on the disabled first.
And why? Because discrimination against the disabled didn’t arrive with the Nazis, and it didn’t go away with them. It’s still mainstream: and while disabled people aren’t necessarily euthenized en masse, automatic and unrequested sterilisations are still happening.
Executive Director of Women with Disabilities Australia, Carolyn Frohmader, said Australia needed a redress scheme for women who were forcibly sterilised.
“We have some members who were told they were having their appendix taken out and didn’t even know [they had been sterilised] until they wanted to have children,” Ms Frohmader said.
“We’ve got members who were sterilised at the age of seven because they had a mild vision impairment.”
Dehumanising, humiliating, and treating disabled people as useless eaters is still mainstream practice all over the world. (But I do have to say, it’s always worse under conservatives and Tories.)
But all that’s a different Topic.
No, you are right to point it out. I know it is a blindspot for me - one that I have to actually spend time to remember and that does not come right up with the other groups mentioned - and that is a problem.
You’re right, along with the Coptic and Eritrean churches among others. (Some references, incl. my childhood set of encyclopedias, misidentified the Ethiopian church as Coptic, even after autocephaly. They had the same pope until the '50s but, from what I gather, the Ethiopian (and Eritrean) liturgy was always different. E.g. the use of a tabot.)
Back on topic, sort of: there is a Coptic church in Colleyville, which is directly south of Southlake and perhaps even more tony. And FWIW, someone in Southlake has a Faravahar sculpted into their gated entrance. I can’t say anyone near me has a Faravahar (in all fairness no one near me has a gated entrance, either).
The fact that we still (mostly) use the term Asperger’s to reference some people on the autism spectrum is certainly part of that.
Asperger was a Nazi eugenicist who determined an arbitrary line between those on the spectrum who could be useful to the Nazi cause because of their neurodiversity, and those whose diversity wasn’t as useful. The people we now know as having “Asperger’s Syndrome” were used in experiments but allowed to live; the others were sent to die in the camps.
/me waves
Diagnosed with Asperger’s when that was still a thing.
I’m torn about that. Asperger was in a position where he had the ability to save some children. Some.
I can posit a best possible case for him as that: he found himself in a position of being in charge of the hospital. In that position, he had the ability to save some children, but not all. He couldn’t let the Nazis suspect him, because they’d just remove him like they had so many of his former peers. So he had to be discreet. First, make the case that these children may disabled, but they are useful, and thus not Useless Eaters. Remember, the argument to morality had already failed. “Because it’s right” was never going to fly. The argument “because it’s to your direct benefit” was the only argument which was ever going to work. (And if you think that’s horrible and all in the past, then you’ve never tried to make the case for better systemic disability representation and accommodation in a workplace. Like I’ve been doing for more than five years now with no sign of being able to stop.) But still, the orders come down. Send children to this “hospital”. No child ever leaves that hospital, and no-one is stupid enough to question why. What do you do? There’s a quota. If you send none, then they’re on to you, and you will be removed from your position at best, and then you will be able to save none. Or do you close your eyes and send some and say the words you know they’re expecting to hear. Just enough to keep them off your back. And hope it’s enough. And never mention it again afterwards, because you know you’ll never expiate the guilt of those children.
Or he was just a Nazi who killed kids because you know, whatever.
I think one of the things we don’t hate the Nazis enough for was in how they could make people into monsters despite themselves.
Not everyone could be a Schindler.
I feel dirty for arguing the case for someone who might have been a child-murdering Nazi. I just can’t get out of my head the “yes, but what would it have looked like if he wasn’t?”
Yeah, that sounds suspiciously like Schindler.
But I hear you. We don’t really know how much was his prerogative.
I think there’s only one question you really need to ask those sorts of people:
I suspect we already know their real answer to that though.
I’m not. He can fuck right off in whatever hell he’s rotting in…
Not whatever. He WAS. He did not have to do the things he did for the nazis.
Even Schindler benefited from enslaved labor.
People who were classified as Aryans had choices. Some made choices that it was better to get by and ignore what was happening to their neighbors. Others made choices to help their neighbors. Some died in their opposition.
See also: German sci-fi author Marko Kloos’s Palladium series which liberally cribs from WWI - II German history. One of the main characters is inspired by his grandfather, who served in the German military in WW2.
which made me think about my grandfather. He served in World War II on the losing side, and I started to think about what the world would have been like when he returned home after spending so much time fighting for the wrong cause. How did he begin to put his life back together? How did he reconcile his sense of self with the knowledge that he was in the service of the bad guys?
Interesting author for people who enjoy military sci-fi that isn’t marinated in right wing nonsense.
There is another aspect to this, which has nothing to do with whether or not he was a Nazi.
And this really, really is a thing for another Topic, but not having one, I’ll make it here.
Did he do reprehensible things: yes. Did he also save lives which he didn’t have to? yes. If he had made a stand and been fired or expelled or taken out the back and shot, would he have been able to help anyone? No. Did he make choices? Yes. Are there people who lived because of those choices? Yes. Are there people who died because of those choices? Yes. Would those people have died anyway? Also yes. Does that mitigate his guilt for making those choices? No.
Here’s where it gets me, personally: I’m autistic. I was diagnosed as an adult, so my life up to that point was of unexplained wasted potential. I’m smart, so why don’t I have a university degree? Why did I get into a selective entry high school, and then only barely pass Year 12?
When I started wondering what this “autism” thing was, I started seeing that autists are presented as one of two things: a tragedy or a joke. And if I continued in seeking a diagnosis, what did that make me? Or did it make me even worse: the sort of person who would make up a thing and claim to have it but not, and just be that canonical pathetic neckbeard being a horrible person and claiming “I can’t help it I have a condition!”.
And then the doctor sat me down and said “You have Asperger’s Syndrome.” Four words, and my heart exploded. There was a reason for it all. It all made sense now, and I was validated. It’s not just me, and I’m not an essentially bad person. There are other people like me, and if we know what’s getting in our way, we can figure out ways around them. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like an inherent failure.
A lifetime of feeling like an inherent failure doesn’t just go away. That shit scars you. And the more I dove into the world to which I suddenly discovered I had belonged all along, I read of autists and how we had things taken away from us. We don’t get to have dignity. We’re Sheldon Cooper, or we’re the boogeyman Autism Speaks talks about. We don’t get to have autonomy. Autists get institutionalised for their own good. Autists get ABA, where they’re trained to look “normal”. Autists have to hide their traits: Autists are taught to not stim, not to flap, to neither stare nor avoid eye contact, to say the words even if you don’t know why.
And deeper than that, the concept of the Absent Minded Professor is an autistic stereotype. But there is no place in the modern, managerial, University for that. Autists made Universities, but it was taken away from us. People in the general vicinity of autism build the internet, and then it was systematically taken away from us.
DSM 5 comes in, and we Aspies get subsumed into Autism Spectrum Disorder. And that’s a jar, but we mostly get over it, because it makes the most sense. And we can still claim Asperger’s as a subtype of it. We still have this word for ourselves.
And then someone comes in and tells us “oh, also, he was a child-murdering Nazi the whole time. A Nazi is responsible for the diagnosis which gave you your sense of self back.” And so our very identity was taken away.
I don’t know you know — I don’t know that I know really — how traumatic that was. This isn’t like reclaiming “queer”. This is other people telling us that we’re not allowed to use this word for ourselves.
Was Hans Asperger a full blown Nazi? I don’t know. Was he “just” an opportunist who didn’t make enough protest when his Jewish friends and colleagues were fired and he was told to send the disabled children under his care away to be exterminated? On the evidence, at the least.
Do I want him to have been those things? No. And it’s for an entirely irrational and unreasonable reason: because an accusation on him feels like an accusation on me. It feels like an attack on who I am, that what he did reflects on me. That I’m responsible for what he did because he gave his name to the condition that I have and that was the word the Doctor said in his office in 2010.
And not least because whenever I turn around, someone brings up “Oh, you know Asperger was a Nazi, right.” and I get punched in the goddamn gut all over again because I wasn’t even talking about him thanks for bringing all that up again YOU’RE HELPING.
It turns out I have opinions.
If I offended anyone, I am sorry. It is my fault: say the word and I delete it.
It was helpful for you to explain where you’re coming from.
I’m the person who called Asperger a Nazi. And I’m also on the spectrum. Oh, yeah, and I’m a girl….a whole ‘nother level of intersectionality. Autistic friends were the ones who first told me about the issues with Asperger. I’ve never met anyone on the spectrum before who felt supported by his name specifically, as opposed to the diagnosis in general. But what you’ve written makes sense.
That’s a stretch. Here is a quote from the Washington Post, full link below:
“Lane Ledbetter, superintendent for Carroll ISD in Southlake, Tex., apologized late Thursday and acknowledged the authenticity of the recording.
“During the conversations with teachers, comments made were in no way to convey the Holocaust was anything less than a terrible event in history,” Ledbetter said in a statement posted to Facebook. “Additionally, we recognize there are not two sides of the Holocaust.”
Texas school official tells teachers that Holocaust books should be countered with ‘opposing’ views
Except that I think people are missing the subtlety of the problem. From the Fort-Worth Star Telegram
What are they going to teach next, that slavery did not exist?”
No. They’re going to try to teach that it wasn’t all that bad. Which is what the more insidious flavors of Holocaust denial try to do. “Sure, something happened, but it wasn’t 6 million, it was just a few. The Jews inflate the numbers.” And also “slave owners weren’t that cruel. After all, they had a financial interest in their property.” It’s all of the same ilk.
