81 years ago today the US did a half baked job at doing what we should have done 91 years ago—and then took credit for it.
Ideological language dehumanizing certain groups had been developing in German academic and cultural circles since the mid-1800s.
By roughly 1928 the man who wrote Mein Kampf—which clearly and unequivocally dehumanized people based on their skin and hair color—had risen to power.
Blatant, antisemitic propaganda was publicized and violence was used against people deemed "unfit" through no objective process.
The Nuremberg Laws stripped people of citizenship based on ethnicity. By 1938, Kristallnacht left hundreds dead and thousands imprisoned. It was openly sanctioned by the state.
The gestapo had rounded up and kidnapped innocent people at gunpoint, in public. Tens of thousands of political dissidents and marginalized groups were detained in concentration camps.
The (American) Red Cross physically visited a single Nazi concentration camp but decided that the reports of piles of dead bodies, with surviving photographs, were irrelevant because they managed to get some pictures of a few people wearing clothes and breathing.
Germany was expanding aggressively and violently with the excuse of acquiring "lebensraum" (livingspace) and "annexing" countries, which is a pretty word for committing political warfare and enforcing your screwed up "laws" in someone else's home. Einsadzgruppen (mobile killing units) skipped the kidnapping and did things the easy way by just shooting victims in public, sometimes after forcibly stripping them naked and violating them in front of their families and neighbors.
And when the US coast guard encountered ships of women, children and elderly people seeking refuge from this, no "immigration" regulations were revised, no diplomatic efforts were made. Most of these people were turned away and many died exactly how they feared they would.
By 1941, hundreds of thousands of innocent people had been systematically kidnapped and murdered over the span of a decade. We didn't do anything until the Nazi regime allied with Japan and brought the violence to us. We decided to wait until the attack on Pearl Harbour threatened US commerce and infrastructure before even acknowledging that any injustice was happening. By this time, millions were already being killed by industrialized mass genocide.
So what did we do then? We microwaved Japan because we were afraid, and played a small roll in taking a part of Normandy Beach from the Nazi regime in France. In the process, we likely also killed some slave laborers to the nazi war machine. We call this D-Day because to us, it was "the end".
It didn't stop the killing though. The nazis continued executions until the very end, some even after liberation was imminent. The death toll reached around 6 million. Then we traumatized and guilt tripped German citizens, some of whom were inevitably nazi sympathizers but many of whom were victims of the violence themselves, by plastering images of their dead, naked, loved ones all over towns and writing phrases like, "Who is guilty? You are" in German. This wasn't some act of vandalism, it was a large scale operation involving many Americans and our officials. We also tasked German civilians with cleaning up the aftermath, so they had to see (and smell) the horror in person.
Almost a century later we haven't learned a single thing about how awful our government is. We still dehumanize people based on affiliation, ethnicity, country, or even just who they associate with, minimize or entirely fail to report atrocities committed overseas, often by our own people, and kick our feet back drinking lemonade while expansionist regimes "annex" other countries just like before.
Happy D Day, everyone. Go watch the Diary of Anne Frank and remember that was a real person.
By roughly 1928 the man who wrote Mein Kampf—which clearly and unequivocally dehumanized people based on their skin and hair color—had risen to power.
Blatant, antisemitic propaganda was publicized and violence was used against people deemed "unfit" through no objective process.
The Nuremberg Laws stripped people of citizenship based on ethnicity. By 1938, Kristallnacht left hundreds dead and thousands imprisoned. It was openly sanctioned by the state.
The gestapo had rounded up and kidnapped innocent people at gunpoint, in public. Tens of thousands of political dissidents and marginalized groups were detained in concentration camps.
The (American) Red Cross physically visited a single Nazi concentration camp but decided that the reports of piles of dead bodies, with surviving photographs, were irrelevant because they managed to get some pictures of a few people wearing clothes and breathing.
Germany was expanding aggressively and violently with the excuse of acquiring "lebensraum" (livingspace) and "annexing" countries, which is a pretty word for committing political warfare and enforcing your screwed up "laws" in someone else's home. Einsadzgruppen (mobile killing units) skipped the kidnapping and did things the easy way by just shooting victims in public, sometimes after forcibly stripping them naked and violating them in front of their families and neighbors.
And when the US coast guard encountered ships of women, children and elderly people seeking refuge from this, no "immigration" regulations were revised, no diplomatic efforts were made. Most of these people were turned away and many died exactly how they feared they would.
By 1941, hundreds of thousands of innocent people had been systematically kidnapped and murdered over the span of a decade. We didn't do anything until the Nazi regime allied with Japan and brought the violence to us. We decided to wait until the attack on Pearl Harbour threatened US commerce and infrastructure before even acknowledging that any injustice was happening. By this time, millions were already being killed by industrialized mass genocide.
So what did we do then? We microwaved Japan because we were afraid, and played a small roll in taking a part of Normandy Beach from the Nazi regime in France. In the process, we likely also killed some slave laborers to the nazi war machine. We call this D-Day because to us, it was "the end".
It didn't stop the killing though. The nazis continued executions until the very end, some even after liberation was imminent. The death toll reached around 6 million. Then we traumatized and guilt tripped German citizens, some of whom were inevitably nazi sympathizers but many of whom were victims of the violence themselves, by plastering images of their dead, naked, loved ones all over towns and writing phrases like, "Who is guilty? You are" in German. This wasn't some act of vandalism, it was a large scale operation involving many Americans and our officials. We also tasked German civilians with cleaning up the aftermath, so they had to see (and smell) the horror in person.
Almost a century later we haven't learned a single thing about how awful our government is. We still dehumanize people based on affiliation, ethnicity, country, or even just who they associate with, minimize or entirely fail to report atrocities committed overseas, often by our own people, and kick our feet back drinking lemonade while expansionist regimes "annex" other countries just like before.
Happy D Day, everyone. Go watch the Diary of Anne Frank and remember that was a real person.
