Africans willingly boarded ships carrying them into slavery.

[cali]

That's not only offensive bullshit. It's false and ugly victim blaming. Saying that Jews willingly boarded trains taking them to the concentration and death camps is just as offensive, just as wrong and just as ugly a piece of victim blaming. Jews and other victims of Nazi extermination, went at the point of guns.

It seems to be widely acceptable here to claim that Jews went willingly on the trains because they thought they were being relocated to a better place, or because it was some cultural trait. The mass shipping of Jews to death camps didn't even begin until August of 1942, and if Jews didn't know precisely what their fate was, they knew from years of brutal opression that they weren't being relocated to some place better. They went because they were unarmed families being forced by an army.

Claiming that the Jews were somehow willing victims of their own destruction, too stupid or too weak to fight back is fucked up.

[geek tragedy]

1. Who's claiming this? nt

[Mr.Bill]

26. Every history teacher I had in the 60s.

I didn't believe it then and I don't now.

[LittleBlue]

2. Did someone on DU say this?

[cali]

8. this highly recced thread:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=7142968

[Warren Stupidity]

22. Ugh. You are completely correct.

[FormerRepublicanNow]

28. But did they fight back, I never read about that

Maybe because they did not have any guns to defend themselves

[arcane1]

32. When the Nazis legalized gun ownership, only certain people were given that right. n/t

[cali]

33. there was some limited resistance. in Poland, some polish Jews joined

the polish resistance. There was the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. There were Jews in the French resistance. It's not really about a lack of guns.

[Warren Stupidity]

37. Seriously? You never heard of the Warsaw Ghetto

uprising? Of course there was resistance. But a totalitarian state that had no strictures against brutality is very hard to resist. Almost Everyone in the Warsaw uprising was killed. Reprisals for acts of resistance were astoundingly harsh.

[jwirr]

3. Thank you Cali.

[dembotoz]

4. As we have seen where this past week a trainload of refugees in Hungary ended up in refugee camps

Deceit by government is not totally rare

I can accept the idea that Jew or Africans could b fooled up to a point into their own death or enslavement.
What is about 2 happen is hard to wrap ones mind around


Sometimes wonder at what point a cow entering the slaughterhouse discovers it is gonna be a bad day

[Agschmid]

5. I imagine this is related to Syria crisis...

But I haven't seen this point made on DU?

[cali]

7. No, it's related to this thread

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=7142968

[Agschmid]

9. Didn't see that one, thanks.

[Behind the Aegis]

6. Well it demonstrates one thing for sure...

...as the gif said, "What I learned about the Holocaust...", seems quite a few "learned" things about the Holocaust that weren't true, historically accurate, or their memory is sorely lagging, which probably also explains why history so often repeats itself.

Thank you!

[Wilms]

10. I thought it referred to Nazi Party members.

The number is about right.

Sorry I missed that.

[questionseverything]

11. me too

my own family left germany between ww1 and ww2 because of the growing nazi sentiment ,something they were terrified of

i did rec the other thread but i was not in any way thinking the jews were to blame, i was blaming those that joined the nazi because
"the trains ran on time" and whatever other bs the nazi used as propaganda

much as repubs are led by propaganda today

[Rex]

13. The person that started this thread obviously doesn't know anything about history.

And it is pathetic they used a LIE in their title to grab attention away from what is true in that thread. You have to wonder why anyone would defend Foxnews?

[questionseverything]

16. who are you referring to...defending fox?

[cali]

38. a lie? more rancorous,mendacious crap. you're on a roll.

I am not and have not, in any way, defended Fox News.

You know that.

Stop making shit up.

[Rex]

17. I does, the OP of this thread either doesn't care or thinks 6 mil and 11 mil are the same number.

SSDD on DU.

[DirkGently]

23. That's what I thought as well.

I noted in passing that the "six million" number is the one most cited as the number killed in the Holocaust, but the rest of it read like it referred to the general populace going along with authoritarianism, which is a valid point, although equating every kind of authoritarianism with the Nazis is often misplaced.

[Warren Stupidity]

25. oh bullshit. What were the "6 million" nazis

Supposed to fight back against? Their status and rewards for being good nazis? Oh and they did fight back, against the allies trying to take away their privileged status. And there weren't 6 million. That is the standard number used for Jews exterminated by loyal nazis. By 1945 there were 8.5 million, as being in the party was a good way to survive and even prosper even while losing the war.

[Wilms]

29. I tell what they were "supposed to fight against".

The destruction of their country at the hands of a maniac.

But, OK. Pardon my Stupidity, Warren.

[a2liberal]

27. It was pretty obvious

Some people are twisting it to make an issue of it -- I can only guess because they don't like the comparison of what's happening in our country to Nazi Germany

[Bluenorthwest]

34. If that was the intention then the mistake was using 'the Holocaust' instead of 'Nazi Party' because

when you say 'six million in the Holocaust' that has a well known meaning. If the meme wishes to speak of the Nazis, it should do so. The Nazi Party atrocities were not only those of the Holocaust and death camps it also included territorial aggression and the occupation of neighboring nations. In terms of Germans who followed Nazi orders, there were tens of millions who did so. Not 6. 20,700,000 served in the Wehrmacht alone.

If the intention of the meme is to say 'Germans fell for it, Americans could too' then a rewrite would be very advisable because as it stands the message is at best confusing and at worst very insulting and bigoted just as the OP says.

[awoke_in_2003]

40. That was my thought, too

How very wrong I was.

[questionseverything]

18. cali is in no way defending fox

the original op did misstate , and could be interpreted to blame the jews, i admit i did not read it that way until cali pointed it out....which is why i love cali

[cali]

19. no,I didn't fail history, dear. And the moronic strawman you've erected is just pitiful

Awfully embarrassing for you. Sad you couldn't do any better. Do you actually believe that anyone is going to swallow your garbage argument that I'm defending Fox News?

You actually believe your link bolsters your your apparent claim that the Jews went willingly into camps and ghettos?

You really are appallingly ignorant on the subject. Or something.

[lunatica]

14. I can't believe this actually needs to be said!

Obviously some people haven't read or seen historical footage. They should be ashamed of their ignorance.

[gollygee]

15. I agree with you

It's maybe trying to make a point about Nazis and the German public, but the 6 million number makes it sound like they think Jewish people were responsible for their own persecution.

If it were written in a different way, to make it sound like it were about the German public and not the Jewish people who were killed in the Holocaust, then it would not be offensive. But as it stands, I agree.

[Paladin]

20. Cue our resident Gun Enthusiasts, criticizing the Jews for not having and using firearms.

That's an ugly Blame The Victim argument I've seen---and that I've called out and disputed---time and again, here at DU.

[Liberal_in_LA]

21. ugly

[Tipperary]

24. Someone actually said this on this forum?

That is one of the worst things I can imagine.

[cwydro]

30. My mother has a friend who

was in Auschwitz as a child.

I've seen the tattoo on her arm.

They sure as shit did not go willingly.

[Jack Rabbit]

31. To underscore the dehumanization of Jews, they were transported in cattle cars

The same is true of those convicted of trumped up charges in Stalin's Soviet Union. They were sent to labor camps to build roads and canals in cattle cars. The purpose of the labor camps was to furnish cheap labor for Stalin's building projects. The purpos of Stalin's brand of justice was to provide the laborers, when the convicts weren't shot. Some worker's paradise, eh?

Of course, cattle cars weren't practical for a trans-Atlantic crossing, so the kidnapped Africans were chained to their beds in the cargo hold of a ship.

Thank you. Cali, for pointing out that a once free human being is no longer free if he's taking directions by an agent of oppression with a gun.

[Bluenorthwest]

35. Stalin forced the majority of the Crimean Tartars onto boxcars and relocated them to Central Asia

It was the largest and swiftest forced relocation of all time. Today, Russians claim Crimea has always been Russian majority. Boxcars, guns.

[Jack Rabbit]

36. Thank you

I was aware that Crimean Tartars were subject to relocations during Stalin's time, but was unaware of the details.

Turks have lived in Crimea since before the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. Before that, Crimea had been part of the Byzantine empire. The Romanovs annexed Crimea to the Russian Empire in 1783. There were Russians living there well before that; in the ninth century it was ruled by the Kievan Rus, descendants of Vikings and ancestors of Russians, Belorusians and Ukrainians. From the fall of the Golden Horde until the eighteenth century, Crimea was part of the Ottoman empie.

Boxcars, guns and imperial tyrants: Byzantines, Mongols, Ottomans, Romanovs, Stalin and Putin.

[scarletwoman]

39. The origin of the Holocaust graphic used in that OP is from the right wing.

See this post:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=7144844

This seems to be a Tea Party meme, adapted and photoshopped

I was puzzled by the 'over 6 million' figure, which would refer not to those persuaded by Hitler, but to the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust; the total number of Holocaust victims is around 11 million. I thought at first that it might be a misprint for 'over 60 million' which could be a very approximate figure for the population of Germany at that time.

But I then checked and found several places on the Internet where this is posted, all right-wing, and mostly illustrated, not by the Fox News logo, but by an arm tattooed with a concentration camp number. So this is definitely referring to the Jews, and is incredibly insulting however it is taken: 'The Jews only got killed because they let themselves be duped'/ 'A relatively limited form of public healthcare, at least if established by a black president, is exactly the same thing as mass extermination'/ 'All human disasters including the Holocaust are caused by gun control'/ all of the above.

<snip>

Pretty ugly stuff; ironically an example of the sort of vicious propaganda that can be used by extremists.

And DUer after DUer has been duped by it, starting with the DUer who posted it in his OP - no doubt in total ignorance of its actual vile message.