Disabled people were among the first victims of the Nazis.
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@futurebird yeah there's always a lot of corruption in what the nazis did: Embezzled money, misappropriated funds, stolen valuables. And it's rarely talked about because it feels so miniscule compared to the horrific crimes, but I think it's a common feature of strongly hierarchical political systems. No, a strong man at the top of government doesn't make it more efficient. He's more likely to create the perfect climate for bottomless money pits
it's a conversation that requires asking "yes, and?"
they put millions of Jewish people in death camps, they stole as many Jewish possessions as they could, but what did they do what they stole? where did it go?
there is a little possible clue in the Peaky Blinders movie, or at least it's something that made me think about this. if you haven't seen it, the story of the movie is about how the nazis counterfeit printed hundreds of millions of British five pound notes to try to crash the British economy, and what Tommy does to stop them. the notes are moved in trucks full of luggage cases. where could they have got all of those luggage cases? if it's what really happened, we can look to Auschwitz for where they got the cases.
there are other bits and pieces to pick out of The Zone Of Interest, if you can stomach watching that one.
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it's one of the dark secrets of white "moderate" society. but you can find it sometimes. here's Utah Phillips reciting an anonymous poem from George Milburn's 1930 book, The Hobo's Hornbook. he often gave little speeches to explain what he was talking about, and give some historical context:
@burnitdown @futurebird @emilychwiggy
Great story! I thought he told an abbreviated version of this on his album We Have Fed You All For A Thousand Years but now I can't find it. I know I've heard the part about handing your brain over to someone for eight hours a day. The long version in this clip is excellent!
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The centers also collected state pensions and social security for months after killing the people sent there for care. So they were very scammy in a way that I don't think we recognize enough in the Nazis, one state sponsored but privatized operation mooching off of public benefits.
That I have heard more about "welfare moms" than this in my life is something to ponder.
@futurebird @emilychwiggy over the past few years in the UK we've had at least a couple local councils found to be talking about "warehousing" disabled people:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/25/warehouse-disabled-people-bristol-city-council
Which, as a disabled person in the UK living somewhat locally to these areas, has been terrifying to watch (especially given these are just tge ones we know about, and because I've wstched peopke brush this off as unimportant)
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@futurebird @emilychwiggy over the past few years in the UK we've had at least a couple local councils found to be talking about "warehousing" disabled people:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/25/warehouse-disabled-people-bristol-city-council
Which, as a disabled person in the UK living somewhat locally to these areas, has been terrifying to watch (especially given these are just tge ones we know about, and because I've wstched peopke brush this off as unimportant)
It's not "unimportant" any time the state or a company hired by the state is charged with "keeping" people be they disabled, or people jailed but not convicted like many collected by ICE that system ... if it should exist at all needs to be transparent.
Don't tell me I can't visit, I can't take photos, I can't talk to anyone.
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@futurebird the nazis were incredibly prolific in disseminating propaganda that people would still believe 90 years later. From the efficient governing, over the consistent ideology, to the "german" engineering of the war machine
But like they were full of people with idiosyncratic ideas and beliefs, full of yes men only out for personal benefit.
Himmler was obsessed with some weird germanic pseudo myth,
Hitler with impractical architecture…this is another one of those instances where i have to say, yes Hitler and those close to him where terrible people, but look at where they got their ideas from. the nazis did not appear out of a vacuum, but out of a century of brutal colonialism that produced some horrifying photos such as the one of a mountain of buffalo skulls.
the nazi lies persist because we live under a mountain of colonial narrative which is itself an enormous pack of lies. it wasn't just some nasty Germans obsessed with "national identity", it was all over Europe in the 19th century. it's why Canada and USA exist as nation states. Hitler took a lot of inspiration from the extremely violent ideas and laws of John A. MacDonald and his government, the first parliament of Canada, many of which are still in the books today.
what's different in Canada today? Indigenous people are over-represented in incarceration. traumatised Indigenous children are further traumatised by family separation, which caused the generational trauma in the first place, but now the "Childrens' Aid Society" does it instead of the North West Mounted Police, who are now the RCMP. if a Black woman who is an elected representative holds up a tiny little placard in Ontario Parliament, to denounce another white supremacist genocide, the "left wing" party will do the work of the openly fascist party and kick her out.
but talk about these things with your average uneducated blockhead, and they'll look at you like you're from Neptune.
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@burnitdown @futurebird @emilychwiggy
Great story! I thought he told an abbreviated version of this on his album We Have Fed You All For A Thousand Years but now I can't find it. I know I've heard the part about handing your brain over to someone for eight hours a day. The long version in this clip is excellent!
@AdrianRiskin @futurebird @emilychwiggy
he probably recited this poem many times at many shows, in a different way every time. the track you're looking for is called The Two Bums, which is also the name of the poem.
i was really thinking of a different track when i posted that. this is the one that made the message even clearer. "who controls the blame pattern? why is it that large bodies of workers in my country always try to assign blame downwards to people trying to get a little something for nothing?"
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@AdrianRiskin @futurebird @emilychwiggy
he probably recited this poem many times at many shows, in a different way every time. the track you're looking for is called The Two Bums, which is also the name of the poem.
i was really thinking of a different track when i posted that. this is the one that made the message even clearer. "who controls the blame pattern? why is it that large bodies of workers in my country always try to assign blame downwards to people trying to get a little something for nothing?"
@burnitdown @futurebird @emilychwiggy
I did listen to that track on the album but he doesn't tell it there. Yeah, the blame pattern is another banger!
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Disabled people were among the first victims of the Nazis. What I did not know was that this program of eugenics through murder was very furtive at first. They knew that "do gooders" and "the church" would object to killing disabled people, often children just to save money.
They were careful not to have too many deaths at any one center at first. But as the stress of war created further chaos they become more open about these murders.
@futurebird There was a lot of resistance by the public to the execution of disabled people. It didn't stop the Nazis from killing them but they worked hard to make it appear that it wasn't happening.
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The centers also collected state pensions and social security for months after killing the people sent there for care. So they were very scammy in a way that I don't think we recognize enough in the Nazis, one state sponsored but privatized operation mooching off of public benefits.
That I have heard more about "welfare moms" than this in my life is something to ponder.
What are the odds that DHS and ICE are going to do the same thing with the hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans they are going to be sticking in their death camps?
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@futurebird @emilychwiggy but there's also an important lesson. There was resistance against T4. Resistance significant enough for the regime to suspend the murdering of that group of people. Not resisting against the murder of other groups was a choice.
I would add that the resistance saved lives. It was risky. Although I wish it had gone much much further. I don't know who was scared to go further and who didn't care.
In the end history will only remember the actions your take, not what is in your heart.
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I would add that the resistance saved lives. It was risky. Although I wish it had gone much much further. I don't know who was scared to go further and who didn't care.
In the end history will only remember the actions your take, not what is in your heart.
Reading about the sneakiness of Aktion T4 (the murders had started and most people did not know, or looked away if they did)... and then the limited resistance from the church. (But still brave some lost their lives.)
And knowing what came after it just makes this current moment feel very cold. Like we are on a dark road and there isn't any good way to turn back.
But, that's just a feeling. The reality is that there is still time. But this shows how it can be hard.
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Reading about the sneakiness of Aktion T4 (the murders had started and most people did not know, or looked away if they did)... and then the limited resistance from the church. (But still brave some lost their lives.)
And knowing what came after it just makes this current moment feel very cold. Like we are on a dark road and there isn't any good way to turn back.
But, that's just a feeling. The reality is that there is still time. But this shows how it can be hard.
There is a lesson here I think. Aktion T4 blew up in media after killing about 70,000 disabled people. The German public and the international public were broadly disgusted. Hitler said he would shut down the program. Made a new center that people could visit without any gas chambers. And this sort of worked?
The lesson is you can never trust people who do such things if they say "oh we will stop."
Now we can consider how we might apply this to our lives today.
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Unfortunately I've heard people say that our Stephen Miller could not have such evil ambitions because he is a part of a regime that is too petty and criminal and the nazis were more "ideological"
I think this is a troubling trend where people believe that the nazis were "at least efficient" which is just ingesting their old propaganda uncritically.
Big LOL here. As we learned from Eichman, Evil can be very boring. It doesn't usually walk and talk grand like villains in Hollywood films. Evil is very middle class: Just gifted enough to keep up the bureaucracy to keep a system doing evil working sufficient effectively. Evil suffers from a certain lack of fantasy. It's enough if the machinery of evil "just works".
And now, anybody, please tell me, Stephen Miller is not up for the role.
Frankly, the outright pettiness was also what characterized the Nazi regime. People need urgently to read up on the third Reich before they get those ideas that the Nazis were somehow people with a grand ideological vision that enabled their evil deeds.
I am German and a hobbyist student of German history. The Trump regime reeks practically like Hitler's. The very texture their actions and their talk have is the same.
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What are the odds that DHS and ICE are going to do the same thing with the hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans they are going to be sticking in their death camps?
I cannot say "no no that's impossible it's not worth worrying about"
When politicians and media try to visit the detention center they won't let them in. When you ask for a list of who is in there they won't say. It can be very difficult to simply find someone once they are picked up they might be flown across the country ... which is odd right? Why move people around so much?
I think we need to bang on the gates more.
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Thinking about it, it doesn't make sense that they would be open about doing such a thing. There were people who objected. Those people were called sentimental and unreasonable. And of course the murders would expand.
The killing centers were disguised as care facilities. Sometimes they billed families for months after their relative was dead.
@futurebird Canadian hospitals do things like that to Indigenous people, to this day.
i have a book about this, from 1987, by Dara Culhane Speck, called "An Error In Judgement: The Politics Of Medical Care In An Indian/White Community", which is an account of one case among far too many where Indigenous people contacting the white medical system results in racist violence. people die under mysterious circumstances and those responsible refuse to explain what happened. people are airlifted to far away, unfamiliar hospitals without their consent or knowledge, while they're unconscious, and after they wake up, are released with no way to get home. newborn babies being immediately put up for adoption without consent.
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Unfortunately I've heard people say that our Stephen Miller could not have such evil ambitions because he is a part of a regime that is too petty and criminal and the nazis were more "ideological"
I think this is a troubling trend where people believe that the nazis were "at least efficient" which is just ingesting their old propaganda uncritically.
@futurebird @emilychwiggy nah, Stephen Miller is a true believer. To a first approximation, Trump believes in nothing.
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What are the odds that DHS and ICE are going to do the same thing with the hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans they are going to be sticking in their death camps?
@Quasit @futurebird @emilychwiggy
What are the odds that they haven't been, already?
Who are the people in all those unmarked graves behind that one prison in Jackson?
And how many more are there?
Considering we're dealing with people who traffic children for all that Epstein stuff, I don't think we can rule anything out when asking what ELSE they traffic people for-- on all these planes flying with their transponders turned off, passing prisoners to places that still have overt slavery, like Mauritania. I put nothing past these monsters. Nothing. The sort of people who double-tap elementary schools and hospitals... There is no line they won't cross.
How many Mengeles and worse could be operating right now that we'd never hear about? And how many more, going back over the years?
In Germany most people didn't know what was happening until the camp were liberated and the footage came out. Oh, they probably heard rumors but they shrugged it off. Nowadays, we can't even trust photos anymore, what kind of coverage would it take for people to face it, much less do something about it?
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@Quasit @futurebird @emilychwiggy
What are the odds that they haven't been, already?
Who are the people in all those unmarked graves behind that one prison in Jackson?
And how many more are there?
Considering we're dealing with people who traffic children for all that Epstein stuff, I don't think we can rule anything out when asking what ELSE they traffic people for-- on all these planes flying with their transponders turned off, passing prisoners to places that still have overt slavery, like Mauritania. I put nothing past these monsters. Nothing. The sort of people who double-tap elementary schools and hospitals... There is no line they won't cross.
How many Mengeles and worse could be operating right now that we'd never hear about? And how many more, going back over the years?
In Germany most people didn't know what was happening until the camp were liberated and the footage came out. Oh, they probably heard rumors but they shrugged it off. Nowadays, we can't even trust photos anymore, what kind of coverage would it take for people to face it, much less do something about it?
@violetmadder @Quasit @futurebird @emilychwiggy (Several camps in Germany were close to cities, e.g. Dachau. Furthermore, inmates were sent to work in various places where they were in contact with civilians. It seems difficult to believe Germans were completely unaware that weird things were happening. It is however true that the mass killing centers were placed further east and outside of cities.)
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Thinking about it, it doesn't make sense that they would be open about doing such a thing. There were people who objected. Those people were called sentimental and unreasonable. And of course the murders would expand.
The killing centers were disguised as care facilities. Sometimes they billed families for months after their relative was dead.
There is something to learn from how defunding state care for disabled people played an important role in winning doctors and nurses over to the idea that just killing these people would be a good idea.
Funding was cut for state care facilities and they became miserable places. Patients acted out and a gulf grew between those providing care and their patients. Meanwhile propaganda suggested that these people would be better off dead.
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There is something to learn from how defunding state care for disabled people played an important role in winning doctors and nurses over to the idea that just killing these people would be a good idea.
Funding was cut for state care facilities and they became miserable places. Patients acted out and a gulf grew between those providing care and their patients. Meanwhile propaganda suggested that these people would be better off dead.
How are people turned into problems? Into "burdens on society" into objects of contempt?
I think about how people get annoyed and angry when a sick homeless person is on the subway. Yes it's annoying that this guy is sprawled out over 3 seats, or yelling and making noise, but why has this happened. Did he choose to come and make my commute more difficult? Or is this the only place he can lay down for a bit where it isn't outside and freezing?
