If Germany was actually sorry about WWII and about the genocides they committed, they wouldn't be in favour of prostitution and they wouldn't be building brothels in which an overwhelming number of Romani women are being raped by men, beaten by men and called 'Gypsy whores' by their pimps and their johns. The legal and institutionalized mass raping of Romani women in German brothels just proves that torture and persecution carried by the German State on Romani women never stopped. The German men raping Romani women in brothels are just the same as their German grandfathers who did the same thing in concentration camps.

Papusza (Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krzysztof Krauze - 2013)

Despite being one of the two ethnic groups affected by the Nuremberg Laws there is not enough education on them or the Holocaust in general.

Holocaust education failed when people went away thinking that the Holocaust

a) Was a surprise

b) Wasn't preventable

c) Can never happen again.

They also seem to think that they would be the heroes saving people and fighting back in the scenario, but y'know....those people were a tiny minority. The majority of people truly believed that Jews and Rroma were a disease on their society and wanted them exterminated. And yes, they believed these things with sugar-coated social justice terms.

Jews weren't Christ-killers anymore, they were "greedy outsiders who have dual-loyalty and corrupt the economy, disenfranchising the poor."

Rroma weren't devil-worshipping heathens anymore, they were "wandering people with no morals who prey on vulnerable people and trespass."

Killing and torturing disabled people wasn't exorcism anymore, it was "furthering society by eliminating the burdens on it" and "sparing those poor souls the horror of living" and "advancing scientific research."

Many progressive and leftist and liberal people ended up being complicit and even active members of the Nazi party because of the way the xenophobic and bigoted ideologies of the parties were painted in "progressive" vocabulary.

Think about how many times you've uncritically reblogged and shared posts about the "global elite" or "secret pedophile ring" or "X country eliminated Down Syndrome" or "scientists are so close to finding the autism gene" or "religion is poison" or "overpopulation".

You are not immune.

Not everyone may have personally manned the gas chambers, but they certainly didn't stand in Hitler's way.

Holocaust education isn't enough until it teaches that.

Begging queer gentiles to understand that the centuries-to-millennia old link between queerphobia and antisemitism is what played a major role in Hitler targeting queer people. Jews have been blamed and killed for "corrupting gentiles into homosexuality" and have long been the subject of transphobic and intersexist conspiracies. Queer people being targeted was largely rooted in antisemitism.

Magnus Hirschfeld, who often is cited as evidence that the Nazis targeted queer people first, was a Jew! Many Jewish people were prominent in the early queer liberation movement in Berlin. So much pro-LGBT research and understanding, as well as development of successful SRS techniques, came from Jewish scientists and doctors who were actively fighting for queer rights.

These Jewish pioneers of queer liberation and trans healthcare are the people whose books were burned when the Nazis came for the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft.

Many queer people claim the end of the Holocaust did not bring liberation for queer people. While this is true to an extent, it is intentionally misleading.

Antisemitism and anti-Romani racism (because you never seem to remember Romani people were also main targets) neither started nor ended with the Holocaust. After "liberation" both groups still faced subhuman treatment (many dying in displaced persons camps after surviving death camps), social and legal discrimination, cultural genocide, violence, expulsion, and murder for their ethnic identities.

The narrative that things were magically better is just that: a narrative created by allied nations to sweep their culpability and failings under the rug.

You cannot separate Jewish people and queer people into two distinct camps that never touch, it's not only ahistorical and erases the existence of queer Jews in history as well as Jewish contributions to sexual liberation, but it also contributes to the modern alienation and exclusion that queer Jews face from the queer community.

Gentiles can reblog but are asked to listen and not to comment.

i’m speechless. imagine comparing this “easily” to antisemitism and anti-romani violence. also sorry but a ‘mass’???? how many is a mass? is it more than the women now seeking abortions out of state? is it more than the women seeking help escaping domestic violence? is it more than refugees from other countries seeking genuine asylum? would love to know what constitutes a mass to the people who believe this

Dick Grayson and Aang

ok but upon watching Avatar the Last Airbender (probably as a kid, but maybe as a young adult) for the first time, Dick Grayson would at first be really into it but progressively relate to Aang more and more.

Carefree young boys raised in a nomadic society, free to roam with their friends & family: Haley’s Circus + Graysons // Air Nomads + Aang’s friend’s all over the world 

and when they are separated from their families and culture through death (Dick + Aang) and time (mostly Aang, but arguably most of Dick’s life spent away from the circus) and make a new family with the people that they meet along the way to fix the world and use their abilities for good: 

Circus and the Grayson’s Romani heritage -->  Dick is part of the Batfam and becomes a vigilante with the intention of catching Tony Zucco.

Meanwhile  Southern Air Temple and the Air Nomads --> Aang meets Katara and Sokka, and later the rest of Gaang doing his best to fulfil his duty as Avatar to stop the Fire Nation, the people that committed genocide against his community 

Despite their circumstances, both boys put on a brave face and do their best to cheer up those around them, unafraid to show emotions or shy away from hard work. (they’re also both total dorks and I love them for it)

While going on their various life journeys, Dick’s growth from Robin to Nightwing and Aang’s forced character growth before Sozin’s Comet, both boys have to blend into their new worlds without trying to forget their past and their true motivation.

I feel its less obvious for Dick, especially as Nightwing, but occasionally we get hints (in comics, movies, games etc) about his family’s culture and traditions, or reminders about the Robin name and colours.

On the other hand is Aang’s clear struggle to balance himself, a goofy airbender who happens to also be the Avatar, with someone who is grieving his entire people and feels the weight of expectation and fear of letting his culture and its teachings die out as the sole survivor. This becomes even more apparent (to me at least) when Aang is trying to find a way out of killing Ozai. He knows he can’t let Ozai go unpunished, but he also doesn’t want to go against the Air Nomad teachings as its sole student, to kill him, or perhaps he is scared and clinging to the only thing he can, his principles.

Either way, I feel like as much as Dick (and all the batfam to be honest) would love Avatar the Last Airbender, Dick would relate to the show and Aang the most. And when he watched one of the last episodes, where Aang struggles to balance his heritage with his duty - his past and his present - with the Lion turtles, you best bet Dick Grayson was Feeling Things (and thats ok)

they also both have angsty red brother figures - i.e. Zuko and Jason

it astounds me how little people know about romani people. like. they are one of the most persecuted and oppressed groups in history, over and over in place after place for centuries, and i fucking swear i say 'romani' instead of 'g---y' and people don't even know what im talking about

stunning watching people in the notes of this post miss the point....

It's so strange to me to see antifascists who once talked about how white genocide is a white supremacist myth are now going along with the narrative that Russia is committing fascist genocide against Ukrainians. I can really tell how few people have done their homework to understand the necessity of race, and particularly whiteness, in the subject of fascist genocide.

Ultimately, genocide is not enacted against a nation, but against an ethnicity and/or race (hence the significance of ethnic and racial cleansing in genocidal policies). This may secondarily be genocide against a nation/state, but only as part of the goal of genocide and not the end-goal itself.

The only way to conceive of genocide against 'Ukraine' is either to say Russia is engaging in white genocide or slavic genocide (since contextually, slavs are considered non-white). Neither of which makes sense since Russia as a nation is largely made up of white and/or slavic people who live quite relatively cozy in Russia. Anybody who says Russia's military violence specifically targets ethnic Ukrainians seem to not understand that Ukraine is a state of many nations and many ethnicities, all of whom are subjected to Russian violence.

In this way, trying to characterize the conflict as 'Ukrainian genocide' is, if anything, reductive of the massive amounts of harm and trauma inflicted on non-Ukrainians in Ukraine. People who say these things are at best naive to how fascism functions, and at worst, they are okay with violence to the non-Ukrainian ethnic diaspora in Ukraine only insofar as it's ethnic Ukrainians/'real' white people committing the violence.

Or alternatively it's to say the invasion of Ukraine is part of a larger scale genocidal campaign, such as Nazi Germany invading Poland as part of the Holocaust (genocide of Jews and Romani), but people seem very keen on ensuring the white Ukrainian population remains front and center of any conversation about Russian violence in Ukraine.

Wanted to make a post dunking on an idiot who seems to think using the word "genocide" for anything other than the holocaust is disgraceful, then took a look at Wikipedia for some fact checking and got too depressed and sad to do it

You actually have to be brain dead if you believe Romani women are oppressed for our ~gender identity and not for our biological sex. You listen to trans activists and they tell you "misogyny is hating women and a woman is someone who identifies as a woman." But Romani women never could and never can identify out of our oppression, because it is sex-based. Just look at history. For 500 years Eastern European Romani women were raped by their white 'masters'. During the Atlantic slave trade, Western European Romani women were shipped off to American colonies and sold as slaves on plantations to be bred with black slaves. They were literally called "breeding slaves". During the Holocaust, Antonescu's army established brothels consisting only of Romani women, who were also forced to serve in brothels in Nazi concentration camps. Still today Romani women make up a large portion of the women trafficked and forced into prostitution in Europe. Are they oppressed because they identify as women? Could they escape all of this by just saying "actually I go by he/him"? No, they are oppressed because misogyny is about being oppressed for being of the female sex. In this context, saying otherwise is victim blaming.

Several European countries (Germany, Sweden, Czechoslovakia) forcibly sterilized Romani women over the course of the 20th century. Misogyny against Romani women has always been about controlling our bodies, our reproductive abilities, sexually assaulting us. No one would want to identify into that and not wanting to suffer that doesn't mean you're not a woman.

That's why transactivism doesn't mean anything to Romani women who know just a little bit about our history. When you're constantly assaulted and persecuted because of your biological sex, it makes no sense to turn around and say "womanhood is a feeling, misogynists target the people who feel like women"

Papusza (Joanna Kos-Krauze, Krzysztof Krauze - 2013)

Professor Ian Hancock OBE (awarded by Her Majesty Queen): The Holocaust claimed anywhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million Romani lives

everyone who describes narkina 5 as a “prison metaphor” owes- you know what, i’m not going to say you owe any cash, but you DO owe it to all jewish and romani people to please. read. and. learn. about the realities of the shoah 

A historical What If I am wondering about

During the World War II, Pope Pius XII was ideologically critical of the Nazis. Under his leadership various Catholics took some measures to rescue Jews and the Pope did publicly condemn the holocaust (but in somewhat vague terms). Some people have claimed that he “did nothing”, which is not true. But I do wonder how things would have turned out if he had chosen a different form of resistance.

What if the Pope had declared that all members of the NSDAP and everyone who helped in the attempt exterminate Jews and Romani is excommunicated? And in addition, if he had declared all oaths to the Nazi regime void and urged the Catholics serving in the German military to desert?

In response, the Nazis would of course take measures against the Catholic Church to bring it under their control, appoint bishops loyal to their rule, imprison clergy loyal to the pope, end the Vatican as a state, etc. This would reduce the ability of the Catholics to render aid clandestinly, which could very well lead to more people dying. The question is: would it have been worth it? How many Catholics would have openly acted against the Nazis and what impact would that have had?

This What If, more abstractly, is the question of which alternative is better when evil is commited:

1) high chance to aid victims clandestinly, some public opposition to the evil, low risk to oneself

2) low chance to aid victims clandestinly, high public opposition to evil (but still low chance of success), high risk to oneself

I do think this is a difficult choice and I think it is understandable that Pius XII chose 1. But I fear this won’t be the last time the Church has to make such a choice, so it is a relevant question if 2 would have been better.

(Addendum 1: To answer these question, it would probably be worthwhile to look at other instances of Catholic resistance to atrocities.)

(Addendum 2: Some of the instances in which Catholics hid/rescued jews deserve their own criticism. In particular the cases in which they rescued children but refused to return them after the war.)