okay fellas, I'm sorry but I feel the need to get onto my little soapbox here for a bit.

Rant below the cut.

Warnings: discussion the genocide of american natives, WW2 discussions, mentiones of death (repeatedly), mentions of eugenics, gas chambers, hanging, starvation, jim crow laws and general rage at people who downplay horrible events that happened in history because they are "not as bad" as WW2

For context: I'm following a bunch of native american creators on insta because somebody unintentionally sent me down a rabbit hole and one of them made a post mourning the lives lost to the strategic erasure of their culture since the Europeans first stepped foot on the american continent. They described it as the native holocaust.

Some guy seemed genuinely confused about the use of the word holocaust so I thought I'd be nice and clear up some confusion about it and left it at that HOWEVER when I brought it up later with friends in discord because I thought it was kinda silly how mad the dude got over it in later comments I came to realize that a lot of people don't actually know what the word means and, especially white americans, seem to get really pissed off when the word is "misused" and now here we are.

So, just to be clear: It does NOT mean death by fire in german. I have no idea where everyone gets that from because it's not even a German word. Death by fire is Feuertod in german and, considering that a lot more people in ww2 died through gas chambers, hanging, starvation, sickness and gunfire using a word meaning "death by fire" would be completely and utterly wrong.

It's true that the greek word it stems from, holókauston, is put together out of holos (whole) and kaustós (burnt) but even then it still does not mean death by fire, it means a sacrifice that was wholly burnt which is why we use the term for events such as the ones of WW2 in a metaphorical sense. It was a great (as in big) intentionally made "sacrifice" that (almost) wholly "burnt" away a whole group of people and I'm putting sacrifice in "-" so nobody gets the wrong idea here. It wasn't a sacrifice, a sacrifice is something you make in honor of something like a god or a cause, it was government funded massmurder.

For reference, here is the wikipedia on the term.

What holocaust the modern word DOES mean is destruction or slaughter of human life on a mass scale through various means which include fire depending on what dictionary you look at.

For reference, here is what is says in the Duden in German and for the English folks the definition from the Cambridge dictionary just to make 100% sure everyone is on the same page here.

The reason for why we call the events of WW2 THE holocaust is because, thus far, it was the most extreme case in human history in meticulously planned execution and a (considering the death toll) extremely short time span. For that it is THE holocaust as in the biggest most extreme but that does not mean that there can't be other instances of one happening and that events that had been labeled as one previously before ww2 suddenly aren't one anymore and as much as we all like to believe that humanity has learned its lesson deep down we all know that is not the case and it's only a matter of time before something worse happens.

"Oh but Wiika, events change the meanings of words” Yes, but I honestly believe that this one word, the one word we have to describe man made horror beyond the comprehension of the average mind, should not be gatekept and exclusive to one event.

Claiming what is happening to native american folks is not a holocaust and "just a massacre that happened x amount of years ago" to me is denial of history and denial of the more than 13 million lives lost on the side of the natives alone as estimated by this paper on page 7 that I have seen cited as a source repeatedly while looking up the topic on the webpages of several reservations and articles on the topic so I'll trust that they check their sources more thoroughly than I do.

For reference, if we sum up the numbers given in the chart under "Number of deaths" from the United Stated Holocaust Memorial Museum (and yes I picked an english source just for you, also to be clear we are only looking at the victims that were civilians/not soldiers and people that were imprisoned/qualified to be send to a KZ which is literally everyone else on that list) and pick the higher number for the Roma we get a number that looks a little something like 18.933.900 and taking into account the two shadows numbers we can pump that up to 19 million and still probably miss a few thousand.

Again, side by side. WW2 19 million in total. The natives of america 13 million. That is a difference of 6 million and at this point I would like to remind you that the killing and erasure of natives is still ongoing meaning that the number keeps going up and we also have a huge shadow number that is probably also in the thousands of kids that had been taken to be "cultured" and never were heard of again and kidnappings and killings that are being skillfully ignored by law enforcement and also just murders that happened in the past that we probably never heard of and also probably never will.

I know that the number of 19 million came to be within six years and the 13 million over the span from 1492 until this paper was first published in 2018 and I know that the timespan and how quickly things happened in WW2 are part of what makes it so disturbing to many people but it should not overshadow the fact that these are human lives lost to a system designed to erase them in both cases.

We should not be standing here and saying one of these things is less bad than the other because it took longer to achieve such a high number of deaths or because the total of deaths is lower. Millions are still millions. Most people can't even imagine what a few thousand people would look like in one open space. Now try and fathom literally millions of people as an image in your head, all dead.

Also, as a little side tangent: I know americans have a bit of a hard on for WW2 media and such because it makes them feel like the hero because they came and swooped in and killed the evil nazis BUT what a lot of folk like to ignore in the favour of the illusion of being a hero is that a lot of hitlers ideas and systems were inspired by what was going on in northern america. The KZs were inspired by the US Indian reservation system. The whole "blood purity" law that forced people to proof that they are "only to a certain percent jewish" or else they be sent to work and extermination camps was inspired by Margaret Higgins Sanger and her eugenics theories and don't even get me started on the Jim Crow laws that directly inspired a lot of anti-jewish laws that were going on back then.

To sum up my whole point with this long ass rant:

Please for fucks sake stop telling people that a massacre, especially against their own people, does not count as a holocaust because there has been "a bigger one".

Don't take away the one word we have to accurately describe the man made horrors and crimes committed against human life because you think a different event in time is more deserving of it. To do so is to deny what happened in its true extent and that is nothing but disrespectful to the lives that have been lost.

You can't just say that one of the two is less horrible than the other, both have aspects that are terrifying to them, some more and some less, but the second you say "I think that x event is less bad than y event" that implies that one of the two is more....excusable?

The two events mentioned above are clearly not the same, they never will be and they never should be treated as such and they never ever EVER should be treated as if they are in competition about which one of them is worse or is deserving of a title.

I merely brought them both up to put into perspective what some people are willing to excuse and even completely disregard because they feel like something else is more deserving of the label of "destruction or slaughter of human life on a mass scale" and thus completely disregard literally 531 and still counting years worth of bloodshed and abuse as nothing more than a minor hiccup in the history of the glorious land of the free the way that they always do with anything that throws a shadow on that not USA exclusive american dream considering that Canada is literally just maple syrup flavoured USA when it comes to this topic specifically.

Thank you for coming to my TEDtalk.

hmmmmmmmmmm maybe i’ll write an Introspective Musing Post about my relationship to religion and their depiction in stories because i’ve pondering about this topic lately

so for those who are reading this and DON’T know what’s been going on...  there’s this webcomic i fell in love with some years ago, about six years actually, that depicts a post-apocalyptic fantasy/horror adventure set in the nordic countries. it had, and has still, some very uncomfortable flaws regarding racial representation, and the creator has historically not dealt very well with criticism towards it. it’s a whole Thing. my relationship with this comic has fluctuated a lot, since there are a lot of elements in it i DO love and i still feel very nostalgic about, and like idk i felt like i trust my skills in critical thinking enough to keep reading. aaand then the creator went a teensy bit off the deep end created a whole minicomic which is like... a lukewarm social media dystopia where christians are oppressed (and also everyone is a cute bunny, including our lord and saviour jesus christ). which is already tonedeaf enough considering there are religious people who DO get prosecuted for their faith, like, that’s an actual reality for a lot of people - but as far as i can tell, usually not christians. and then there’s an afterword that’s like, “anyway i got recently converted and realized i’m a disgusting human being full of sin who doesn’t deserve redemption but jesus loves me so i’ll be fine!! remember to repent for your sins xoxo” and a bunch of other stuff and IT’S KIND OF REALLY CONCERNING i have, uh, been habitually looking at the reactions to and discussions around this, maybe it’s not very self care of me but there’s a lot of overwhelming things rn and it’s fantastically distracting, yknow? like, overall this situation is fairly reminiscent of the whole jkr thing. creator of a series that is Fairly Beloved, does something hurtful, handles backlash in a weird way, a lot of people start taking distance from Beloved Series or find ways to enjoy it on their own terms, creator later reveals to have been fully radicalized and releases a whole manifesto, and any and all criticism gets framed as harassment and proving them right. of course, one of them is a super rich person with a LOT of media power and a topic that is a lot more destructive in our current zeitgeist, and the other is an independent webcomic creator, so it’s  not the same situation. just similar vibez ya feel as a result of this, i have been Thinking. and just this feels like some sort of defeat like god dammit she got me i AM thinking about the topic she wrote about!!! i should dismiss the whole thing!!! but thinking about topics is probably a good thing so hey lets go. me, i’m agnostic. i understand that this is a ‘lazy’ position to take, but it’s what works for me. i simply do not vibe with organized religion, personally. (i had the wikipedia page for ‘chaos magic’ open in a tab for several weeks, if that helps.) i was raised by atheists in a majorly atheist culture. christian atheist, i should specify. norway has been mostly and historically lutheran, and religion has usually been a private and personal thing. it turns out the teacher i had in 7th grade was mormon, but i ONLY found out because he showed up in a tv series discussing religious groups in norway later, and he was honestly one of the best teachers i have ever had - he reignited the whole class’ interest in science, math, and dungeons and dragons. it was a real “wait WHAT” moment for my teenage self. i think i was briefly converted to christianity by my friend when i was like 7, who grew up in a christian family (i visited them a couple times and always forgot they do prayers before dinner. oops!), but like, she ALSO made me believe she was the guardian of a secret magic orb that controls the entire world and if i told anybody the world would burn down in 3 seconds. i only suspected something was off when one day the Orb ran on batteries, and another day the Orb had to be plugged in to charge. in my defense i really wanted to be part of a cool fantasy plot. i had no idea how to be a christian beyond “uuuuh believe in god i guess” so it just faded away on its own. when i met this friend several years later, she was no longer christian. i think every childhood friend of mine who grew up in a christian family, was no longer christian when they grew up. most notably my closest internet friend whose family was catholic - she had several siblings, and each of them took a wildly different path, from hippie treehugger to laveyan satanist or something in that area. (i joined them for a sermon in a church when they visited my town. my phone went off during it because i had forgotten to silence it. oops!) ((i also really liked their mother’s interpretation of purgatory. she explained it as a bath, not fire. i like that.)) i have never had any personal negative experiences with christianity, despite being openly queer/gay/trans. the only time someone has directly told me i’m going to hell was some guy who saw me wearing a hoodie on norway’s constitution day. yeah i still remember that you bastard i’ve sworn to be spiteful about it till the day i die!! i’ve actually had much more insufferable interactions with the obnoxious kind of atheists - like yes yes i agree with you on a lot but that doesn’t diminish your ability to be an absolute hypocrite, it turns out? i remember going to see the movie ‘noah’ with a friend who had recently discovered reddit atheism and it was just really exhausting to discuss it with her. one of these Obnoxious Atheists is my Own Mother. which is a little strange, honestly, because she LOVES visiting churches for the Aesthetic and Architecture. we cannot go anywhere without having to stop by a pretty church to Admire and Explore. I’VE BEEN IN SO MANY CHURCHES FOR AN ATHEIST RAISED NON-CHRISTIAN. i’ve been to the vatican TWICE (i genuinely don’t even know how much of my extended family is christian. up north in the tiny village i come from, i believe my uncle is the churchkeeper, and it’s the only building in the area that did not get burnt down by the the nazis during ww2 - mostly because soldiers needed a place to sleep. still don’t know whether or not said uncle believes or not, because hey, it’s Personal) i think my biggest personal relationship to religion, and christianity specifically, has been academic. yeah, we learned a brief synopsis of world religions at school (and i remember the class used to be called ‘christianity, religion, and ethics’ and got changed to ‘religion, beliefs, and ethics’ which is cool. it was probably a big discourse but i was a teen who didnt care), but also my bachelor degree is in art history, specifically western art history because it’s a vast sprawling topic and they had to distill it as best they could SIGHS. western art history is deeply entangled with the history of the church, and i think the most i’ve ever learnt about christianity is through these classes (one of my professors wrote an article about how jesus can be interpreted as queer which i Deeply Appreciate). i also specifically tried to diversify my academic input by picking classes such as ‘depiction of muslims and jewish people in western medieval art’ and ‘art and religion’ when i was an exchange student in canada, along with 101 classes in anthropology and archaeology. because i think human diversity and culture is very cool and i want to absorb that knowledge as best as i can. i think my exchange semester in canada was the most religiously diverse space have ever been in, to be honest. now as an adult i have more christian friends again, but friends who chose it for themselves, and who practice in ways that sound good and healthy, like a place of solace and community for them. the vast majority of my friends are queer too, yknow?? i’ve known too many people who have seen these identities as fated opposites, but they aren’t, they’re just parts of who people are. it’s like... i genuinely love people having their faiths and beliefs so much. i love people finding that space where they belong and feel safe in. i love people having communities and heritages and connections. i deeply respect and admire opening up that space for faith within any other communities, like... if i’m going to listen to a podcast about scepticism and cults, i am not going to listen to it if it’s just an excuse to bash religion. i think the search for truth needs to be compassionate, always. you can acknowledge that crystals are cool and make people happy AND that multi level marketing schemes are deeply harmful and prey on people in vulnerable situaitons. YOU KNOW???? so now’s when i bring up Apocalypse Comic again. one of the things i really did like about it was, ironically, how it handled religion. in its setting, people have returned to old gods, and their magic drew power from their religion. characters from different regions had different beliefs and sources. in the first arc, they meet the spirit of a lutheran pastor, who ends up helping them with her powers. it was treated as, in the creators own words, ‘just another mythology’. and honestly? i love that. it was one of the nicest depictions i’ve seen of christianity in fiction, and as something that could coexist with other faiths. I Vibe With That. and then, uh, then... bunny dystopia comic. it just... it just straight up tells you christianity is literally the only way to..?? be a good person??? i guess?? i’m still kind of struggling to parse what exactly it wanted to say. the evil social media overlord bird tells you the bible makes you a DANGEROUS FREETHINKER, but the comic also treats rewriting the bible or finding your own way to faith as something,, Bad. The Bible Must Remain Unsullied. Never Criticize The Bible. also, doing good things just for social media clout is bad and selfish. you should do good things so you don’t burn in hell instead. is that the message? it reads a lot like the comic creator already had the idea for the comic, but only got the urge to make it after she was converted and needed to spread the good word. you do you i guess!! i understand that she’s new to this and probably Going Through Something, and this is just a step on her journey. but the absolute self-loathing she described in her afterword... it does not sound good. i’m just some agnostic kid so what do i know, but i do not think that kind of self-flagellating is a kind faith to have for yourself. i might not ever have been properly religious, but you know what i AM familiar with? a brain wired for ocd and intrusive thoughts. for a lot of my life i’ve struggled with my own kind of purity complex. i’ve had this really strange sensitivity for things that felt ‘tainted’. i’ve experienced having to remove more and more words from my vocabulary because they were Bad and i did not want to sully my sentences. it stacked, too - if a word turned out to be an euphemism for something, i could never feel comfortable saying it again. i still struggle a bit with these things, but i have confronted these things within myself. i’ve had to make myself comfortable with imperfection and ‘tainted’ things and accept that these are just, arbitrary categories my mind made up. maybe that’s the reason i can’t do organized religion even if i found one that fit for me - just like diets can trigger disordered eating, i think it would carve some bad brainpaths for me. so yeah i’m worried i guess! i’m worried when people think it’s so good that she finally found the correct faith even if it’s causing all this self-hate. is there really not a better way? or are they just trusting she’ll find it? and yeah it’s none of my concern, it’s like, i worry for jkr too but i do not want her within miles of my trans self thANKS. so like, i DO enjoy media that explores faith and what it means for you. my favourite band is the oh hellos, which DOES draw on faith and the songwriter’s experience with it. because of my religious iliteracy most of it has flown over my head for years and i’m like “oh hey this is gay” and then only later realize it was about god all along Probably. i like what they’ve done with the place. also, stormlight archive - i had NO idea sanderson was mormon, the way he writes his characters, many of whom actively discuss religion and their relationship to it. i love that about the books, honestly. Media That Explores Religion In A Complex And Compassionate Way... we like that i’ve been thinking about my own stories too, and how i might want to explore faith in them. most of my settings are based on magic and it’s like, what role does religion have in a world where gods are real and makes u magic. in sparrow spellcaster’s story, xe creates? summons? an old god - brings them to life out of the idea of them. it’s a story about hubris, mostly. then there’s iphimery, the story where i am actively fleshing out a pantheon. there’s no doubt the gods are real in the fantasy version of iphimery, they are the source of magic and sustain themselves on slivers of humanity in exchange. but in the modern version, where they are mostly forgotten? that’s some room for me to explore, i think. especially the character of timian, who comes from a smaller town and moves to a large and diverse city. in the fantasy story, the guardian deity chooses his sister as a vessel. in the modern setting, that does not happen, and i don’t yet know what does, but i really want timian to be someone who struggles with his identity - his faith, his sexuality, the expectations cast upon him by his hometown... i’m sure it’s a cliché story retold through a million gay characters but i want to do it too okay. i want to see him carve out his own way of existing within the world because i care him and want to see him thrive!!! alrighty i THINK that’s all i wanted to write. thanks if you read all of this, and if you didn’t that’s super cool have a nice day !