#such as disability. infected wounds and the countless healthissues the freed KZ inmates had as a result of their time in the camps

[wikagirl]

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.

#tw ww2 #tw death #tw violence #tw murder #tw eugenics #tw holocaust #mention of death #mention of eugenics #if we counted ALL the victims of ww2 including soldiers. rebels and people who died after the end of the war to things caused by the war #such as disability. infected wounds and the countless healthissues the freed KZ inmates had as a result of their time in the camps #we would have more than 70 million dead bodies summed up from all sides of the war #also please for fucks sake stop telling me as a german how I'm supposed to feel about ww2 or that I'm uneducated about it #ww2 is literally the only topic we do in history class from year 7 and onward #so sometimes up to 6 years of only ww2 and we are thorough with it too and considering how a lot of americans talk about the horrors #that happened in that time period I honestly think that they are the ones who don't know what they are talking about #a lot of folks outside of germany never even heard about the blood purity laws or the arian breeding programms #literally all of the shit I listed in here are things that were drilled into my brain in history class #I only looked things up to fact check so I don't misremember. This is basic history knowledge that is expected of german kids. #I've been told that i was a liar before because of what I mentioned earlier about where hitler got his inspo from #and to those people I say fuck you because since then I have actually bought and read his book and it's literally all in there #yes that book #and yes it's back on store shelves with editors notes and context markers and all that good stuff #and I honestly think it should be read in schools or at least snippets of it should be what all this insanity is built upon #actually our history teacher in 9th grade made us read bits of it even when it wasn't part of the curriculum #that woman trained us to sniff out nazi propaganda methods like blood hounds #and it's disturbing to see how much of these methods are currently being used in US government campaigns #shout out to mrs curtis for being the best history and english teacher I've ever had #can't wait to once again have the good old “white saviour syndrome” be tossed at me #but honestly I'm just so fed up with people downplaying events because ww2 was worse #they do it with the russia-ukranie situation rn and even bfore that they did it with gulags which are often used a joke