Happy Thanksgiving fellow Americans.
Survivors liberated from Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of World War II said “never again.” From then up to today some have intended the phrase to mean that never again should Jewish people suffer horrors like those of the Holocaust, and some have intended it to mean that the world must eliminate such horrors not only for Jewish people but for all people.
This morning after learning something new about a prior round of fighting in Gaza I had some new thoughts on this. There’s a rough transcript below:
The video behind the thoughts behind the recording:
(On Instagram here. Downloaded and uploaded because of how much pro-Palestinian material keeps curiously disappearing across platforms.)
For more on “never again” hit my recent post Death to Fascists.
Thank you for your interest friends and enemies and internet strangers.
Rough Transcript:
Good morning. Happy Thanksgiving to those in the United States or otherwise celebrating American Thanksgiving. So I'm somebody who thinks the state of Israel is doing some really terrible things at present. Uh, and also knows that Jewish people have suffered some really terrible things in history. I've seen different takes, uh, attributing like the trauma of the Holocaust and trauma responses.
Uh, kind of saying like that's, that's what the deal was, uh, with the Nakba. With the like initial brutal kind of seizing of that land, uh, in 1947 to 49, or like that's the deal since. I don't know, that doesn't sit real well with me on the whole. At the same time, um, like ignoring, uh, ignoring like that Holocaust history, which is like very much not on its own.
But follows like centuries of Jewish people, uh, like in most places, being like, you know, a minority people who were treated pretty, [00:01:00] like with varying degrees of like brutality and persecution and experienced different death and suffering all across Europe. Absolutely. Like European anti Semitism for centuries is like a hell of a thing.
So none of that's new for anybody who's been listening to me go on about this stuff. But here's the thing that's new to me. Um. So I just saw a little Instagram reel explaining how in one of their recent, uh, campaigns against Gaza, not the present one, but the prior or the one before that, the amount of bombs that they dropped the first day and the time that began dropping them when Gaza schools are changing between like a morning shift and an afternoon shift and like all the kids are in the streets and, uh, like, fuck, I'm sure not everybody in Israeli society.
Uh, it was like, yeah, let's start our bombing campaign right when all the kids are in the street. I'm sure that's not the case at the same time. A few people had to be on board with that. Like that, that couldn't have been just [00:02:00] Netanyahu, you know, and his evilest, you know, number one, number two, like that, that, that, no, that, that assuming that that's accurate, um, Um, that had to be, you know, substantially agreed.
So here's the thought, uh, contrast what lessons can be learned from the Holocaust. If you're somebody like me and like plenty of others in American society or in the West who like grows up somewhere incredibly like safe and lucky and privileged and whatever else however you'd like to characterize it.
Yeah, you grow up. Yeah, you're going to school, you're getting fed, you're getting entertained, you're getting coddled, you're getting advertised to, you've never, ever, ever seen warfare. You've probably never seen a dead body. Like, you, you've, you know, you're just in the whole grand scale of like human variance and, and variance [00:03:00] of, Uh, like, environments to grow up in and be formed in and like, get your bearings for what the world is like, uh, and what it's like to be a human being and how the world works and all of that, like, you're in fucking Disney World, like it's, things are real nice and safe and fair and kind and like, yeah.
So, and then, you know, at some point, I'm sure you get your, you get your, uh, you get your exposures to some countervailing factors. You learn death is a thing you lose a pet or two, maybe a grandparent, um, you know, you get bullied at school or something. Um, you know, but for a lot of people, it hasn't gone a whole lot further than that.
When you learn about the fucking Holocaust. You learn about the Nazi war machine and extermination machine and like the extraordinary slaughter and suffering of Jewish [00:04:00] people in that. Um. And, you know, uh, certainly in the way it's usually presented, but probably just apart from that, just those facts striking you like, it's like, Oh my God, like there's like good and evil here.
There's like the cruel and the suffering here. Um, I think it's very moralized and, um, you know, yeah, you got some horror and some shock and some like. Never again to anybody resolve, you know, some shadows of that stuff, like some intimations of that stuff. And yeah, what I'm suggesting, what I want to suggest is that...
Like, all of that, um, like that's because of that whole frame, that whole context, um, that yeah, it's so shocking and it's so moralized and it's so like, wow, this is a, like a uniquely awful thing that happened, uh, and that like we need to try to make never happen again. And like, in a lot of ways it succeeded and like, [00:05:00] we'll succeed and it should succeed.
Like this will never happen again. We'll keep this from happening. We're in a good country, a good world, maybe some of that stuff too. Um, whereas for Jewish people actually living through it, that's a very different sort of frame. And for Jewish people since living, you know, growing up, like steeped in some awareness of that, that's a very different frame.
And. Uh, so while clearly, uh, so many Jewish people, uh, you know, it take a similarly moral stance toward it of like, this is a horrible thing that was done, uh, you know, in the Nazi Holocaust to Jews and to other groups, to queer people and Roma people and Slavic people and disabled people. Uh, And like, that should be, should never happen again to anybody, like we should fight against this stuff.
Uh, it shouldn't happen to Jews. It shouldn't happen to, uh, queer people. It shouldn't happen to transgender people. It shouldn't happen to Palestinian [00:06:00] people. It shouldn't fucking happen to anybody like this. This is something that should be opposed. Um, it also makes some sense. To imagine, uh, Israelis, not all Israelis, but, uh, some appreciable share of Israelis, uh, like, taking quite a different frame on the whole thing.
Basically, the frame that Netanyahu has expressed pretty well, that he tweeted from his, uh, presidential Twitter, um, not too long ago, of, Look, you gotta be strong, you gotta be brutal. The world is a brutal place. Uh, the weak... Disappear from history. The strong. Yeah, they get criticized and they get called bad, but you know what?
Eventually, people make peace with them and respect them. So, never again means never again to us. We will never again be weak. We will never again... Be vulnerable. We will never again leave any small gap in [00:07:00] the armor. We will do whatever it takes to make this not happen to us. And we will play this brutal game by its brutal rules.
We will do whatever we need to do to any of our opponents, to any threats. We will, it will never again happen to us by us doing it again to others, whenever they fuck with us.
.