Fast-forward through tragedy

[sovay]

I feel as though it must signify something that the Schweizerische Volkspartei's breathtakingly anti-Islamic poster (and its successful vote) came out in the same year as images of Nazism are being flung nonchalantly around the American political arena, but past the absolute failure of historical memory, I'm not sure what that something might be.

Comments

A Mere Day After I Reloaded this Icon...

[cucumberseed.livejournal.com]

Ghost-slaps all around, I think. I am not sure if a ghost slap comes from a ghost or it's what happens when you slap someone so hard their soul falls out.

[shirei-shibolim.livejournal.com]

Does it have to go beyond failure of historical memory?

I'd been wondering for a while why the reaction to Muslim immigration has been so much more brazenly bigoted in famously liberal northern Europe than in the United States. Not that we don't have our problems, but our politicians are at least better at couching their concerns in euphemism. Then, while reading The Jews of Medieval Western Christendom, it occurred to me that that part of the world didn't experience any significant non-Christian immigration between the Middle Ages and the past few decades.

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

As a frequent visitor to Switzerland in the Seventies and Eighties, I can report that Swiss xenophobia is nothing new.

http://www.hindu.com/2000/03/17/stories/03170007.htm

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2007/09/05/swiss_party_wants_to_revive_nazi_policy

(And remember: Jews were banished from Swiss towns in the 1620s.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Switzerland

A nice place to bank, but you wouldn't want to live there. (As I discovered.)

The trains run on time, though.

[hans-the-bold.livejournal.com]

Weren't the Swiss also complicit in hiding stolen Jewish assets during and after the Holocaust? And didn't they turn Jews away from their borders during the Holocaust? Not to mention the way the Swiss helped the Nazis sell the stolen goods on the international market.

I could say more, but I would quickly slip into profanity.

http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/aa072397.htm

[madwriter.livejournal.com]

Lately every time I see a Nazi-invoking protest crop up I find myself harboring an unworthy desire to go hold a one-man counter-protest across the street with a sign that says HITLER HATED LIBERALS.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Yes.

I wish I could figure out what that something is, myself, but I'm drawing a blank the now.