You and me knew life itself is
I think it was at Lunacon this weekend that I was saying to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch that people don't think about chemical weapons being used in World War II. They are so much a part of the Tarot of World War I, especially the Western Front—Trenches, Poppies, Shells, and Gas—that just because they were not widely employed in combat between 1939 and 1945, in the popular imagination they might as well not have been part of the war at all. Which is one of those weird gaps of definition, I remember saying, because the Nazis used fucktons of chemical warfare, it just wasn't directed against Western Allied troops. It was used chiefly on non-combatants. And being thus compartmentalized off the battlefield, when people around here say "chemical weapons," for many of them I suspect Zyklon B falls into a kind of memory hole. If you have any sense of the Holocaust, however, you think for a minute and the compartmentalization collapses; the memory hole closes. It's not rocket science.
Dammit, Sean Spicer.
(My mother, by contrast, looked at Spicer's remarks and did not think the issue was an unexamined separation of World War II and Holocaust: she thought it was an older problem of definitions. Of course Hitler didn't use chemical weapons on his own people. The Jews weren't his own people. That was kind of one of the key points of National Socialism. So nothing about Spicer's initial statement was wrong, if you take Hitler's word for it. You should just never take Hitler's word for anything. Especially not if you're speaking for the White House.)
So, yeah. I spent most of today away from the internet and then I find out that happened. It does not feel to me as deliberate or as boundary-testing as this administration's earlier omission of Jews from Holocaust Remembrance Day—I think it's more likely that Spicer, who has so far manifested the approximate historical understanding of a turnip, got flustered and tried to bluster his way out of the question and instead just blurted his foot even farther into his mouth—but he's still thrown another bone of garbage to the Holocaust deniers and done nothing to improve the ignorant racist image of the current administration, though truly at this point I believe they are more or less projecting what they intend to, they just don't want to have to get called on it. I'm just amazed that apparently they want to project an image of that level of flailing incompetence.
I'm probably slandering turnips. They're older than Linear B. They're not even unique to Europe. I'm not even going to touch "Holocaust centers." It wasn't like daycare, you know?
spatch that people don't think about chemical weapons being used in World War II. They are so much a part of the Tarot of World War I, especially the Western Front—Trenches, Poppies, Shells, and Gas—that just because they were not widely employed in combat between 1939 and 1945, in the popular imagination they might as well not have been part of the war at all. Which is one of those weird gaps of definition, I remember saying, because the Nazis used fucktons of chemical warfare, it just wasn't directed against Western Allied troops. It was used chiefly on non-combatants. And being thus compartmentalized off the battlefield, when people around here say "chemical weapons," for many of them I suspect Zyklon B falls into a kind of memory hole. If you have any sense of the Holocaust, however, you think for a minute and the compartmentalization collapses; the memory hole closes. It's not rocket science.Dammit, Sean Spicer.
(My mother, by contrast, looked at Spicer's remarks and did not think the issue was an unexamined separation of World War II and Holocaust: she thought it was an older problem of definitions. Of course Hitler didn't use chemical weapons on his own people. The Jews weren't his own people. That was kind of one of the key points of National Socialism. So nothing about Spicer's initial statement was wrong, if you take Hitler's word for it. You should just never take Hitler's word for anything. Especially not if you're speaking for the White House.)
So, yeah. I spent most of today away from the internet and then I find out that happened. It does not feel to me as deliberate or as boundary-testing as this administration's earlier omission of Jews from Holocaust Remembrance Day—I think it's more likely that Spicer, who has so far manifested the approximate historical understanding of a turnip, got flustered and tried to bluster his way out of the question and instead just blurted his foot even farther into his mouth—but he's still thrown another bone of garbage to the Holocaust deniers and done nothing to improve the ignorant racist image of the current administration, though truly at this point I believe they are more or less projecting what they intend to, they just don't want to have to get called on it. I'm just amazed that apparently they want to project an image of that level of flailing incompetence.
I'm probably slandering turnips. They're older than Linear B. They're not even unique to Europe. I'm not even going to touch "Holocaust centers." It wasn't like daycare, you know?
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That's a really good point. Although they managed to do that implausibly badly too, what with the barrel bombs thing and stuff.
They are crap fascists. They don't even have the visual style. And I agree that's a good thing! But just because they can't achieve the second coming of the Third Reich doesn't mean they can't hurt a lot of people—including people who don't even exist yet—and I want them out of power before they get any farther in their demolition of this country and destabilization of the planet than they have already.
I do wonder how they are so bad at this. They use so much thinly-or-not-at-all-veiled material lifted straight from history, but they also use it really incompetently.
I suppose the intelligent, historically literate people also already know how this ends, and aren't going to sign on with the Keystone Klan.
Did you see the text of Richard Lugar's address? I disagree slightly with some of his arguments, but I thought it was overall an interesting and solid critique of the record so far on foreign policy.
no subject
I know it's not a complete answer, but I really do believe that when contempt for intellectuals and education is one of the cornerstones of your political platform, you are not going to end up with the best strategists in the world.
I suppose the intelligent, historically literate people also already know how this ends, and aren't going to sign on with the Keystone Klan.
That, too. At least I hope.
(If "Keystone Klan" is your coinage, I hadn't seen it before and it's good.)
Did you see the text of Richard Lugar's address? I disagree slightly with some of his arguments, but I thought it was overall an interesting and solid critique of the record so far on foreign policy.
I did not, thank you! "But we cannot bomb our way to security." Well, that's relevant.
no subject
The inability to bomb your way to security is, it seems pretty clear, one that the current decision-makers don't recognise, given that what the hell they just used a MOAB, but I choose to share Lugar's hope that maybe they're going to learn it soon.