Which is to say that none do.
The Alt-Right (you know, Nazis?) have gotten exceptional at taking rhetoric from the Left and Liberals and turning them on their heads in their own support. You may recall that wonderful turn from ten years ago, “Well, you’re not so tolerant being intolerant against my views”. The makers of that Gotcha! are back and in full force, playing Orwellian games. One of the most obvious and famous was the retort “Black Lives Matter? No, ALL Lives Matter!”
This co-option is a form of editing. It’s an obvious form of erasing black people from the list of those that matter. Whereas the original phrase posited that black lives must matter as well, the edit dismisses non-white existence to position white people as the only people who truly matter. Similar to how men continue to erase feminism by calling for “equality”, thus not having to deal with the fact that Women Are Human.
The other day, the Illegitimate President of the United States honored the dead and sufferers of the Holocaust by… not naming them. At all.
Amid protests and legal challenges over President Trump’s immigration order, the White House also found itself on the defensive this weekend about a normally routine statement about International Holocaust Remembrance Day that drew criticism and scorn.
The statement released on Friday failed to mention Jews or anti-Semitism, something that past presidential statements had done without fail…
The original statement, released on Friday, was dedicated to the “victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust,” but did not specifically mention the approximately six million Jews who were exterminated by the German regime.
The statement also failed to specifically mention the Roma, the disabled, the gay people and other groups that were targeted on political and ideological grounds, including communists and socialists.
Furthermore, all the president’s monsters have come out to defend the omission.
Rince Preibus, head of the Republican National Convention:
I mean, everyone’s suffering in the Holocaust including obviously, all of the Jewish people affected and the miserable genocide that occurred — it’s something that we consider to be extraordinarily sad… If we could wipe it off of the history books, we would. But we can’t. [Emphases mine]
Notice the passivity of it all. It’s sad. It just happened to have happened. If only we could do something about it now. If only there were lessons to learn. But we can’t as there aren’t.
“If only we could wipe it off the history books.”
Like All Lives Matter, this phrasing sounds so inclusive and yet passive. But it is active. It is a movement of editing history, not unlike Stalin. It erases the Jewish, the Rroma, people with disabilities, and the communists and socialists.
It is an active erasing from history books while faintly shrugging shoulders about present recurrences.
We wish we could do something for these refugees, visitors, and residents coming from majority-Muslim countries, but…
If only something could be done to protect the vulnerable. This administration has really got its hands tied, I mean…
