Right. The real effect of comparing everything to Nazis and Auschwitz, which is a real hobby for some, is that it obscures the very real dangers posed by the rise in extremism today.

I heard an interview with a Jewish historian of anti-semitism on French radio and he was 1) very concerned about the rise in violence targeting Jews in France today 2) annoyed that some compare it to the 1930s. The situations have nothing in common, he said, and lead people to misunderstand and minimize the uniquely desperate situation of European Jews in the 1930s, who were utterly abandoned and couldn't expect help from any quarter. We live in a different world today that poses its own multiple dangers and those should be assessed in their specificity.

I get it that it's more exciting to think of yourself as an anti-fascist warrior rather than another guy from the suburbs. That's perfectly human. But it's funny to me that the Soviet victory over the Nazis (which fueled the myth of communist anti-fascism in the West and was a reliable tool to recruit useful idiots to the cause) was always a Russian nationalist myth within Russia, with only the thinnest veneer of universalist values even during the Soviet era. Now that it's mobilized by Putin in Ukraine, some of the self-professed anti-fascists are temporarily embarrassed and scrub all the heroic Soviet imagery from their twitter profiles. Wonder if that's the end of that or is it due for another rewarming.

Thank you. I hadn't considered that two situations could be different. Aren't you supposed to be smart?

I'm not necessarily talking about you in particular but of a broader trend which I like to observe on Twitter and of which you seem to be broadly representative. I have no interest in following the evolution of your rhetoric and registering whether you did or did not, at some point, learn to insert "but it's more complicated than that" or something to that effect. Overall, it still seems that your worldview is informed by categories derived from Star Wars and video games and things of that nature, but if you're working on complicating that picture, good for you. Chapeau.

And you seem to like shadowboxing with the leftist in your head and posting about a French Jew who probably hates sharing the Holocaust with gypsies.

I'm talking about a very well-known phenomenon, which I've witnessed for years in a city with four universities and a long and storied history of left-wing student activism (some of which, moreover, I'm really proud of). For the way the rhetorical mechanism of "anti-Fascism" worked throughout the 20th century, see Furet's great book The Passing of an Illusion.

The remark about the French Jew is pretty shameful tbh. As usual, you make presumptions without basis, which is understandable. But I'd be more careful in this particular context.

Oh come on, pussy, it was a joke. And a joke with like a 50% chance of being true, don't lie.

France, where universalism is the official state ideology, has a long history of suppressing the specificity of Jewish victimhood in the Shoah. Some of this "amnesia" has to do with years of minimizing the French role in the deportations, some of it has to do with anti-Semitism in its various guises, some of it has to do with other dynamics specific to French society and various political realities which I have no energy to detail here (Vladimir Jankélévitch's The Imprescriptible is an old text about this that retains much of its power today).

I understand the idea that there are good Jews who are prepared to share their victimhood with others and there are bad Jews, who hoard it to themselves (and are probably Zionists to boot), but in France the reality around Shoah memory carries too much baggage for this joke to not ring hollow.

This is more about Europeans hating Romani no matter their politics.

A gentleman who knows his memes

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Etz74toWQAAN_o2.jpg

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/...57/808/21d.jpg

you did basically say he was a 1930s Jew who was greedily protecting his precious Holocaust victimhood from having to be shared with other groups. Pretty disappointed to see this type of antisemitic rhetoric coming from you, Batlord. :(