“Both Sides” is Bullsh*t

Ovens at Auschwitz concentration camp where 1.1 million Jews, LGBT people and others were gassed to death and their bodies burned. Image by alanbatt from Pixabay

I ran across a chilling Medium piece calling for studying and teachin“both sides” of Nazism and US Slavery without interjecting any moral judgement about anybody’s actions. Because, this guy argues, nice, regular people living in Nazi Germany allowed horrifying things to happen to their neighbors but that doesn’t mean they were monsters.

Yeah, actually, it does. And when we aren’t clear about this, when we refuse to label bad things bad, and bad actions bad, and bad people bad, that’s how atrocities happen again. Nobody is asking for the descendants of those bad people to feel guilt and shame over the actions of your ancestors. Discussing history honestly isn’t an insult to anyone living today. If you choose to see it that way, that’s on you.

Based on his looks and his incredibly English surname, I’m gonna go out on a very short limb here and assume this guy doesn’t have a drop of Black or brown blood in his pasty white body, and I’d bet a million bucks he isn’t Jewish, either. It’s reallll easy to sit back in your pseudo-intellectual armchair and declare “both sides” of the holocaust or American chattel slavery when your archetype has never been the target of mass political oppression and murder.

Imagine if American women started an organization that targeted men for violence. Imagine if chapters of that organization popped up all over the country…