thought during my nazi cinema class
i don’t remember, in the various times the holocaust was brought up in academic settings in primary & secondary school, hearing much about the programs to sterilize and kill people with disabilities in nazi germany. i feel like i definitely did not hear about it nearly as much as i heard about the killing of jewish people. (and, incidentally - i never actually had like, a “holocaust section” in school; my world history classes never made i that far into the 20th century and the rest was american history or ancient or medieval. not that the reign of emperor justinian isn’t important but… priorities, people. the closest i came to studying the holocaust in school was when we read the diary of anne frank in 8th grade. i feel like maybe the largest scale genocide of the 20th century is something that should be covered in schools? is this weird?). which, now that i think about it - duh, right, any group with a strong belief in racial superiority and purity is going to want to get rid of the “impure.” and possibly everyone in the world has realized this except me.but i feel like maybe this is a gap in the way people talk about the crimes of nazi germany. i don’t know. hate doesn’t happen in a vacuum. my professor said today, “a positive needs a negative,” meaning: the aesthetic/racial/lifestyle ideals upheld by the nazis need an “opposite” to hate, meaning further: the hatred of jews, of people with disabilities, of homosexuals and other “deviants,” was all connected. and i feel like we don’t talk about it like it is. or, we talk about it as “anyone they thought was inferior” without getting into the fact that they were all thought inferior and worthy of nothing better than extinction for similar and overlapping reasons.
and, the professor mentioned in lecture today, hate films against the disabled over and over brought up the question: why should (good, worthy, pure) aryans have to care about these (lesser) people, emotionally or monetarily - one film is in large part hours of people who lived in hospitals and stills with the amount of money they would, over their lifetime, cost the state. this framework is not as unfamiliar to me as i wish it were. “why should i a good aryan pay for these people’s health care” is not that far removed, to my ears, to “why should i a good hardworking american have to pay for these lazy/poor/illegal people’s … um, health care.”
and… i don’t want to pull a godwin’s, here. but i feel like - the way that most public discourse about the holocaust & other nazi crimes happen is set up so that it is impossible to relate to. it works to make it difficult to find any overlap whatsoever between nazi rhetoric and rhetoric on any number of subjects that we might encounter today in the US. and i feel like maybe there’s a defense mechanism of sorts going on here. which - is not a new thought, duh. many people have pointed out that it’s easy to demonize the nazis as perpetrators of random violence, or as monstrous or inhuman, and hard to look at the holocaust and say, this was a human act; humanity has the potential to do this; there is nothing that fundamentally separates us and them. i have said this to people on more than one occasion.
i don’t know, i feel like there’s something i’m not quite putting my finger on. today it occurred to me that maybe that is why people talk less (at least in my experience/to my ears) about disabled people in nazi germany, or in general why they talk about it as a list of different hatreds separated by commas instead of a list of hatreds all of which served the promotion of aryan supremacy. there is too much closeness, maybe, in nazi rhetoric about disabled people and current day thinking (or kneejerk assumptions) about disabled people. and getting into that raises uncomfortable questions about both our own society and our previous adamant distancing of ourselves from the nazis. or, giving any depth at all to nazi ideology (which is not the same as giving legitimacy, or as denying the fact that nazi ideology was, in fact, not really all that much of an ideology), complicating the picture at all, makes it harder to keep up that distance.
i’ll have to think about this more.
