Is it antisemitism to say that WWII created the perfect victim? White, well dressed people with cute children, horrifically lead to death camps by clearly labeled bad guys. Americans can’t wrap their heads around US fascism or the genocide in Palestine, because it doesn’t look like Schindler’s list.
The word “antisemitism” is powerful. It evokes all those images we’ve watched in movies and tv shows. Any variation from the model seems to get easily dismissed by (white racist) people who still think the National Socialist party was a party of socialists.
It’s easy to look back as see it as black and white, but during that time every person who resisted annihilation had articles spinning it into justification to continue annihilating them. I think that’s probably the biggest lesson we never learned. Which is why the same tactics work now.
That’s my point! The reality is so much different than the popular perception of the genocides in history that lots of people are able to ignore genocides happening right now. In reality, there is no perfect victim, bad guys take control of narratives, and good guys look for excuses to do nothing.
I also really hate using ww2 as a comparison because a more obvious comparison exists which is the genocide of native Americans.
The genocide committed by Germans during WWII lead to a cartoon version of history, with good guys and bad guys. What happens when people we sympathize with commit genocide?