Typing up all the exhausting ways in which fiction -- fiction that I really love, or really want to love -- uses the Holocaust and Nazis as set dressing, casual outlines of horror without any empathy for the horror itself, I don't feel tired. I feel really fucking angry.
YES. Because the worst part is that it's not just something that happens in fiction - it's a reflection of what happens in society as a whole. I fear that for most people, the horrors of the past are so far away that it's no more real than fiction, deeds perpetrated by ridiculous cartoon villains who have no real motivations or background beyond "they're Nazis, and so do Evil Things". And that means it's impossible to learn the lessons from the past, and to keep such horrors from happening all over again.
I am always so astonished when I encounter people who assume that nothing like the holocaust could ever happen again - certainly not in their country. Many people don't see it as a general threat based on general human tendencies, but rather as the work of cartoonish villains - Germans, Nazis, Hydra, whatever you want to call them - that could never have any parallels with what is happening in their own lives, their own countries and governments, with real people they actually know.
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Typing up all the exhausting ways in which fiction -- fiction that I really love, or really want to love -- uses the Holocaust and Nazis as set dressing, casual outlines of horror without any empathy for the horror itself, I don't feel tired. I feel really fucking angry.
YES. Because the worst part is that it's not just something that happens in fiction - it's a reflection of what happens in society as a whole. I fear that for most people, the horrors of the past are so far away that it's no more real than fiction, deeds perpetrated by ridiculous cartoon villains who have no real motivations or background beyond "they're Nazis, and so do Evil Things". And that means it's impossible to learn the lessons from the past, and to keep such horrors from happening all over again.
I am always so astonished when I encounter people who assume that nothing like the holocaust could ever happen again - certainly not in their country. Many people don't see it as a general threat based on general human tendencies, but rather as the work of cartoonish villains - Germans, Nazis, Hydra, whatever you want to call them - that could never have any parallels with what is happening in their own lives, their own countries and governments, with real people they actually know.