Your tax dollars at work

  • kava@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    i’m not ready to say we’ll kill them yet. for example we stuck Japanese in camps but didn’t kill them. sure, we took all their property and whatnot.

    but you’re right that it’s concerning because remember the Nazis originally did not mean to kill the Jews. Initially they meant to deport them out of the country.

    They created the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in the early 1930s which was meant to facilitate the process of Jews leaving the country voluntarily (at least at first) and also by force. Sort of like our modern ICE

    One big idea before the decision to exterminate was to send them all to Madagascar. They seriously explored this idea in the late 1930s but realized it was logistically impractical to transport such a large number of people.

    Some enterprising Jews managed to float the idea of returning Jews to British Palestine - and they collaborated with the Nazis to get 60k Jews out of Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement

    But eventually they realized, around 1941, that the easiest way to deal with the Jewish Question would just be to industrially exterminate the Jews

    this entire process lasted about a decade give or take a couple years.

    my main concern is this: let’s say they start this process. they make the camps, they put hundreds of thousands in said camps. but then they realize they don’t have the money, will, or logistical capacity to actually continue through with it

    what happens then? that’s the key question. in the beginning, exterminating is out of the question. it sounds absurd.

    but over time, as the situation gets normalized, the overton window shifts. then you mix in economic crisis and war… the idea of extermination starts to look less and less absurd