Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Honor those killed in anti-trans acts of violence; mourn the lights in our community that have gone out; say their names and tell their stories; and vow to fight for those still with us.
When the Nazi concentration camps were liberated by the Allies, it was a time of great jubilation for the tens of thousands of people incarcerated in them. But an often forgotten fact of this time is that prisoners who happened to be wearing the pink triangle (the Nazis’ way of marking and identifying homosexuals) were forced to serve out the rest of their sentence. This was due to a part of German law simply known as “Paragraph 175” which criminalized homosexuality. The law wasn’t repealed until 1969.
This should be required learning, internationally.
You need to know this. You need to remember this. This is not something to swept under the carpet nor be forgotten.
Never. Too many have died for the way they have loved. That needs stop now.
Make it stop?
I did a report on this in my World History class my sophomore year of high school. It was incredibly unsettling.
My teacher shown the class this. Mostly everyone in the class felt uncomfortable.
I have reblogged this in the past, but it is so ironic that it comes across my dash right now. I a currently working as a docent at my city’s Holocaust Education Center (( I say currently because I’ve also done research and translation for them )) and out current exhibit is one on loan from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum ((USHMM)). This is a little known historical fact that Paragraph 175 was not repealed after the war and those convicted under Nazi laws as a danger to society because they were gay were not released because they had be convicted in a court of law. There was no liberation or justice for them as they weren’t considered criminals, or even victims for that matter. They were criminals who remained persecuted and ostracized and kept on the fringes of society for decades after the war had been won. Paragraph175 wasn’t actually repealed until 1994. And it was only in May 2002, that the German parliament completed legislation to pardon all homosexuals convicted under Paragraph175 during the Nazi era. History has forgotten about these men and women — please educate yourselves so this does not happen again. Remember this history. Remember them.
@mindlesshumor ok how the fuck did I miss this when I’ve studied The Holocaust like nobody’s business??? wtf
Because the history we have left regarding it is literally the contents of this first hand account.
It is a thin little book.
When I first opened it, I wondered why it was so thin.
Why there wasn’t other books like it.
Other first hand accounts.
By the time I finished it, I didn’t wonder anymore.
Bent by Martin Sherman (fiction; however, it’s often credited with bringing attention to gay Holocaust victims for the first time since the war ended)
This is one of the memorial sculptures in Dachau. It was erected in the early 60s and is missing the pink triangles. Because in the early 60s, homosexuality was still a crime in most of the world. Our tour guide explained why the pink triangles have not been added later – if they were, then folks would assume that they had always been there. This way people ask “why aren’t there pink triangles?” and somebody can explain why – because in some ways, the rest of the world was as bass-ackwards as Nazi Germany.
can i just say i was literately in a genocide and holocaust class and i didnt even learn this
“The average prison sentence for men who kill their intimate partners is 2 to 6 years. Women who kill their partners are sentenced, on average, 15 to 17 years. A pair of Maryland cases vividly illustrates this inequality in sentencing. In one case, a judge in Baltimore County, Maryland sentenced Kenneth Peacock to 18 months for killing his unfaithful wife. The very next day, another judge in the same county sentenced Patricia Ann Hawkins to three years in prison for killing her abusive husband. Significantly, the prosecutor in the Peacock case requested a sentence twice as long as the one imposed, while the prosecutor in the Hawkins case requested one-third of the sentence imposed.”
“As many as 90% of the women in prison today [2008] for killing men had been battered by those men.”
It puzzles me when people cite LOTR as the standard of “simple” or “predictable” or “black and white” fantasy. Because in my copy, the hero fails. Frodo chooses the Ring, and it’s only Gollum’s own desperation for it that inadvertently saves the day. The fate of the world, this whole blood-soaked war, all the millennia-old machinations of elves and gods, comes down to two addicts squabbling over their Precious, and that is precisely and powerfully Tolkien’s point.
And then the hero goes home, and finds home a smoking desolation, his neighbors turned on one another, that secondary villain no one finished off having destroyed Frodo’s last oasis not even out of evil so much as spite, and then that villain dies pointlessly, and then his killer dies pointlessly. The hero is left not with a cathartic homecoming, the story come full circle in another party; he is left to pick up the pieces of what was and what shall never be again.
And it’s not enough. The hero cannot heal, and so departs for the fabled western shores in what remains a blunt and bracing metaphor for death (especially given his aged companions). When Sam tells his family, “Well, I’m back” at the very end, it is an earned triumph, but the very fact that someone making it back qualifies as a triumph tells you what kind of story this is: one that is too honest to allow its characters to claim a clean victory over entropy, let alone evil.
“I can’t recall the taste of food, nor the sound of water, nor the touch of grass. I’m naked in the dark. There’s nothing–no veil between me and the wheel of fire. I can see him with my waking eyes.”
So where’s this silly shallow hippie fever-dream I’ve heard so much about? It sounds like a much lesser story than the one that actually exists.
+1
You know how Frodo leaves Sam with the legacy of the quest – the job of bearing witness to what happened – and the duty to finish and protect his writings?
Tolkien lost all but one of his friends in WW1. He was founder member of a literary club at school – the TCBS. There was a larger group and a core of four. They all stayed friends, they kept writing and sharing their work with each other. And they were almost all killed. One of them, Geoffrey Smith, wrote this to Tolkien in 1916.
My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight – I am off on duty in a few minutes – there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. […] May God bless you my dear John Ronald and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them if such be my lot.
And that was his last letter. There’s something eerie about the way he seems to have pegged Tolkien as an eventual survivor.
Sam’s survival (and his emergence as the true hero of the book) are beautiful because they’re suffused with loss, because they’re not the grand conquering heroic narrative that on some level was “supposed” to happen.
Tolkien possibly only survived because he got trench fever – a particularly nasty disease carried by lice – and got sent home because he was desperately ill. Considering how the rest of his unit fared, it probably saved his life. Unpleasant and unglamorous, but if not for that, we wouldn’t have LOTR. I’m sure survivor’s guilt was a factor – as was a sickening sense of dread when “The War to End All Wars” didn’t, and his son went off to WWII.
TLOTR has some of the type of valorization of war that you find in the Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature that JRRT loved and studied and taught because he loved that style and it’s deeply fitting for cultures like the Rohirrim, but it’s also full of the slog of war, the waste and tragedy, and the irrevocable damage that even victorious survivors carry for the rest of their lives. Frodo’s symbolic “death” is also resonant for survivors of what was called “shell-shock” then and PTSD now.
I mean, it’s not Game of Thrones. It’s not gritty in the same way. But the protagonist of LOTR was minor gentry from a backwater nobody’d heard of, and the REAL hero who saved the world by saving him was his gardener. All the great kings and queens and lords and ladies in the story are background characters compared to the story of the little people. Literally little people, but symbolically too.
I could never have loved the Lord of the Rings if not for the Hobbits.
Saturday morning, on the 26th of October, a Nazi walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue, shouting “All Jews must die!” and opened fire. He killed eleven Jewish people, including grandparents, husbands, wives, and a doctor remembered for his compassionate care of his patients during the AIDs crisis. Several of them were there celebrating a baby-welcoming ceremony for a gay couple’s newly adopted twins.
This was the deadliest antisemitic attack in all 364 years of American Jewish history. Jews all over the world are shaken, upset, and scared. We know that this could have been any of us, but beyond that, this attack struck at the heart of our people. We were attacked in a place of safety and sanctity. We were reminded that as Jews, we are not safe in America. And we lost eleven Jewish souls.
Some of us are grieving, some of us are angry, some of us are devastated, some of us are numb, some of us are crying, some of us are terrified, some of us are anxious, and some of us can barely walk up the stairs because this doesn’t make any sense and yet it makes so much sense because we all, on some level, imagined this was coming. Our history has taught us that our safety is never guaranteed, and over the past two years we have watched the sickening rise of Nazism and antisemitism all over the world, including in America, where, despite our history, many of us had been lulled into believing it could never happen here.
We lost a third of the world’s Jewish population within living memory. So many Jewish families, in every country, fled antisemitic violence within the past few generations. The tragedy we just experienced is visceral, it’s terrifying, it’s devastating.
So please, check in on your Jewish friends and ask how they are doing. Please, take a moment to understand and absorb this tragedy. Please, understand how this is not just yet another mass shooting (that while theoretically tragic, you don’t really have the space for another one, what with compassion fatigue), but rather an attack that pierced the heart of a group of people already carrying centuries of pain and trauma. Please, make space for this one. Please, when you talk about this, don’t use generalized language about hate and about how no one should be killed for their religion. Please speak the words: Jewish. Antisemitic. Say this was an antisemitic attack, on Jewish people. And please, keep us in your thoughts today.
Folks who aren’t Jewish, you can reblog this. In fact I’d be grateful if you did.
Rose Mallinger, who was killed at the Tree of Life Synagogue yesterday, was 97 years old. 97 years. She lived through the Holocaust, was on this earth, a young woman as 6 million Jewish people were killed for being Jewish. Spent her whole life surrounded by people who looked at the atrocities of the Holocaust and said “never again.” Lived 97 years and died at the hands of a gunman who killed her for being Jewish.
How can we still be so awful? Have we really not learned from our past mistakes? What will it take for us to be better?
Today, 11 Jewish people, my people, were shot dead by a man shouting “All Jews must die” simply because they were jewish and celebrating the birth of a child on their day of rest
Anti-semitism is always happening. High school boys drawing swastikas because they think it’s funny. People dressing up as Hitler for halloween. People profiling such as making fun of curly hair and large noses.
And when our own get blatantly murdered, I only see jewish people talking about it.
The leader of our country blames the synagogue for being attacked by an armed gunman.
People try to turn this into an anti-gun argument.
This was a hate crime that resulted in the loss of 11 human lives. Please acknowledge this. Please let this have some impact. Do not let this be forgotten or slip by unnoticed. This was a horrible event that should not be discarded
Headcanonsandmore 