You know what happened after visiting a concentration camp in 9th grade? All of these German kids still thought it was funny to make “press on the gas” jokes to the bus driver, tell each other holocaust jokes, literally minutes after walking out of a former concentration camp and a day after hearing a Jewish concentration camp survivor who now lived in the US talking about how daily life changed in 1933 until his family fled some years later. My friends have similar stories about their school visit to concentration camps. 

i’m not sure what you’re trying to imply with there’s never the question of “well, there were many sides”, but some kids, upon reading the 25 point plan, did start arguing in my history class that this shows that not all Germans who voted NSDAP were necessarily evil anti-semites. (They just didn’t feel strongly about the rights of Jewish people.)

Anyway, Germans always talk about “learning from our past”. But how can the murders by the NSU be considered part of this country’s “past”? Where they didn’t even bother to investigate whether maybe it could be related to neo-nazis; instead they further traumatised the nine families by accusing them of being involved in the murder, or being at fault because they were supposedly involved with organised crime. The boulevard press called these “the kebab murders”. After the nail bomb attack of Cologne with 22 injured people, a kid said in a documentary about it that when he said to a police officer “that was nazis”, the police offer told him that he never wanted to hear something like that from any of them again, and that seems to be representative of the work of German law enforcement.

It’s common knowledge if you’re not ethnically German that you just don’t travel alone through East Germany by public means of transport. Countries issue warnings to their citizens to not travel to East Germany in general, and the reaction of the German public somehow is to talk about how this isn’t representative of Germany and makes us look bad, because Germany looking bad is obviously the most important issue. I feel like this is where these posts originate from, not wanting Germany to look bad.

Speaking of East Germany, what about Hoyerswerda 1991, where Germans then went on TV to boast about how their town was free of foreigners? A year later, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, where all of the German residents stood there applauding while molotow cocktails were being thrown in the apartments of refugees. Most of the culprits weren’t even criminally persecuted in the first place, or they got away with fines and suspended sentences. The longest imprisonment of a neo-nazi related to these riots was three years. Cases against police officers, who were accused of not properly handling the riots and letting the neo-nazis be, were all dropped. Every single neo-nazi who tried to murder refugees 25 years ago is free. Later the same year, an arson attack in Mölln and in 1993, another arson attack in Solingen. 

The aforementioned examples are just the ones that got at least some coverage by the media. Before 1990, victims of neo-nazi violence/murder were neither recorded by German state authorities nor the media, so the number of victims of right-wing violence since 1945 is greatly underreported. A list of the known cases can be found here. (This list includes two murders done by fascist Grey Wolves, one of a Turkish communist and one of a Turkish woman in a women’s legal advice centre; inb4 some Germ tries to make out some sort of argument out of this, implying that neo-nazis aren’t an issue at all in Germany.)

The “Germany is learning/learns/has learned from its mistakes” rhetoric as found in this post has been around since 1950, but all of this has happened nonetheless.

It’s always brought up in relation to anything happening in the US, implying something like Charlottesville couldn’t happen here anymore. Except that it does, so. Implying that neo-nazis don’t exist here doesn’t help anyone.

his family came by later and asked if they could look around in my yard for his phone. they told me more about what happened when they realized i was a sympathetic ear, which i won’t post here, but suffice it to say i’m questioning the strength of force brought out re: this incident and i am REALLY glad i was there so i could tell his mother that at the very least her son was arrested without incident. i don’t presume to know what he is or isn’t guilty of, especially because the situation became murky the second i found out more detail from non-cops, but it’s for that reason specifically that i honestly felt instinctively responsible in that moment for that young guy’s well being. he looked to be about the age of my brother, and was the same size, just some skinny kid. just, the more that i think about it the more i realize how vital it feels that i was there, because the scene could have gone COMPLETELY different and the fact that i could increase the chance that it wouldn’t just by making my presence known is… really important to me. i was able to reassure his mother that her son was physically safe to the furthest of my knowledge, and i saw that goddamn relief on her face when she asked, ‘they didn’t beat him up or anything?’ and i felt such gratitude for being able to tell her that no, i saw it all, and i did everything in my power to keep him from harm’s way, no matter what the overall situation was. we couldn’t find his phone. but i hope they’re going to be okay. 

Materialism (in the marxist sense) does not merely mean “caring about matter or material reality” it means understanding that social phenomena do not precede material reality but are produced by the real economic conditions of a given context.Thus, for materialism, there is not a fixed ontology which underlies any social phenomena, whether that ontology be biological or ideal. Rather, social phenomena are produced through contradictions emerging from the material and economic base of a society. 

Gender is no different. Marxist Memes, in fact, betrays materialism by positing an underlying biological ontology which precedes economics. This is why they can ignore the reality of trans womens experiences under capitalism wherein we find ourselves overrepresented in the most dangerous forms of labpor, and often are at the fringes of precarious workers.