If you’re following the whole Hans Asperger debacle:
You can find that article here. It provides a detailed look at the matter. This piece, as well as Steve Silberman & Maxfield Sparrow’s Tweet responses, add important nuance and autistic voices to the discussion.
Maxfield Sparrow talks about the impact of this news about Asperger, giving advice to fellow autists/aspies, and asks the question “Why was the first printing of “NeuroTribes” so kind to Asperger?”.
Silberman’s reply to that is extensive. Still, it is important to know for anybody telling others to just “read NeuroTribes”. Part of it reads:
“The reason I didn’t attempt to overturn that consensus was that I didn’t have access to the data in Sheffer’s book and Czech’s paper, which they deserve credit for uncovering. It was widely believed that Asperger’s case files had been destroyed during the war, but Czech found them in a municipal archive in Vienna. That’s where a lot of this new information is coming from.”
Through no fault on Silberman’s part, he did not have access to the full information. And Silberman states that Hertig Czech did not give him the same information about Asperger as he gave the author of “In A Different Key”. Czech had refused to provide the details that came out in that book because “he wanted to first publish the information under his own name”. Which is messed up, in my humble opinion. Later in the article, Edith Sheffer is displayed as having misrepresented Lorna Wing’s attitude to the term “Asperger’s” during her book’s epilogue. It goes to show what a grey area all this research and publishment can be. Everybody appears to have a bias (Silberman included) and this affects their speech. To gain a clear view, all talkers must be examined.
Maxfield Sparrow also makes a valid point here:
“One good thing that came out of reading Sheffer’s book was that it brought me a step closer to understanding and embracing Autistic Pride. I struggle with being okay about being Autistic and often Autistic Pride seems just a bridge too far. But seeing more clearly that we have always faced the barriers we face today has stirred some pride in being part of a people who survive against the odds. Seeing non-compliance pathologized by Nazi doctors makes me proud to belong to a people who resist oppression. And realizing that so much of what passes for therapy and accommodation today would be wholeheartedly embraced by Nazi doctors reminds me that the monsters who killed Autistic children 80 years ago were also human beings with families and friends and loving relationships. It reminds me that otherwise good people today could also be monsters.”
Honestly, I encourage you to read the whole piece, even though it’s lengthy. Don’t leave this at the quotes I picked out as they cannot give the entire picture. It must be viewed fully. Because then you can form your own opinion on the article fairly.
Maxfield Sparrow and Steve Silberman have a reciprocative discussion, both asking and answering questions, delving much deeper into it than “Hans Asperger isn’t the problem!” vs “Hans Asperger is the Devil!”
Their conclusions:
“[Maxfield Sparrow:] When the chips are down, I will always join with my neurotribe. So I want to officially state that, while I still don’t personally want to be called an Aspie, I am ready to fight on behalf of my Autistic siblings who do connect with that identity—not as a euphemism for high functioning, but as a cultural marker of their understanding of themselves and the world we live in. No, you cannot take away the identity of thousands of Autistics! Asperger had deep flaws, but the identity that has grown around his name is valid and the people who identify with Asperger’s have the right to decide for themselves whether to keep his name or not.
Steve Silberman: I agree. I think autistic people should be leading the response to this new information and determining what happens to the phrase Asperger’s syndrome. One of the best things that could come out of this is a wake-up call, because concepts like eugenics reassert themselves in every historical era—whether it’s Nazis talking about “life unworthy of life,” geneticists in Iceland talking about “eradicating” Down syndrome through selective abortion, a presidential candidate mocking a disabled reporter from the podium while bragging about his “good genes,” or autism charities framing autism as an economic burden on society. Resisting institutionalized violence requires perpetual vigilance.”
gentiles on this site, like every day: obviously you didn’t know that disabled and LGBT people were also killed in the Holocaust. here’s some incredibly basic information on this, presented as smugly as possible. i’m sure you must be awed by my incredible expertise about the Holocaust, as, without a doubt, i am the only person who ever learned about the Holocaust for a week in high school. anyway, stop hoarding the Holocaust you greedy, greedy Jews!!!!!!
Remember that before the Holocaust, there were 18 million Jews in the world. They killed a third of us.
Remember that pre-war Eastern Europe was the center of world Jewry, and it had a thriving Jewish society with Yiddish theater, poetry, literature, art, and political activism. An entire society was destroyed.
Remember that before the war, a third of Warsaw’s population was Jewish. The vast majority of those Jewish residents were murdered.
Remember that Salonika (Thessaloniki) was a city in Greece that had a Jewish majority for hundreds of years. It used to be known as Sabatopolis – the Shabbat city – because before electric light, ships going by on Friday night would see a dark shoreline because the residents could not light lights. In the 16th century, it was known as the “mother of Israel” and was a center of Jewish life where Eastern European Jews would come to visit and study. Fewer than 1800 Jews from Salonika survived the Holocaust.
Remember that in Krakow, what used to be the Jewish quarter is now a tourist trap for the groups who come to look at what once was. The Jewish community owns several beautiful synagogues but only regularly uses one because there are so few Jews left. Without the tour groups who regularly pray with them, they would have trouble getting a quorum of ten men by the beginning of the Shabbat service. The other synagogues are museums now.
Honestly as much as I love the enthusiasm people are showing to beat up Nazis I can’t help but be irked at how people are perpetuating the historical fiction that America was the most vehement opponent of Nazism.
America only opposed the Nazis because Britain did. Britain only did because they viewed national boundaries as of divine import. Churchill liked Hitler until he started invading other countries. Pro-Nazi rallies were held across this nation, including at Madison Square Garden. Hitler directly praised American efforts at state-sponsored eugenics and treatment of Native Americans.
Stop playing Captain America. It really is a fluke of history that the United States sided against the Nazis. This election is not in defiance of American political culture, it is a fulfillment of it.
Same goes for Canada, who had the highest percapita NSDAP membership after Germany until we were literally at war with them and it was illegal.
See, I didn’t know that either.
Erasing history is how you ensure its repetition.
The United States turned back a boat full of Jews fleeing Europe. Many of the people on the boat ended up in camps and died. FDR refused to bomb the train tracks to Auschewitz. The United States likes to pretend that they were the good guys in that war and they l were fighting the Nazis because they valued the dignity of the lives the Nazis were murdering but that’s just not true. Saving the Jews and Rromanis was just a PR stunt.
The ship in question was the MS St. Louis. America by that point had a good understanding of what Jews in Germany were facing, but FDR refused entrance at the behest of his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.
Hull and many of his pals, including future Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, future CIA founder, Allen Dulles, absolutely knew what was happening to Jews in Nazi held territories and went out of their way to downplay, and in some cases cover up, those facts.
After the war the Dulles brothers, at the behest of their former clients on Wall Street, would go out of their way to prop up German businessmen and German businesses, often while covering up known crimes committed by those men and their companies during the war.
Some, like Volkswagen, survived relatively intact.
But one company had to undergo some fancy name changes post war. See IG Farben was, pre-WW2, the largest chemical and pharmaceutical company in the world. But being a German company it collaborated heavily off the new regime and gleefully took advantage of the opportunities the Nazis provided, such as a free workforce and test subjects.
Post war it was clear IG Farben had to be dismantled. Its board members were all put on trial by the West and most had their sentences commuted. Many spending little, if any time, in anything resembling a jail. They also weren’t forbidden from taking new jobs or forming new companies.
So the Dulles brothers set aside the considerable assets of much of IG Farben and by 48 their Nazi friends were off the hook and ready to start a new company.
You’ve probably heard of it. Especially if you take aspirin.
The victims/survivors of IG Farben include Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi.
So I’m actually reading a memoir by Primo Levi at the moment and he recounted being in a meeting once with some businesspeople from Bayer shortly after the war (he was working for a chemical company in Italy at the time). At the end of the meeting he meant to say “time for us to go” in German but ended up accidentally phrasing the word “go” in the vulgar, crude way that he learned in the camps which is more like saying “go to hell” or “go the fuck away.” The Bayer functionaries thought it was rather funny and asked him where he learned German. He replied “Auschwitz.” No more laughing after that.
I’m on the outside too but I never felt a second of hesitation about being pro-Palestinian and against the Israeli occupation. Maybe it’s easier for me because here in the US we have the clear example of whacko Christian Zionists who are basically everything any moral person DOESN’T want to be: they’re pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic and anti-semitic and anti-Christian (because Palestinian Christians are on their shit list too).
So I believe criticizing the Israeli occupation of Palestine is a moral imperative for US citizens (since so much of our money goes to Israel’s military), and is not in itself anti-semitic. Many Jewish Israeli citizens have harsh criticisms of the occupation too! That being said, a lot of people use Palestinians as an excuse to be anti-semitic and equate all Jewish people with the actions of the Israeli government. Conversely, a lot of people also use Israel as an excuse in order to hate on Palestinians and all Muslims in general. And some far right people even do both of those things at the same time. There’s massive amounts of disinformation going around.
But even if there wasn’t such a ton of disinformation, the conflict still wouldn’t fall under a neat “oppressor-victim dynamic” because a neat oppressor-victim dynamic only exists in textbooks and abstract models, not in the real world. Yeah, it’s complicated, but all large-scale geopolitical conflicts are complicated.
I think what makes it especially complicated is that Middle Eastern countries have expelled their own Jewish citizens to Israel numerous times, essentially making most Jews of MENA descent in Israel also refugees or descendants of refugees. In their case it was “go to Israel or die.” The Holocaust survivors essentially became stateless refugees also and many were massacred when they tried to return to their home villages. “for many Israel is the only place they could be safe” has quite a bit of truth to it. But I think there’s a difference between a people living someplace and them occupying another people’s place and controlling their way of life. I get Zionists telling me “aha you think Israelis should have a place to live that means you are one of us!” which kind of reminds me of when people used to say “feminism is equality between men and women therefore anyone who thinks women and men are equal is a feminist.” It’s a tactic movements use to try to broaden their appeal but it runs up against reality and when I say…pretty much anything else about the occupation, Zionists don’t like it.
i think the worst thing to come out of this site are the ‘NAZIS ARE TERRIBLE. they WILL KILL ALL JEWS in COLD BLOOD, LET THEIR FAMILIES DIE IN FRONT OF THEM, and start the HOLOCAUST 2.0!! also reblog to make a jew feel safe.’ formatted type posts
ways to make a jew feel safe and comfortable:
-let them celebrate their holidays openly around you and encourage them to express themselves religiously. if they invite you over for a holiday, go!! they’re making an effort to let you learn more about them.
-consider any different diets they might be on (ex. kosher or even if it’s passover) when you have them over at your house. a little goes a long way with this one
-if christmas is around חנוכה that year, feel free to send them a חנוכה card!! it’s not really as big of a holiday for us but we do appreciate the effort put into making us feel included 🙂
-educate any of your friends that might make antisemitic jokes. even ‘grammar nazi’ jokes. standing up for jewish people goes further than when theyre just around. antisemitism isnt something that only exists when a jew is in the room.
-understand that, if they practice judaism, their beliefs arent like yours, and that that’s ok! a lot of people forget that not everyone is either a christian or an atheist whenever the topic of religion comes up. (but also remember not every jew practices or believes in judaism!!)
-if they tell you to warn them before you talk about nazis, do it. It’s really easy just to give someone a heads up before you talk about people who want them dead, especially if they’re openly jewish or a holocaust survivor descendent.
ways NOT to make a jew feel safe and comfortable:
“NAZIS are EVIL. they will KILL ALL THE JEWS. that’s just BAD. they will MURDER EVERY SINGLE JEWISH FAMILY. NO JEW IS SAFE. anyway reblog to make a jewish person feel safe and loved 🤗”
also if you can goyim reblog. and if you’re jewish and want to add on feel free!
hey by ‘if you are a goy reblog if you can’ i meant ‘i highly encourage you to reblog this because i have seen too many posts that make me and other jewish people very uncomfortable and they are, to be honest, entirely surface level and exhausting to see over and over again. not only that, but they are also annoying to us because they dont make us feel safe at all, and reblogging posts about how bad nazis are isnt actual activism or showing real, substantial support for jews. if youre serious about being there for your jewish siblings actually take part in their lives. make sure they’re comfortable. make sure you make casual antisemitists uncomfortable. dont just reblog posts about hating nazis, your posts dont do shit. supporting your jewish friends by even doing something as simple as what i listed above does have an affect of us. your posts about you hating nazis mean absolutely nothing unless you care for and acknowledge Actual Jewish People’s problems and challenges. otherwise, they’re surface level bullshit and do not contribute whatsoever to improve our safety.’ 🙂 🙂 🙂
I hate those posts! I’m sorry but I find them so awful and performative. Maybe it’s because a goy told me that I probably never had any negative encounters with the altright when we were arguing and then I saw she had reblogged one of them a few posts down. To me what that says is she just reblogged it reflexively without taking the time to read it because otherwise she would’ve put two and two together and realized the absurdity of what she said.
I’m not saying anyone following me is a bad person for having reblogged them of course, just that I don’t particularly find them helpful.
it’s not that i think “gay people should shut up about the Holocaust,” it’s about recognizing what kind of relationship you have to the Holocaust
for Romani and Jewish people, the Holocaust constitutes a kind of generational trauma – the Holocaust today continues to be a presence in our families and communities. in my experience, if you’re Jewish, you either have family members who were killed in the Holocaust or you’re close to a lot of people who do. the Holocaust is also presently used, on a large scale, to terrorize us as part of our oppression.
it is a part of our consciousness and a part of our lives in a way that does not happen on the basis of being disabled or on the basis of being gay.
if you are gay or disabled but not Jewish or Romani, your relationship to the Holocaust is “i might have been affected by the Holocaust if i had been there.” if you are Jewish, your relationship to the Holocaust is “i am affected by the Holocaust.”
and that’s why y’all can produce Holocaust discourse just as bad as any other non-Romani gentiles, and why you need to be just as aware of that as they do.
I just saw the weirdest ad on YouTube. I thought it was for a new WWII video game, but it didn’t seem to be selling anything – it looked like some kind of weird pro-Poland propaganda and just said “Poland did a lot to save the Jews” and then ended with a hashtag about Germany.
What… what did I just watch, and why was it on a YouTube video about sea slugs in America?
as far as I can tell, poland has made it illegal (!) to accuse them of being complicit in any nazi activity which occurred on polish soil, most sensible people objected to this, and the polish government are now putting weird propaganda ads on american youtube for unclear reasons
Hey… Poland? What the fuck?
Yeah they’re basically pulling all the propaganda out that they can saying that they weren’t AT ALL complicit in the murder of Jews and Roma along with the Nazis.
This is a part of Poland’s massive push to erase their own complicity in the Holocaust, and in post-Holocaust antisemitic violence. It is part of Poland’s rising antisemitism. It’s not just American youtube, however. It’s also Israeli youtube. So essentially, Poland is targeting the two countries in the world which have the largest Jewish populations today with this propaganda campaign.
There are multiple advertisements doing this.
I have yet to see one, but I will report any if they show up while I’m watching youtube.
Basically, here is a quick timeline of current related events which make this propaganda campaign terrifying:
60,000 far-right nationalists march on Poland’s independence day, Novermber 2017. chanting “Pure Poland! White Poland!” [Whoops, guess they forgot Nazi Germany saw them as Slavs and therefore lesser? Oh right, re-writing national myth is a part of fascism.] Demonstrators were highly antisemitic, one claimed he was marching against “Jewry.” Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the Polish government seemed to praise the event: “It was a beautiful sight,” the interior minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, said. “We are proud that so many Poles have decided to take part in a celebration connected to the Independence Day holiday.”
“Whoever publicly and contrary to the facts attributes to the Polish Nation or to the Polish State responsibility or co-responsibility for the Nazi crimes committed by the German Third Reich… or for any other offenses constituting crimes against peace, humanity or war crimes, or otherwise grossly diminishes the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of these crimes, shall be liable to a fine or deprivation of liberty for up to three years.”
Discussion of ANY Polish complicity in the Holocaust is therefore also part of the proposed ban. Punishment can be jail time, fine, or “restriction of liberty.” Supporters of Polish President Andrzej Duda urge him to sign the bill regardless of strong objections from both the United States, Israel, and the academic community/Holocaust scholars. The measure passed through Parliament on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan 27th 2018. This causes Israel to postpone diplomatic meetings with Polish representatives, and both Israel and the USA voice objections to the measure.
February 6th, 2018: an article which asks an important question – Poland wants to outlaw blaming Poles for Nazi atrocities. But what about the Jedwabne massacre?To cut to the chase, in an occupied town of Poland in 1941, the Polish residents rounded up the town’s Jewish population, and then willingly (and freely) slaughtered an estimated 400-1,400 of their Jewish neighbors [numbers are estimates as the site was not fully excavated, but rather exhumed in a controlled section], as German forces looked on. The Germans had even refused to let them use firearms, and so the gentile Polish residents of Jedwabne used farm tools as their method of execution.
Then, as of this Shabbat (Saturday, Feb. 10th 2018), jumblr users begin to post warnings about Americans seeing these Pro-revisionism Polish videos on youtube. Others confirm Israelis have been inundated with these videos as well. Although I don’t know if it began earlier, I have noticed that people started first seeing these ads introduced on the Jewish weekly holy day/day of rest, and I do wonder if slipping them in when many Jewish people wouldn’t have noticed was intentional, which feels especially sinister.
Rush's tumblr archive 