— Feature, Musings —08.12.2025 09:42 AM
The humiliation: what the Nazis did – and what is happening here, now.
“It is not the pain and the wounds that are the worst,” the Swiss philosopher Pascal Mercier wrote, many years ago. “The worst is the humiliation.”
The Nazis knew that. After Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, widespread public humiliation of Jews commenced. In one notorious case, a young Jewish man named Julius Wolff and his non-Jewish fiancé, Christine Neeman, were taken by the Nazis’ brown shirts – the Sturmabteilung – in Norden, Germany, and forced to parade through the streets wearing signs.
Wolff’s said: “Ich bin ein Rasseschänder” – that is, “I am a race defiler.” Wolff and Neeman were later taken to concentration camps.
For the Nazis, public humiliation of Jews, and those who would consort with Jews, wasn’t something that just happened by chance. It was something that was central to their program of oppression of the Jews and non-Aryans, from the very start. It was all designed to inflict suffering on Jews.
But – and this is key – it was also how the Nazis drew a distinction between Jews and non-Jews. Ritual public humiliations were a way to remind ordinary Germans that Jews were not human – they were, as the Nazi propaganda of the time repeatedly proclaimed, parasites. They were vermin, ungeziefer, infecting the corpus of the Third Reich and the world.
We don’t know what the man who assaulted a Jew in a Montreal park a few days ago was thinking, at this point. We likely never will – his defence lawyers will be working overtime to ensure that the judge, or the jury, never hears a solitary word about antisemitism.
So, we will be left to wonder: was it an argument that simply escalated? A case of mistaken identity? Just an unstable person, assaulting a man in broad daylight, in front of his children?
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https://www.ctvnews.ca/ottawa/article/ottawa-mayor-condemns-assault-on-muslim-woman-aboard-oc-transpo-bus/
Alright WK, you know I’m on your side with Israel v Hamas. Israel has the right to live in peace and security. In my own little way I’ve been repeating this on my social media. But Bibi’s disgusting behavhiour makes it NEAR IMPOSSIBLE to cut through that. He’s a monster, he has to be removed and put on trial. Israelis themselves mostly hate him. He must go, he must be put on trial. This doesn’t diminish the harrowing situation Israel is in but he’s obscuring it for his own skin-saving cunty reasons. It’s a mess. He has to go, Hamas must disarm. But him going has to happen first.
I’ve written several times he has to go. I’ve disliked him for many years. But so what.
To a lesser extent, Trump does the same thing to immigrants. Singled them out for blame and abuse to make it acceptable in the general population – tyrants, it’s what they do.
The same demographic that propelled the Nazis to power supports Trump – he’s a fascist just like the garbage that polluted Europe in the 30’s
Warren,
Israel is a textbook example of cognitive dissonance. While at least a majority of Israelis hate Netanyahu, somehow he manages time and again to keep his majority in the Knesset. The mind quite simply boggles.
They really need for he and his coalition to be replaced. Like you have alluded to in previous posts, if they keep him around Israel will cease to exist as the only democracy in the region – he’s unfit to lead.
Israel is the best argument there is against proportional representation.
Gord,
There are PR models that still make sense. But they are modified PR.