I intended to post this a few hours earlier, but real life intervened >.< Anyway, this thread was inspired by Aussie's comments to me in the feminist thread. He mentioned that the hardship and murder of previous generations should not be reduced to cheap jokes and shots at people we clash with. Straightforward enough and tough to disagree with. However, my thought was this... do instances like this always devalue that memory? People who know what went on certainly feel every bit of the pain despite what some consider flippant reference. I read Elie Wiesel's book and that kind of horror sticks with you. Perhaps most wouldn't care about what people say in idle banter about something they didn't personally experience. I don't pretend to understand what it feels like to live it or lose people like that. But the question is more closely related to how sensitive we should be around dark deeds considering environmental context. Certain concepts taken primarily from the bible like "Good Samaritan" for someone who does good deeds and "Philistine" for someone uncultured are okay to use in a meaning evolved from the original, and the effects on those in the stories are not considered degraded. Is it unacceptable for us to expect the same to happen for more recent events?
I firmly believe that if the consequences of something can be immediately felt by people today (genocides in the past two centuries, slavery, colonialism etc. are good examples), it must be treated as something very severe and its victims respected a great deal. There are grey areas, but the point is more that if somebody has benefited from someone else's suffering and there are continuing effects, then we must consider it to be a modern tragedy, not a historical nothing. For example, my Jewish friend is always insecure when someone takes the Second World War and the Holocaust lightly; are they a threat to her? Do they have Nazi sympathies? It can be pretty damn real even when the systems have changed; the same violence persists, even if it's at a smaller level. Some atrocities have to be taken seriously, but they have remarkably few personal effects nowadays - something like the subjugation of Carthage doesn't have immediate consequences in the modern world, so it doesn't have to be discussed with the same delicacy as events like the Rwanda genocide or the Soviet expulsion of the Tatars from Ukraine. However, that doesn't mean we should make jokes about ancient events (people did die in large numbers), just that their modern ancestors aren't directly affected and there are obviously no survivors. With terms like "philistine," there are no groups today which are known as the Philistines, so the connotations of that don't degrade living people or a modern culture. It's not an insult to a modern people to use a historical demonym as a synonym for lack of culture. However, to call a frugal or cheap person (regardless of their ethnicity/religion) a "Jew" has very real consequences, both in terms of the Holocaust and Pogroms as well as in the historical and present otherisation and degradation of Jews, especially in Europe and the Americas. The cultures which caused atrocities in the past few hundred years haven't died. To make light of their atrocities (especially as a part of one of those cultures) continues their legacy and means that we have to watch out so that it doesn't happen again. Some people don't mind it, but many do, and it's better to respect that than to be flippant and risk offending/triggering trauma/making someone uncomfortable.
I've got to hand it to you, that was very well written, and an excellent point against some jokes I might be inclined to make. I am out of ground to stand on.
