A medium read for you

[sabotabby]

I normally don't just post a link but I need everyone to read the Magneto essay that's going around so we can talk about how great it is. It's one of the best pieces of literary analysis I've seen in a good long time.

The Judgment of Magneto

Comments

[dissectionist]

I have zero interest in Marvel or comics, but this was fascinating even to me. The writer makes the point more clearly later on, but when I came across the reference early in to “Never again for Jews”, it hit hard because I’ve been so puzzled by that. My Jewish friends very clearly see it as “Never again for anyone,” so that’s what I believed “never again” meant in general. As a result, I’ve been baffled how others can say (and clearly mean) “never again” while simultaneously supporting genocide. It wasn’t until I read that in this essay that I suddenly understood that “never again” can have multiple endings.

[sabotabby]

I was always fundamentally baffled as well and just assumed it was hypocrisy, so finding out that it was originally a Kahanist slogan brings a lot into focus.

[dissectionist]

I was reading the JDL’s Wikipedia (as the JDL was founded by Kahane) and it goes into more detail there that the slogan was originally created by Jews in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust. It was then coopted by Kahane, who changed the meaning from “we will fight to never again have a Holocaust” to “we will never again be lulled into a false sense of trust [for non-Jews].”

So it wasn’t his originally, but he coopted and popularized it. Thankfully most people still ascribe its original meaning to it, rather than his nationalist version.

[sabotabby]

That was what I assumed. Why we can't have nice things, etc.