/soy/ - Soyjaks

Imagine an event celebrating German culture in New York City in 1939. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed German immigrants and others with German ancestry proudly parade through the streets, wearing traditional ethnic dress and exclaiming typical slogans. Some of them, though not all, wave the Swastika, the flag of the German state.

A man walks up to the parade outraged. He screams about the crimes being carried out in Germany right now, and how it’s being justified with appeals to the very same German culture and ethnicity that these people are celebrating. He thus considers the function of this event, regardless of the intent of some of its participants, to be the subtle normalization of the German state, its values, and its action. Especially since some of the people involved are even members of organizations like the German American Bund, that are openly pro-Nazi.

That person’s concerns would actually sound quite reasonable. Sure, not everyone with German ancestry was responsible for Nazi crimes, and surely not all of them were conscious of the connotations of what they were doing, but the effect is the same nonetheless: Amid Nazism, there is no such thing as a neutral expression of German culture - this is an obvious and intuitive fact that most reasonable people would agree on.

But something weird happens: a bystander pulls the man aside. He points at him with accusatory finger, saying “hey buddy, that’s Anti-Germanism!” Another bystander steps in to agree: “Yeah man! I’m anti-Nazi, but you’re just straight up being anti-Germanist! You’re conflating Germanness with Nazism!”.

Bystander after bystander steps in to take their turn to have a yell at him. The police are called. He’s arrested for an “anti-German hate crime”, and his “disgusting” anti-Germanist act becomes a news story. He’s immediately fired from every job he’s ever and will ever have, and it will be impossible for him to ever associate with basically anyone ever again for the rest of his life, even though he was right. He receives no support from anyone, not even his self-styled Anti-Nazi allies, as they refuse to entertain even the thought of having an 'anti-Germanist' in their ranks.

Now, luckily, this scenario is just something that I invented: it’s not actually how things played out in reality. They actually went quite the opposite way, as most people understood precisely that you could not so simply divorce German culture from an ongoing German supremacist genocide.

But all of this does happen today with Israel - which is even more striking, given that a much higher percentage of Jews outside of Israel support Israel vs the support of Nazi Germany among the German diaspora, and it's also far more ingrained into their culture.