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How? I just don’t see why putting barbed wire and guard dogs around a certain fact makes people better off.
First of all, it tends to elevate one event and one set of victims above all others. There are lots of genocides in history. I’ll recommend reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Our policy in the USA denied native Americans rights, forced them onto reservations and underfed them. Armenian genocide was a very deliberate decision. The Cathars were slaughtered with the explicit approval of the Pope. Even African slavery in the new world was pretty bad. But there’s only one genocide that we must not question and must never belittle. Which puts that people above in some sense. I can call the Trail of Tears an exaggeration all day long. I can say slavery wasn’t that bad. But touch the Grand Mythos and I’m a bad person.
Second, I believe, as I said earlier, that such a cartoon version of history with a cartoon villain making comically evil angry sounding speeches, crowd shouting slogans, Hugo Boss uniforms and red and black flags give people a very skewed idea of what authoritarian regimes look like. It’s become a visual shortcut for evil and if you want to make a bad guy regime for your movies, tapping into the aesthetic of Nazi Germany is the way to do it. But if someone else comes along and wants to use the state to silence and arrest enemies, as long as they can avoid looking like those people and don’t talk like the Nazis talked, and don’t want to go after that one ethnic group, it’s fine.
Third, I think it undercut any sober analysis of whether or not our own democratic system works. Neoliberalism has faults as well, but it’s hard to get people to think about it because of the free world propaganda which the Grand Mythos and the idea the human rights are the best way to secure human flourishing. It’s actually been used quite effectively to justify going to war with our political enemies. All that needs to be said is that a country is violating human rights and we are ready to bomb those countries, destroy their infrastructure, kill people, or maybe if they’re lucky we’ll just kill their economy with sanctions.
Its not about "facts" its about topics and certain topics are just massive red-flags.
Maybe this is uncharitable of me but if it were up to me I would not allow anyone with strong opinions on how age of consent laws are unjust anywhere near children unattended. It's the same principal.
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