How many Jews ...

[Nic Name]

Very good. I think everyone here saw that in 9th grade. So spectacularly stunning and original.

[Nic Name]

Many people know - although many of them very much want to forget, and many more want to make others forget - that the Nazis and their European accomplices murdered six million Jews by employing various methods, such as hunger, beating, hanging, shooting, gassing, etc. during the Second World War. Nearly one tenth of the victims were Hungarian Jews, which means approximately 550,000 people. This estimate is based on a sound research of archival documents.

Source with photo documentation

[Nic Name]

An "original" image that memorializes the reality depicted in the first post.

Writer Tim Dorsey brings an interesting perspective to this memorial in this photo
from his travels and brings us closer to the subject than is comfortable for some.

And finally, something we <b>haven't</b> seen. So how about deleting this waste of a thread and making something worthwhile with that latter picture?

[That Guy]

One of the things I made a point to do while I was in Germmany was to see Buchenwald. I went with a German friend of mine that lived in the area, and she had a hard time being there, and understanding that her own countrymen were capable of such a tragedy. The entire place is quite eerie, as they still have the original gas chamber still in place, but the bunkers have all been knocked down. Many memorials are in various spots around the landscape, remebering comrades and soldiers.
Just because I have a soft spot in my heart for these people doesn't mean I hate them. I also have a soft spot in my heart for skinny white Texans. I still like to laugh, too.

[tokenidiot]

Some countries play baseball, some murder Jews in mass quantities.

Just let us have our fun, will you!?

[Nic Name]

Every community has a token idiot.

Paul Lastname is the tokenidiot in the Cellar.

Posted above by Paul Lastname, a.k.a. tokenidiot

Some countries play baseball, some murder Jews in mass quantities.

Just let us have our fun, will you!?

I’m sure Paul Lastname doesn’t think he’s a racist or bigot. He probably has Jewish friends who don’t know he’s a racist. He probably thinks he can talk like a racist and behave like a racist online and not be a racist in real life. He might have racist friends who will defend his behavior. I don’t know if his friends share his "interests" shown in his Cellar profile as “blaming the jews.” He probably has family that would be appalled at his racist behavior.

Originally posted by Paul Lastname, a.k.a. tokenidiot in another thread

wow, who ever thought that one day you'd be related to your very own goddamn nazi-loving german?

I’m sure that the older generations of the Lastname family, who may have strong personal awareness of the Holocaust and the atrocities of Nazi Germany, Oma and Remco Lastname and their relatives around the world, would be embarrassed by Paul’s behavior, unless the whole family is racist. One can only wonder what kind of values Paul was raised with as a post WWII German. No matter how one looks at it, his behavior here brings shame on his family.

In another thread, Paul Lastname, a.k.a. tokenidiot, says he’s not an American. Living in the USA, he relies on a cultural and constitutional protection of freedom of speech to speak his mind. He hasn’t yet learned that there are limits to free speech, not the least of which is accountability, whether publicly or, perhaps, just in the online community that he infects with his racist posts.

Now, the Internet may seem like a safe place to behave like a racist, expressing one’s most socially unacceptable thoughts and offending community members and guests using a pseudonym, tokenidiot. Not if you’re mentally defective, as well as morally corrupt.

[tokenidiot]

i think you missed the sarcasm. david probably didn't.
in the future, i'll try to address my posts directly.

dave: hi.

nicname: that was to david.

[jeni]

Paul Lastname is the tokenidiot in the Cellar.

oh my god, shut the fuck up.

you're the idiot who evidently doesn't understand the context of the post. nor do you know much, if anything, about the person who typed that. why are you so quick to point fingers? jesus fucking christ.

[jeni]

you!?

i would think that would tip you off.

or...i really don't think many nazis thought killing people was "fun", so the use of that word should have told you something.

[tokenidiot]

and honestly, after reading this http://www.cellar.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2408 thread, i doubt that many (if any) of the people here will be offended by my post.

[wolf]

Good Lady!!

Before the flamewar erupts fully here ... (although I recognize that it's probably too late.)

Mightn't this be a good time to retire to neutral corners for a moment.

This is obviously a topic which has a lot of negative emotional impact for nic ... and probably for a lot of people. Frankly, I don't give a good goddamn one way or the other. Some stuff that gets posted here I enjoy, some I dislike, some (okay, it takes a lot more than most people to get me to this point) disgusts me.

It's one thing to have the tasteless joke thread going (which, incidentally, I think is hilarious ... the blacker the humor, the better, IMHO) but this devolved pretty much immediately into personal attacks, which was something that USED to be rare around here.

Nope, nobody died and left me in charge.

I'm just doing what we do around here. Contributing my opinion.

Okay, guys. Touch gloves ... and let's see what happens in the next round.

I was beginning to have faith in Nic Name. I was beginning to think that he had the best intentions, even if he went about them in a way which I found irritating. I was calming toward him, and I was even <b>civil</b> when I pointed out a mistake he had made (something that I normally would have accompanied with words like "retard" and "illiterate"). But I was wrong.

Where to start?

For one thing, I can tell you that my experience with Germans (eh, Europeans, for that matter) is that they're <b>much</b> different from Americans and Canadians. The Atlantic Ocean isn't the only thing that separates us, nor is the language. Society is very different in Germany, and it became even more apparent to me when I spent close to two weeks with a German family.

You don't know Paul or Remco or Sibille. You've never been to their house, sat with them at dinner, stayed up until 7AM Pacific watching soccer with them. You don't know them at all, yet you act like you do.

Paul's words are hardly racist; they're not even making fun of Jews. I think anyone attempting to get the actual meaning out of his dark humor will realize that he's poking fun at Germans and Germany. Perhaps if you read over it more carefully you'll see that. That's certainly what I come away with, and I'm certain that's how he intended it.

As for whether or not Paul's family would be ashamed of him... I doubt they would be. Because thankfully, they are not like you. They understand that he is joking, and they're not so stuck on this that they would be so easily offended. You obviously have a very deep personal connection to the Holocaust. Whether it's because you're Jewish, or your parents are Holocaust survivors or what, I don't know. But you are apparently unable to look at the situation without emotion. It's obvious that this is <b>personal</b> to you. Maybe that's why you need to discontinue discussing it with us.

Honestly, I think Paul started making jokes like that after Jen or I put the idea in his head. One of us, upon learning that he was German, probably said something like "Oh, so you hate Jews, huh?" - jokingly, of course. And he <b>understood</b> that it was a joke, and that's why you see here what you do. It's all in good fun, even if you can't understand that.

I have a Jewish friend named Avi. Avi is short for Avraham, and his last name is Schwab. Avraham Schwab. One day, I said to him "So you're Jewish, huh?" He replied "Yep." And I said "I hate Jews." His response was "Me too!"

Now, I'd suppose you'd go on to say that he's racist as well for even joking around with me like that (and, of course, I'm racist, and blah blah blah). But I disagree. I think the generation gap is too big, Nic. I don't think you understand the way things work with younger people today. You grew up in your environment (where apparently dark humor was illegal) and we grew up in ours. You're much older (when's your birth year - '50? '51? I'm too lazy to find the post where you alluded to it). My dad was born in '49. He wouldn't find those jokes funny either. There is a difference in the society in which we were raised. You grew up in the 50's and 60's; we grew up in the 80's and 90's. There may only be a difference of 30 years, but those eras are worlds apart.

So really, I'm forced to draw this conclusion: You're either ignorant of the environment in which many youth today grew up or you're trolling. Neither of those is very much appreciated in an online community. I enjoy your regular posts, but perhaps you should take ones like this elsewhere.

[Cam]

I'm joining wolf on this. I've only been here for about 2 months, but when I started people generally didn't go out of there way to personally antagonize others. That has changed in the last 2 or 3 weeks. It seems that in the ellar lines have been drawn, and alliances have formed to the point where if someone not on your "side" says something a opposite of your opinion, 4 people start ripping on him/her. Where is the education discussion, flame wars are fun once in a while, but this is getting ridiculous.