Grillman goes on Auschwitz tour for the cool architecture, gets pissed that guide keeps harping on about how bad inmates had it
"I just wanted to know more about the MP40s the guards had"
I'm crossing all the Death Camp tours off our list! Next time we'll just go to Holland again, which had real camps!
This is probably a review of the Whitney Plantation, which made news for being the first plantation whose tour focused on the real, very difficult, lives of enslaved people.
I grew up in south Louisiana, in a town named for a plantation, and this might come as a shock to a lot of you, but until Whitney, which opened in like 2010, all plantation tours were about the lives of the planters. Enslaved people were only mentioned tangentially and usually in relation to the slavers. Like "And often the very best slaves would help raise the children, and they got to work in the big house, which was quite a treat for them!"
Y'all don't even know. Whitney changed the game, but very few plantations have followed its lead.
Why should I care about the plantation owners? I'll give the biography of every plantation owner ever:
Every day, he'd wake up, sit on his ass all day while people around him toil, and he'd just get drunk, and occasionally, if he's in a bad mood, beat or r*pe a slave, until eventually, he died and his son did the same.
There, no tour necessary.
We just came to hear about the history of a southern plantation, but -to my shock and horror- that's exactly what we got!
Heh, usually these sorts of tours are “Our slaveowner was nice to their slaves.”
Huh, you are right.
In Tucumán (Argentina) you can go visit a plantation museum where the tour guide mindlessly tells the "fun" story about "the silly
slavesworkers! believing the legend of "the familiar", a hellish dog loyal to the plantation owner [oligarch surname still in charge of course] that would eat 'troublemaker' workers."Like, the fucking idiot tells that story joyfully
, no man-made projectile could ever pierce the thickness of that skull god damnI recognize the guy in the pic from a Townsends video of all places, so if this was Gunston Hall and they're cool with him and his politics then they must be relatively cool too
when folks like you ask me “What are you making me for dinner?”
How about a knuckle sandwich, bitch?
townsends are the people that do like colonial era cooking videos on yt, right?
Yeah, and this guy is a culinarian and historian so he's guested on there a couple times
that's cool. i think i might have seen one of those guest appearances before. yeah you never really know the vibes right off for something like a historical cooking channel from people into reenactment living in bumfuck indiana
Townsends is good, at least as far as it's possible considering the
subject matter. For the most part they do a more small-cabin vibe and survival food so the topic of slavery doesn't actually come up much, but they've done a few episodes about slave-created cuisine and aren't shy about the history when it does come up.
I'm much more interested in hearing what they were expecting from a plantation tour.
the lavish parties, the feasts, the genteel culture, the clothing and finery affordable only to those who are cannibalizing the sweat, blood and bones of hundreds of thousands of souls.
it's aspirational for the slime of humanity.
well the European manors didn't have the enslaved people literally directly in front of the house. I could tell you horror stories about relatives that worked as servants in those damned houses but they didn't actually have slaves in the house
Peasants had it a hundred times better than chattel slaves, though you do have a point. I remember a commentor the other day talking about some Chinese people speaking of the "revitalization of China" as though everyone was an aristocrat under the Ming Dynasty rather than most being a peasant or near equivalent.
they were expecting to hear about the history of the white people that lived there, and a description of the commodities produced by the slaves, maybe even some of the shacks they were forced to live in, and that's it.
now we are crossing all plantation tours off our list
You had more than one?
"we came to get the history of a southern plantation"
gets the history of a southern plantation
my ancestors were from Sicily
AMERICANwhy are americans all ~land of the free USA #1~ but also SO desperate to pretend that they're from other places? like bestie you were born in ohio, you're just american, stfu
Yeah this person is unhinged, but to answer your question, it mattered up until like 80 years ago and we're riding the momentum. Being a settler state with a lot of immigration and segregation means peoples' ethnic background was more important than their citizenship. "I'm half Italian half Polish" was actually useful information to partially understand someone's cultural practices, religion, attitudes, relationships, and so on. I mean I know some Dutch people who live in a German area and they eat all different shit from everyone around them and have different traditions, still.
That's what Americans mean by that- in my experience they would never be like, oh did you hear about the sports game between Switzerland and Germany? Switzerland got owned! Fuck you I'm Swiss you German bastard! That's not it, it's not the nationality.
But for the most part now, white people are all like 4th 5th 6th 7th generation or more, and that shit doesn't matter, but they're used to their parents or grandparents talking about it, so they sometimes think it still matters. I mean people do talk about that a lot less than they used to. Kids aren't like, "oh, Brayden's one of those god damn 6% Scottish 6% Filipino 12% Japanese 12% Italian 12% English 12% French 12% Spanish 25% German kids, you know how they can fuckin be"
Because, deep down, (white) Americans know that it sucks to be "just American". They see people of color or people with a legitimate European community and are jealous and upset or sad that they don't have that. My distant family is Italian. Great grandma (or something) didn't teach grandma about it, so it was lost, and now we have no connection other then vague stories. My dad's boomer brained, but even he seems a little sad he doesn't know any distant cousins in Italy or something. Vs a nice lady I met recently who goes back to Albania occasionally and has a good time and reconnects with distant family and seems much more well adjusted.
yeah as a rule if you've never been to a place you aren't from there
Because they don't want to feel guilty and be associated with what it means to be white in America and what their ancestors probably did. Especially around stuff like slavery, which is why it always comes up around that.
I'm 18% Irish, 26% Italian 4,34% German and ⅖% Navajo and...
My brother in Christ, you're 100% American.
we came to get the history of the Southern Plantation
And you expected them to not mention slavery?
Shit like this gives me a complex about sharing information about myself. Her and her husband's ancestry is irrelevant and it reveals her as a weirdo. Like the plantation tour company has been owned by the revelation that they lectured a non-racist. It annoys me. In reaction, I don't want to be annoying and I think twice about sharing information about myself unless asked for it.
For me it's just the irrelevance mixed with telling on herself. "My ancestors never owned slaves" - motherfucker slavery is not about you.
You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you pretend to forget that you own colonies and that in them men are massacred in your name.
That's why all my cringe takes are actually to disorient whoever is trying to doxx me, IRL me is too cool to ever be cringe
it really is so fuckin bird brained like "in the antebellum south, white society held blacks in brutal conditions of bondage" "wait but I'm white, and my people didn't do that!" okay then what are you whining about stupid.
Their own ancestors may not have owned slaves, but they willingly participate in American whiteness and reap the benefits thereof.
It shatters the idea that they are inherently good people, and instead ANYONE is capable of good or evil. Adolf Hitler could have had a long lost sibling that's the nicest guy in the world, and Fred Rogers could have a cousin that is a Military Industrial Complex profiteer. Which if you believe in free will, would be totally easy to accept. But CHUDs don't believe in free will, they believe in a caste system and to them, if they are related to people that horrible, then THEY are the ones that deserve to be the low man on a totem pole.
White people have such fragile egos about hearing how other white people in the past built and enforced white supremacy. "my ancestors were from Germany and Sicily" Ok and while your ancestors were eating brautwurst and caponata, there was a brutal regime of white supremacist slavery going on in America.
They think they have to feel personally guilty to realize white supremacy still exists and where it came from. They think "white people owned slaves" is a personal attack. And they think they can excuse themselves from even needing to think about race relations in America by claiming they weren't even involved in it. You live here now, don't you?
They think "white people owned slaves" is a personal attack
It’a incredible how many white people react this way to that statement.
If you're ancestors didn't own slaves, don't be so offended.
It's almost like (despite their families not owning slaves) they sympathize more with the slave owners
Unironically.
I come from a Jewish family that rolled up in the 1890s, so I know I don't have any sins of the father. Even if I did, then it's the ancestor's fault for sinning, not me.
Therefore, why let out a big sigh of annoyance when someone mentions that slavery happened if you truly think you have nothing to feel guilty over? You don't see me get defensive when people say Israel is a racist, apartheid state despite being Jewish.
why let out a big sigh of annoyance when someone mentions that slavery happened if you truly think you have nothing to feel guilty over?
Because real history doesn't make them feel warm and comfy. My guess is they wanted the plantation be some sort of Disneyland with all dark spots glossed over
90% of white Americans have no understanding of history and don’t care. And a big chunk of that remaining 10% also don’t have a real understanding but they’re reactionary white men who read books about history by Bill O’Reilly and Oliver North and watch the History Channel when something about WW2 is on.
But these people don’t want to learn actual history. American history - like everything else in their lives - just exists to stroke their egos and make them feel like the Good Guys and that people like them (white folks) are also the Good Guys.
Even if your ancestors did own slaves, were working to expand slavery and fought in the coffee loser army you shouldn't be offended. You're not responsible for what your great great great grandfather did and just because he was a monster you don't have to be.
I swear I saw this years ago (on the sub) but without the attached photo. The attached photo is actually from pretty recently. It's a chef who cooks traditional food using the same methods as would have been used in the 1800s. I saw him on a cooking channel on youtube. He made 1800s barbecue. It was very cool. He also talked about slavery. I'll see if I can't find it.
EDIT:
(CW meat) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwkRWIwZ43A
If he is German I got bad news for you. Pretty much every German company that is relevant now used forced labour during the Holocaust and Shoa and that includes working people to death. So if your husband is German, then I wouldn't so clear cut say "his family owned no slaves", as while that is true millions of the 80 million people did enforce the forced labour and were complicit actively.
The Holocaust and the Shoa refer to the same thing. There isn't really a name for the other genocide that went on afaik besides obviously Generalplan Ost.
CW holocaust
I understand how you got to that thought, but in usage it isn't quite true. Shoa is pretty much always the preferred nomenclature for Jewish groups (as cynical as it is to find a "right" word to describe what happened).However the term Holocaust was also used for genocides with aim of (at least partial) extermination i.e. Armenian, however it is absolutely right that the Holocaust as "modern" origin did mean the Shoa, which was aimed at Jews. Which is a reason why the term isn't really to be used for other genocides.
However during its usage sometimes discrimination and extermination of others are included, when it means the actions of Nazis with the goal of extermination, some do subsume parts of the Porajmos under the holocaust umbrella, as much as it did use the same structures, processes and had the same goal, while the specific terms Shoa and Porajmos are used to the specific situations.
In regards to the action T4 that name itself is common. You are right that colloquial the term Generalplan Ost is often used, which itself brings a few problems with it. It does bring the mass executions in Poland and areas of the Soviet Union and alike under a common umbrella and does itself not differentiate between executions of civilians and Soviet Soldiers for example. Of course there is also the problem that it is - much like Action T4 - a German phrase.
While there were plenty of - also political prisoners or LGTBQA+ - people in forced labour I wanted to highlight both the Roma and Sinti and Jewish people who were worked to death. You are right that working to death was also aimed at "asocials" (punks, politicals, gays, unhoused, neudivergent, partially young/single mothers):
In einem Aktenvermerk vom 14. September 1942 notierte Otto Thierack über ein Gespräch mit Joseph Goebbels:
„Hinsichtlich der Vernichtung asozialen Lebens steht Dr. Goebbels auf dem Standpunkt, dass Juden und Zigeuner schlechthin, Polen, die etwa 3 bis 4 Jahre Zuchthaus zu verbüßen hätten, Tschechen und Deutsche, die zum Tode, lebenslangen Zuchthaus oder Sicherheitsverwahrung verurteilt wären, vernichtet werden sollten. Der Gedanke der Vernichtung durch Arbeit sei der beste.“[2]
Goebbels schrieb zu diesem Gespräch in seinem Tagebuch:
„Wer an dieser Arbeit zugrunde geht, um den ist es nicht schade.[3]“
Or to sum up "extermination through work is best", writes Goebbels, it is to be aimed at "Jews, Gpss, Polish people (convicted to 3 years of prison), Tschez & Germans (sentenced to death, life, security detention [which was also used against political enemies])"
That is why I used the doubling as short hand. Could've directly done a fuller list or used alternative phrasing.
However there is also the argument which is recurring that writing from a German perspective - that doesn't belong to the victims -, in the country of the perpetrators a term used and defined by the victims is not right.
Thank you for the explanation, just one thing:
You are right that colloquial the term Generalplan Ost is often used, which itself brings a few problems with it. It does bring the mass executions in Poland and areas of the Soviet Union and alike under a common umbrella and does itself not differentiate between executions of civilians and Soviet Soldiers for example
I'd consider Jewish soldiers who were executed for being Jewish to be victims of the Shoa, so I don't think the execution of Soviet soldiers for being various types of what was designated as "life unworthy of life" needs to be excluded. Combat deaths are something else, but executions seem to me to be appropriate to include.
