Nazi paraphernalia on sale at Banqiao station?

Where have I suggested that “the Jews had it coming to them”? I don’t think any sane person would deny that the Holocaust was very bad, and not something that the Jews (or the little remembered non-Jewish victims) somehow ‘deserved’. A disgusting thing for you to intimate, but very predictable.

I simply see an irony in the exaggerated sensitivity (not just by Jews, but by western society in general) to swastikas, versus a complete insensitivity to human rights abuses carried out in plain view within western societies in the name of religion. In fact, the moment you point out these human rights abuses you get labeled antisemitic, islamophobic, etc.

I’ve nothing in particular against Judaism as a religion other than the fact they sexually mutilate children, and (even worse) our so-called ‘civilized’ western society lets them get away with it.

OK, the Jewish god as described in the Bible is a capricious monster, and much of what his followers get up to is just depraved. But he’s the Christian and Muslim god too, so whatever issues he has are hardly unique to Judaism.

Jews actually rank above Christians and Muslims for me in many respects. Importantly, at least they don’t cause a public nuisance by proselytizing, and certainly don’t (not recently at least) seek to convert by the sword in the currently popular Islamic fashion.

But again, I’d note that Judaism’s custom of sexually mutilating babies arguably is a form of proselytizing via a blade, and denies the child his religious freedom. It’s a real human rights abuse, and far more important to deal with than a few swastikas hanging in a shop window in Taiwan.

Unfortunately it isn’t possible for society to accommodate EVERY single person and their PTSD, inherited trauma, etc.

What society can do is uphold some universal human rights - something it currently fails on, partly because of a culture of excessive pandering to the perpetually offended.

I’m not sure of your meaning in the above statements. I don’t believe that the rites of the Jewish religion involve the use of human blood in a sacrifice, and I don’t believe that there is any plausible evidence that they do. The only thing along those lines that I’ve ever read of is what is sometimes called the blood libel. Here’s what Wikipedia says about that:

–“Blood libel” (numerical citations omitted) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel

Wikipedia’s explanation, shown above, coincides with what I’ve read concerning rumors about Jews and the blood of humans (on those few occasions when I’ve read about such things), and as the term “libel” indicates, there is no believable evidence that such acts have taken place. This accusation has been thoroughly discredited. Additionally, I’ve never read or heard that the accusation had anything to do with circumcision.

Further down, the above-referenced Wikipedia article goes on to say:

(numerical citation omitted) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_lib … _sacrifice

The circumcision of non-Jews and non-Muslims is common in the United States, and it’s fairly common in some other Western countries. I’m not Jewish or Muslim, and I’m circumcised. My father (1916-1995) was not Jewish or Muslim, and he was circumcised.

This is taken from a Wikipedia article on circumcision:

–“Circumcision” (numerical citation omitted; asterisks indicate omission of text) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision#Prevalence

Concerning the United States, this is from another Wikipedia article:

–“Prevalence of circumcision” (numerical citations omitted) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalenc … ted_States

I presume by your outrage that you didn’t intend to suggest that, but with all respect, I think I can see how someone might draw such an inference from the statement below, given that the statement is being made in a discussion of the Nazis, which generally gives rise to thoughts of Nazi atrocities, including atrocities against Jews:

Kiwi, I mean no disrespect to you personally in anything that I’ve written in this post.

Ive posted about this store before. It is opposite the station and bus station in the ground floor of thr ‘hi mall’

Its not selling nazi things, its just a crappy clothes shop with nazi themed decor and its called ss3 something. There are a bunch of nazi flags hung up, also uk germany and usa ones. Yea i felt annoyed when i first saw it to.
If anyone wants to check it out let me know and i can tell you about some other weird shit in the same area worth looking up!

If Nazi-themed decor that’s certainly a bit ridiculous, though in defense of Taiwanese: (1) It’s not really their history; (2) Say what you like about the Nazis but they often did design very well.

I’m much into sicking the media on those I subjectively deem out of line. We see lots of this today in the west and it too often becomes a type of bullying.

I do get where you are coming from, and the American culture of bitching on the internet doesn’t help, but the solution isn’t to say, ‘Well fuck victims of Nazis, the whiners.’ Your perspective is out of whack, perhaps because you are attempting to over-analogise and assume parity with every other genocide. It’s not ‘pandering’ to cut Europeans some slack over the Nazis, it’s just … fundamental . There’s a lot of stuff I don’t get – there are issues I will never have much respect for because they’re basically ridiculous to me, but I keep my mouth shut when it’s not some dumb microaggression bollocks. When it’s genocide, and even if we find it silly or jarring, that say, x people still really do have a problem with symbols of y, isn’t it kind to recognise that fear and try to alleviate that?

Me, I’m never really going to feel that personally bothered by the Armenian genocide, 9/11, the Nanjing massacre, just to give three examples. It wasn’t me or mine, and I don’t have any emotional response to Turkey, al-Qaeda, Imperial Japan or whatever. But I do to swastikas. My stomach genuinely turns and I get a like surge of … something. And I wasn’t even there. Now perhaps to a third generation person, you can say ‘weeeeel, what’s the big fucking deal? Isn’t there a statute of limitations of that kind of pain?’ Yes. Obviously, I’m not co-opting that stuff. But there are people still alive that have memories. I sometimes feel irritation at the anti-Japan crap I hear in China and think ‘Why can’t you just move on and let it go?’ But it’s not for me to say, because it never affected me. I think we have to make an effort to hear what people think in individual situations, rather than assuming there’s a one-size-fits-all heuristic for deciding who is worth listening to, and who ‘deserves’ to be heard.

This is not about ‘rules’ and what should and shouldn’t be allowed. It’s about not being a dick to people who feel bad. Empathy, and trusting that when another human being says ‘Seriously, this makes me feel awful, can we knock it off?’ they aren’t just shit-stirring like some teenage Yank Twitterati. There are many many complexities to these things, and it’s not good for anyone if we just throw our hands up in the air and say. ‘Fuck it, we can’t please everyone!’

What would I say if I were in Banqiao? Probably nothing, because as others point out, it’s about education and it’s just some daft kid who runs a shop, and it’s not kind to harass the kind of people who don’t really understand this stuff. When I say ‘education’, I don’t mean an in-depth knowledge of the history of another continent, but that empathy and communication and openness to others’ viewpoints that comes from reading and parenting and an outward-looking social set-up and world-view. The response from shop idiot would be, I would predict, extremely defensive, so what’s the point? There’s not much to be gained.

If I were displaying a flag that someone from another continent asked me to take down, would I seriously say ‘No, it’s just a symbol, what are you getting bent out of shape over?’? Would you? Really?

You seem to have a real bee in your bonnet about circumcision…no idea why. But this thread is not about circumcision therefore by constantly turning the argument back to circumcision you leave yourself open to people concluding that you want to downplay the Holocaust because Jews practice “sexual mutilation”. That’s not a disgusting inference, its what anyone with a grasp of the language would conclude your agenda is.

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Wait, so we’re not going to campaign against the Philippines as a symbol of nearly universal circumcision on pubescent boys, but we are going to say that Jewish and Islamic symbols should automatically bring bleeding infant penises to mind? And the reason is because no “concerned and empathetic citizens” seem to be suggesting they end this “revolting tradition of blood sacrifice?” There’s not really any way for this not to be considered a double standard on your part. Also worth noting: there are 7-8 times as many Filipino people in the world as Jews, so if ending circumcision is your priority, you should really consider adjusting the scope of your compaign.

Right, but the people affected by it (Europeans, Americans, Jews, gypsies, etc…) almost universally degree this is a horrible thing to display. If I opened a shop in LA selling replicas of imperial Japanese military equipment and the naval flag, would you tell angry Koreans and Chinese visitors that they should just shrug it off because “it’s not Hokwongwei’s history” and so he doesn’t have to be responsible for what it represents?

I mean, if this is our argument, a Taiwanese shop adorned with Islamic State flags could be written off in the exact same way. “It’s not their history or their current event. They don’t understand it. So let’s let it be.” I completely disagree on this judgment.

heres a photo i took of the store in question.

there is no excuse for this sort of thing imo, its plain ignorance. i have seen photos on facebook of 2 separate people, one i was kind of friends with dressed up in nazi costumes. the other guy also had a terrorist costume, complete with a felt tip pen drawn on beard. this guy also had a nazi flag over his desk in the company he worked.

anyway i posted it up on my IG and a taiwanese person apologised for it so its good to know there are some people here with awareness towards the rest of the world. its taiwanese peoples battle to fight, and they are only making themselves look stupid to outsiders by doing this sort of thing.

I’m no expert, but it doesn’t seem that complicated. The evidence is their genital mutilation rituals.

Animal sacrifice was central to the old ‘Temple Judaism’ and naturally was bloody. Note that everyone was sacrificing animals at the time, so really I’ve no comment on that. It was just the contemporary style of religion. Anyway, the Jewish-Roman wars ended with the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish Diaspora. With the temple gone and the people scattered the religion changed. Priests replaced by rabbis, animal sacrifice ended, and genital mutilation of humans became the last remaining blood ritual.

Genital mutilation as performed in Judaism is clearly sacrificial in nature. It may well have evolved from earlier traditions of infant sacrifice - common in the ancient world - animal sacrifice could be a stand in for human sacrifice, as in the story of God commanding Abraham to kill his own son. In fact, sacrificing a piece of the genitals may have evolved as an alternative to sacrificing the entire child. In the pre-antiseptic age the child not only lost a portion of their genitals but actually risked death. Meanwhile the parents publicly displayed their acceptance of religious authority by risking their child’s life in this way, marking the child as the property of the ‘tribe’, etc. Parents were spared the obligation to put their child through the ritual if they had already lost two children to it. Think about that for a second. It’s a sacrifice.

Certain bits in the bible support the sacrificial aspect. Just one example, the story of Zipporah and the Bridegroom of Blood, bizarre as it is, clearly presents the mutilation of an infant’s genitals as a sacrifice to avert God’s wrath and simultaneously emphasizes the bloodiness of it all. So a blood sacrifice? Definitely.

Also note how orthodox Jews in New York have recently been determined to retain a version of the ritual in which the mohel actually sucks the bloodied penis of the infant he’s just mutilated. Babies have been dying from herpes as a result, but the rabbis believe preserving the blood and gore is somehow essential to their religious expression.

Was it any wonder weird rumors circulated about the Jews given what they did to their own babies? That story of God commanding Abraham to kill his son, and Abraham obeying (blimey!) is also a worry. And you bring up the Temple in Jerusalem as a site of blood sacrifice, to which I’d say that perhaps that tradition of blood sacrifice is a factor in the subsequent persistence of genital mutilation rituals.

Yes, in the mid-late 19th Century genital mutilation (male and female - at least initially) became medicalized, partly in association with a trend in the Anglo nations of admiring Jewish culture for its success. Every decade since the doctors seem to decide it cures/prevents something new: paralysis, epilepsy, masturbation, cancer of the cervix, cancer of the penis, urinary tract infections, AIDS, etc. Today we have the absurd situation whereby the UN goes round Africa peddling genital mutilation for males (apparently it’s the closest we have to an AIDS vaccine - lol!), while campaigning against genital mutilation for females. Africans must think westerners are crazy.

No stats on the number of deaths though are there? Hospitals don’t like to collect figures on deaths that are an embarrassment for modern ‘medicine’. But annual deaths would exceed 100 in the US. That brings us back to the ritual’s likely origins in child sacrifice. It’s not something a responsible parent should allow to happen, and it should not be allowed to hide behind a cloak of religious freedom.

No disrespect taken.

I stand by what I said. I’m not anti-Jewish except in so far as I’m against all groups that sexually mutilate children, and on that front I believe our ancestors were quite correct in reviling Jews. A disgusting practice should be called exactly what it is.

You’re correct in that, at least since the start of this year, I’m getting active and abrasive in talking about genital mutilation. It continues to be allowed because people would rather not hear about it. Society needs its nose rubbed in its own double standards until common sense wins and everybody’s human rights get protection.

I’ve brought up genital mutilation here because I’m tired of being told I’m ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘encouraging another Holocaust’ for mentioning it, and because I sense some hypocrisy (only potentially mind you) in a Jewish person wanting others (even the media) to leap into action and protect their delicate sensibilities, while potentially having zero concern for the human rights of defenseless children whose only mistake has been getting born into the wrong family.

I’m not sure why you keep bringing up Filipinos. I rarely encounter them and they’re not a significant minority in either of the countries I’m a citizen of. I believe they’re growing in numbers in NZ, but that’s mostly happened since I’ve been abroad. But obviously they do it too, as I believe I pointed out on this very website a few months back when somebody asked about Asian countries/cultures that practice male genital mutilation.

Muslims and Jews are the big ones in my book, simply because civilized societies cannot persist if they allow religions to abuse human rights. In the New Zealand context I’d add Pacific Islanders.

As for your accusation of a double standard on my part, apologies but I’m not sure I even follow what you are saying. I see no double standard.

I simply feel no pressing need to destroy/hide/ban symbols. Arguably that just gives them power. Also, where do you start and end. Should Taiwan ever change its flag I’d be against banning display of the old one for fear of offending victims of the White Terror (exception for display on government buildings, since that would just be taking the piss).

I’m also tired of a society filled with ‘trigger warnings’ and other such nonsense. Frankly, if a person who did not directly experience the Holocaust can’t deal with a swastika then that’s their problem. I make exceptions for actual Holocaust survivors. When I was growing up we’d occasionally put the Nazi stuff out of sight so as not to unnecessarily offend visitors with direct links to that history.

I think it’s important not to forget that the average German serving under the Swastika was likely OK, or at least not evil. Stuff happens, and people get swept up in it. They’re not all monsters.

And that’s not unlike what the religious (and non-religious) do with something like genital mutilation. They accept a human rights abuse simply because that’s what the rest of their herd is doing.

Someone from another continent, some foreigner, barging in and making demands? I honestly think I’d tell them to get lost. What right do they have?

It might even feel a bit like PRC students coming to my country and attacking Tibetan flags, or demanding ROC flags not be displayed.

No, it’s completely different, for obvious reasons. What’s with the analogy schtick? Do you actually propose that as a counter to what I wrote? Curioser and curioser.

Look, I understand why you wouldn’t want to engage. It’s OK. It doesn’t matter.

I went over there this evening around 5:30 or so. I may have missed something, but like you, I couldn’t see any Nazi or Nazi-like emblems on any of the goods offered for sale; I only saw the Nazi symbols in the decor. I saw an unusual-looking number “88” on one item for sale, but it would be quite a stretch to call it Nazi.

Yesterday I thought I saw a Nazi-looking accessory next to a couple of pairs of sunglasses at around 0:14-0:15 in the video linked below, (again, to be on the safe side, I’m labeling the YouTube video linked below as [color=#FF0000]NOT SUITABLE FOR WORK[/color]):

After I read your post that said they weren’t selling Nazi stuff, I viewed the video again, and now I don’t think that Nazi symbol is an accessory or part of an accessory. I think it’s part of the decor of the store. Additionally, when I went to the store, I couldn’t even find the Nazi symbol in the display of the sunglasses.

But the decor, or at least part of it, is hard to miss and hard to mistake.

I have no problem with people flashing around confederate flags, or nazi symbols. It makes it easier for me to spot racist, ignorant bigots. I do have a problem with gov. doing that, ex. south carolina before they finally took down the confederate flag.

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Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. What I meant was that, were I Taiwanese (I’m not), I might not react well to some foreigner lecturing me. I just pulled out a couple of examples I’ve personally seen of foreigners barging in and making demands about flags. Not very good examples, but just what came to mind at the time.

Look, I agree Taiwanese society could improve in this regard. Taiwan seems to have some kind of ‘Nazi scandal’ every year. Embarrassing for Taiwan, but also always looks pretty harmless.

foreigners have every right to get offended by this. Taiwanese people would be offended also if they came across something as ignorant about their history in europe. if they wouldn’t then you might have an argument but taiwanese are pretty sensitive about their country, so it doesn’t stand.

The self-appointed thought police get ‘offended’ by everything.

Oh hang on, not quite everything. They’re actually very selective about what ‘offends’ them. They like to go for the easy stuff.

This comment makes sense in the context of an outsider telling you what you should and shouldn’t display. If I said “don’t display a Confederate flag because black people will get offended,” you could argue I’m overstepping my bounds. But I am the one being offended by the Nazi flags (though admittedly the picture posted above is nowhere near as bad as I was expecting). Have I lost my right to be personally offended and demand people be responsible for the symbols they show off?