I think Martin Luther should have to be known as the “Martin Luther, author of the treatise ‘The Jews and Their Lies.’”
Example: “It’s been 500 years since Martin Luther, author of the treatise ‘The Jews and Their Lies,’ started the Protestant reformation.”
Tired of pretending he wasn’t a raging anti-semite who advocated for the oppression and murder of my people.
ETA: Before anybody makes a colossal mistake, please do note that Martin Luther and Martin Luther King are not even remotely the same people.
He is currently being celebrated all over Germany like a hero. Here and there his admirers mention his antisemitism but still put him on a pedestal like he’s a saviour or something. It’s terrifying. And apart from playing down his antisemitism nobody even mentions his horrible misogyny.
Look, I’ll be the first to admit I’m not an expert on Martin Luther and if you guys say he was antisemitic and stuff, well you’re probably right (the misogyny thing – like okay yeah it’s awful, but also he lived in the 1500′s, bloody every one was misogynistic he was hardly unique in that)
But keep in mind what he did do yeah? You can’t paint him only in black. He took on the Catholic Church and won. That’s huge, especially for his time, when they had a habit of killing people who disagreed with them. The Church was scamming people out of their money, getting them to buy ‘Indulgences’ and telling them this would save them and get them to Heaven. And ‘saviour’ is probably taking it a bit far, but you’ve also gotta understand how big the Church was back then, and how important it was in people’s lives. He translated the Bible so people could actually understand it, and then it got distributed (thanks to the timely invention of the printing press) so people could actually have access to it. So now people could read and understand for themselves, and not just blindly believe what the Church was telling them. Imagine if someone came up with a way we could all tell the difference between truth in a media story and bullshit – how big an effect would that have? That’s the kind of impact we’re talking about.
So yeah, we should absolutely be aware of people’s shortcomings and not paint them just as heroes if they were also assholes. But, no one is perfect. And being an asshole doesn’t stop you from doing good things in the world – things that we should equally keep in mind.“In the treatise, Luther writes that the Jews are a ‘base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth.’ Luther wrote that they are ‘full of the devil’s feces … which they wallow in like swine,’ and the synagogue is an ‘incorrigible whore and an evil slut …’ He argues that their synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated. They should be shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection, and these ‘poisonous envenomed worms’ should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time. He also seems to advocate their murder, writing ’[w]e are at fault in not slaying them.
The prevailing scholarly view since the Second World War is that the treatise exercised a major and persistent influence on Germany’s attitude toward its Jewish citizens in the centuries between the Reformation and the Holocaust. Four hundred years after it was written, the National Socialists displayed On the Jews and Their Lies during Nuremberg rallies, and the city of Nuremberg presented a first edition to Julius Streicher, editor of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer, the newspaper describing it as the most radically antisemitic tract ever published.” (x)
But right, sure, “no one is perfect.”
Why does one have to take a side? Like can’t we acknowledge that Martin Luther was a cruel and dangerous asshole and his cruelty is totally not okay and should be mentioned a lot more and talked about while everyone here is celebrating him so much, especially in this time where discrimination against different religions is so up to date it would be great if this were more of a topic but also acknowledge the good things he did? Shouldn’t it be okay to celebrate someone and still acknowledge or talk about the cruel things they did?
Also it’s a totally different view on things from 2017 than 1500, while it is not okay to be antisemitic today different times just are different times, the human race is developing, just like you can’t expect a good singer to be exactly as good with 5 as with 40 years. The human race needs to learn to be empathetic and we’re making big steps forward but to expect someone from 1500 to be as empathetic as we are in 2017 is totally surreal! I’m not saying it makes him a good person from our point of view I’m just saying he was seen like that back then. You’re not considered a bad person if you hate and want to kill people considered evil in our time, like trump or terrorists, right? Well back then they had certain people who were the evil people and Martin Luther Was probably considered a good person for wanting to rot out evil just as we’d be considered good people if we could rot out terrorism or anti-Semitism. Values change, we can’t expect people from 1500 to fulfill 2017 values and standards. Maybe in 2300 we’ll be so empathetic to say that anyone who wanted to rot out anything is evil and everyone who does harmful things is harmed within themselves and we will accept them as equally human still and it is not okay to hate anyone if you’re in your right mind or whatever, who knows?
“Shouldn’t it be okay to celebrate someone and still acknowledge or talk about the cruel things they did?”
That was the entire goddamn point of my original post. People were celebrating him without acknowledging his anti-Semitism or misogyny, something with which I took issue.
“Also it’s a totally different view on things from 2017 than 1500, while it is not okay to be antisemitic today different times just are different times…back then they had certain people who were the evil people and Martin Luther was probably considered a good person for wanting to root out evil.”
Yeah, and it was also socially acceptable to be antisemitic in 1940s Germany. Like…what’s you’re fucking point, Neville Chamberlain? Popular opinion isn’t an excuse for advocating in favour of genocide. There’s also a huge difference between historically normative ignorance and preaching literal violence. Like, sorry if you think we’re not being objective enough, but Luther’s words and beliefs were used to “root out” our real life actual family members, so SORRY IF WE’RE STILL A LITTLE SENSITIVE ABOUT IT.
“Different times.” Are you fucking kidding me right now? Geh kaken oifen yam, you fucking schmuckweasel.
I wonder, did the Jews in the 16th century just think that antisemitism was a sign of the times and no big deal? When followers of Luther came to their homes to murder and burn and rape, did they just shrug their shoulders and ask what else could be expected of them? When their children were slaughtered, did they take comfort in the fact that at least Luther took on the Catholic church and won, which was a big effing deal? When they had to flee in the dead of night just ahead of literal torch wielding mobs, did they just chalk it up to a learning curve, maybe Christians need a other half a millennia to learn to be “empathetic” to the fact that murdering is bad, even of the victim is Jewish?
Or did you maybe not consider them at all?
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