The German Experiment That Placed Foster Children with Pedophiles
With the approval of the government, a renowned sexologist ran a dangerous program. How could this happen?
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The linked article is fantastic btw I recommend it if anybody is in for a long read.
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I’m not getting it, this is bad right? Like putting kids with pedophiles who exploit them and then protecting the pedophile’s power over the kids is bad?
I can get if this specific thing is used out of context to denegrate queer groups, but it’s also something that you shouldn’t be dismissing and instead being very vocal about the fact that this is exactly not what being queer is right?
This type of exploitation also actively harms people in those communities since it seems like the idea was to push kids who were already at risk into situations where they were being actively exploited by pedophiles…
Motherfucker are you seriously making me prove that i am not a pedo here? Do i SERIOUSLY have to do a “but do you condemn Hamas?” after i have explained over and over again how literal nazis are using this for campaigning in my country and why this is connected to trauma from a literal hatecrime to me? Fuck off. How can you be so dense?
I don’t understand the point you wish to convey. Do you think the claim of either OP or the article is that queer people are pedophiles? The article talks about how this story has been opportunistically exploited by fascists, here are a couple of excerpts:
Schweer had “offered help from the AfD,” Marco told me. “I immediately said, ‘Not for political purposes, only because I want help.’ ”
From the perspective of an AfD politician, Marco’s life story was expedient, a tale about the ways in which the German left had got sexual politics wrong. At meetings of the German parliament, members of the AfD (which won more than twelve per cent of the vote in the last national election, becoming Germany’s third-largest party) rallied around the Kentler case as a way of forcing left-wing politicians to address history that did not reflect well on their parties, but also as a barely disguised vehicle for impugning homosexuality. An advocacy group affiliated with the AfD held “Stop Kentler’s sex education” rallies, to protest the way that sexuality is currently taught in German schools. “Kentler’s criminal pedophile spirit lives on unbroken in today’s sex education,” a brochure printed by the organization explained.
Later:
Christoph Schweer, the AfD adviser, had urged Marco and Sven to keep fighting, but Marco couldn’t understand why. “We have gotten our wishes, so there’s no point in further irritating or tyrannizing the Senate,” he told me. But Schweer kept pushing him, Marco said. (Schweer denies this.) “Then I slowly got suspicious. I asked myself, What else should I want? That’s when I got the feeling that the AfD just wants to use me, to play me up. And I said, ‘I don’t want to be a political tool. I don’t want to get pulled into an election campaign.’ ” He dropped his lawsuit and accepted the Senate’s offer. His only remaining goal is that, in the upcoming report, all the names of people involved in carrying out Kentler’s experiment be revealed. (Schweer said that he had been supporting Marco as a “private person,” not on behalf of the AfD. He also told me, “I have new ideas, but for [Marco] it’s over.”)
It’s a stale meme based on a decades old event that nowadays is used almost exclusively in the propaganda of the biggest political threat to my local community, why is it so hard to understand that it makes me uncomfortable to see a literal anti-queer nazi talking point on here?
I think the way the history is twisted and exploited by nazis is what constitutes the talking point, not the history itself, but the article is clearly against those distortions and for all their many and sometimes grievous faults, I am pretty sure you won’t find HBs responding to the article by declaring that the spirit of pedophilic sexual predation lives on in modern acceptance of gay people and the other shit AfD says.
It probably should have some CWs though
In case it wasn’t clear, i was never complaining about the article, which does explain how this gets exploited by fascists. I was only arguing about the meme, which lacks that context, is realistically the only part most people here will engage with and gets reposted a lot as well. I get that this is outrageous, i don’t mind dunking on the BRD, either, it honestly deserves worse, but i can’t help but feel weirded out by this shit. I have been personally hatecrimed by an AfD supporter agitated by a campaign instrumentalizing the Kentler case, i can’t take this lightly.
Just saying I didn’t know about this prior to seeing the meme and my only thought was “Another west german L. If only the Soviets had marched to Lisbon.” It seems this likely will be seen much differently by people inside Germany than people outside it. For me as someone outside Germany I just see this as another example of capitalism and fascism being one and the same.
I wasn’t accounting for the meme properly. I think you’re right that the way that it’s totally decontextualized is not a good thing given the exploitation of the history, even if that’s not OP’s intention and within HB it wouldn’t be received that way.
from what serialexperimentsgay has said, it seems that perhaps this gets brought up by AfD people the way that people in the u.s. that are antitrans fascists bring up john money.
so i guess, do AfD agitation or their versions of this meme make the homophobic trope connection between pedophiles and queer people? this doesn’t do that, and most of the u.s.ians that aren’t homophobic bigots wouldn’t make that connection from seeing this image. we aren’t taught about the Kentler case and it is not common knowledge, so without further context, someone in the u.s. wouldn’t necessarily see this and start thinking about doing anti-queer hate crimes.
i’m just trying to better understand your perspective here, personally, not argue that we must have this meme or something.
I think there’s an argument to be made that the proliferation of a decontextualized recounting of these events creates an opening for fascists to come in and “contextualize” them with their distortions, as they already do all the time.
from my perspective this is obviously anti-nazi (since nazis essentially got to run west germany) and doesn’t mention queer people. i have personally only encountered this event on this site, in the context of “look at these nazis harming kids,” and nothing to do with denigrating queer people. so that might be why it’s hard to understand what you’re saying if purpleworm has also never encountered what you’re talking about, certainly not to the extent of understanding it as an (apparently common) nazi trope.
