PeterExplainsTheJoke
Petah what’s the meaning behind the tattoo?
Discussion
Hey, Mort here, peter fell into the Toilet again. The Victim of the Police Violence is a Holocaust survivor. He has numbers on his arm, just like the ones My Father and Mother have.
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We are fucked as a society....
Knowledge of history is crucial today.
I hear history is written by the victors. Didn’t the FBI Kash guy write American history books for children?
Knowledge is crucial today, and very lacking
Eh, I dunno. Seeing as most Americans cant read above a 6th grade level, so one could argue that this is just another failing of our education system. Granted OP is american, of course.
Not just failure given a certain party is trying to destroy it completely over the last decade or so
You mean the last 50 some years.
They started destroying Public Education as soon as Desegregation hit, but it took them about 15 to 20 years to REALLY figure out their gameplan. It started with Catholic Schools.
Ah yea should have said decades lol
Yeah, I was gonna say...
I'm nearly 50 and they've been chipping away at education since I was a kid, so I have to assume it started before that.
Just out of curiousity, if you feel like awnsering, with the experience you gained from your years on this ball if dirt we call home, do you feel like there is hope for America to get better? Or are we doomed to keep pulling and pushing the status of certain rights and privileges back and forth forever?
40 something here: I think Propaghandi says it best: " Despite endless wars, extinction level events depradation and plague every one of your ancestors survived to reproductive age."
We, as a people, will survive this. Even if America as a nation doesn't. What matters is coming together with each other now and opposing this wrong. What comes next will be decisive.
The question we need to ask ourselves is what kind of future do we want to live in. And move towards that future together.
It'll be ok. But dont stop screaming till it is.
Fair question. I see no path for it to get better under our current political system. On the national level, almost no politicians actually represent the wants and needs of their constituents. We're not their friends, we don't have lobbyists, they get our votes for nothing in return. They face no consequences for failure or acting against our interests. The two party system ensures that one side or the other will get their person in the seat regardless. And who chose those people? Not us.
The right drags the whole conversation further right, the center plays passive resistance and either lets themselves be dragged slowly to the right, or actively moves right to chase the right's votes. They call the center the left, but the left is wholly unrepresented in our government.
Everything has just been accelerating; getting faster, more extreme, and more absurd.
It hasn't been functional in my lifetime, I'm not sure how long before I existed it actually was.
I think it's too far gone at this point. The rich won. The national government seems to largely exist now as a giant system for turning public tax money into privately held money. They remake the laws and policies to suit the wants of businesses and have been doing so for at least a half decade before I was born.
The current administration has proven with no doubt that there is no entity to police them. I'm glad people are protesting, but I don't think it does anything. There are simply zero consequences for ignoring the will of the people.
Class warfare is the only warfare that matters and currently in America the rich have won. The same tactics used throughout history are still working today. Blame any and all problems on immigrants and the poor. Turn us against each other and talk about anything else besides class warfare.
Don’t blame us teachers. We teach it to the kids. They’d rather be on tiktok and snap than learn anything
Oh, never meant to blame teachers. Was talking in terms of Systems, imo you guys are Victims too.
Nah they’d just rather do anything other than be forced to sit in a room and have information they don’t care about shoveled down their throats for 8 hours a day.
Kids not paying attention in school is a timeless phenomenon. It has nothing to do with TikTok or snap or anything else. If kids didn’t have phones they’d just stare at the wall.
Kids not paying attention in school is a timeless phenomenon.
You're clearly not a teacher. Yes, this is technically true, but it has absolutely exploded in terms of how much of a problem it is.
Ask any teacher of any subject that has been around for 10+ years - COVID absolutely decimated our attention spans and social skills, there's almost nothing left.
And I'm sure I'll get downvoted but we've normalized questioning authority at every level. Which is good and well-intended and absolutely useful at times, but it gives everybody a free pass to fabricate a reason to use it as an excuse to not do what they're supposed to - aka what they don't want to do.
I’m not a teacher but I am a high school senior. I see that shit first hand every day.
I’ve been enrolled in 3 different high schools who all have different cell phone policies. My first school had a zero tolerance policy, if you had your phone on your person whatsoever (we had lockers to keep them in) it was taken from you for the rest of the day. At my second school they were a bit more lax in that you could have it on you but if you had it out it’s taken for the rest of the day. My current school is an alternative school where the cell phone policy is left up to individual teachers (most of which don’t have one).
At all 3 of these schools they had the same problems with a lack of class participation. At 2 out of 3 of these schools you are literally incapable of having your phone out in class. Y’know what students did instead? They stared at the wall, they doodled, they played on their chromebooks, they did anything they could besides class work.
Even if you want to talk about pre-COVID, I was in 6th grade when COVID happened. I didn’t own a phone at the time, neither did many of my peers. And yet it was the same shit: staring at the wall, playing on Chromebooks, drawing, we just did whatever we could besides class work. That’s just the nature of children. If you try to make them sit down, stay still, and listen they are bound to do the exact opposite.
The issue isn't just phones in the class though.
I've watched attention spans frop over my life from being a pupil as blackberries became a thing, to going into teaching.
The problem i observed was that a load of the kids I taught just didn't do things that required attention spans to enjoy them.
And it's not just phones. I'd argue it's things like 10 minute CoD matches, Fortnite Battle Royales, perpetual games with loads of repetitive 5-minute events, to YouTube videos as well as a whole bunch of other things.
So yeah, we were bored in class back in the 90's and 2000s. But we at least had the ability to focus for more than ten minutes because we realised it was worth it.
And I have to emphasise; it's not the kids' fault. It's the tech companies pushing this shit, because it doesn't just affect kids; it affects us adults too.
Has nothing to do with the education system, me like a significant amount of other people learned about the Holocaust. This is one reddit user who very well may not even be American as there are other countries in the world and on top of that while people are so quick to pin all the blame on the education system, there are also plenty of people who got bored in history class and spent the time day dreaming and not paying attention.
I'm willing to bet this user knows the Holocaust is a thing that happened and what happened during that time but either doesn't remember that they marked Jewish people like this or forgot that information regarding this comic. Yes, the education system in the US is fucked up, but if there's one thing the US will do it's make ourselves look like hero's and go in depth on the faults of every other country during a war we were involved with And IF YOU'RE LUCKY your school will mention some of the fucked up shit we did too. That or you'll learn about Hiroshima and Nagasaki later in your education past the 5th-8th grade.
there are also plenty of people who got bored in history class and spent the time day dreaming and not paying attention.
The system failed to make the lesson interesting.
US will do it's make ourselves look like hero's and go in depth on the faults of every other country during a war we were involved with And IF YOU'RE LUCKY your school will mention some of the fucked up shit we did too. That or you'll learn about Hiroshima and Nagasaki later in your education past the 5th-8th grade.
I consider this to be part of the failing of our education system. Obviously its the more parts to that than just the education system. But im not going to type a thesis about why people dont know about the holocaust on reddit. There are far better individuals who have done this way better than I could.
I still remember being scarred when I borrowed a book out from the library about hiroshima and nagasaki. the visualisations in my head of people being boiled alive and their skin literally peeling off were horrible, so I can't imagine actually being in that situation, nowhere to go but with all the other plagued people. Then I got to the part where us doctors were told to lie about radiation poisoning, leading to thousands being ostracised and dying due to exposure and never being able to get treatment. Somehow I never learnt about this in regular curriculum. (Australian btw)
No need to progress past 6th grade reading. A lot of newspapers, magazines and internet articles are written at a fifth grade level. And anything worth reading they are turning into terrible movies…..so we got that going for us I guess.
If no one teaches you how are you supposed to know this? Asking "what does this mean?" is not a sign of stupidity, its a sign of curiosity, the desire to learn something, and in my opinion nothing to sneer at.
I get the sense that's what they meant... Or at least what most of us mean. The fact that younger people need to ask is both a sign of the failing system and a sign that as a society, we in danger, girl.
I'm glad people ask! Lack of curiosity is how we get people blindly falling for the emotional manipulations of the people in charge.
I don’t think you can extrapolate to society in danger based off one person asking a question.
I wrote "younger people", referring to more than one. We can disagree on whether or not it's indicative of societal danger that this specific history isn't being taught well, but you'll be wrong.
AH yes that i can agree on, If no one teaches these things then people have failed this person .
I can only speak for American education 15 years ago.
But while we covered the Holocaust, pretty much everything about school was permeated with this undertone of "yeah sure important or whatever, but what really matters is good job and fitting into affluent suburb culture"
So it's very easy to see how people can coast through life, and not only not know this stuff, but actively resist knowing it and still find themselves accepted.
I had a decent education and know what this is because of the X-MEN films.
A decent portion of the world doesn't get extensive education on WW2 and/or Holocaust. Idk why you find it that mind boggling tbh.
Even when talking about ww2 depending on location you are going to focus on different things.
Here in germany the war in the pacific is more or less „Oil Embargo, Pearl Habour, Nukes“
casually glossing over like 40m deaths.
It's not that recent, most people under 30 would have never met a survivor and its quite a temporarily removed event.
To be fair, I didn't know either because I'm used to seeing them in a very specific format (Maus is a brilliant work on the Holocaust) and just seeing a five digit code tattooed on someone's arm didn't get me to make any connections there.
Specifically I'm more used to seeing the kind with the number and then the triangle pointing down underneath.
"Schoolhouses are less expensive than rebellions. A tenth of our national debt expended in public education 50 years ago would have saved us the blood and treasure of the late war. A far less sum may save our children from still greater calamity." President James Garfield
It’s really strange. I’m 28, and while it’s not something we were ever taught in school (obviously we did WWII and the holocaust but never mentioned the numbers tattooed), but through films and books I knew that it happened. It’s kind of wild to me that this is something people just don’t seem to know. I don’t know if my brother who’s like 5 years younger than me knows this.
It wasnt taught in the country i grew up in since it wasnt part of our history
I can forgive pure ignorance, but the denialism is just heinous.
to be fair, as illustrated, they don't really look like the holocaust tatoos did.
"All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes -all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its rememberance. Then we become the grave diggers."
Rod Serling Twilight Zone Death's Head Revisited
78% of the posts on this subreddit are made by people that have no knowledge of history or general culture (no, I don't mean knowing how many kardashians are there)
We wouldn't be in half the shit we're in right now if people actually knew history.
Zoomers
How is it my fault? Nobody told me.
Dead internet. I get bored scrolling Reddit very quickly these days because it feels like karma whoring bots are everywhere. Every front page post from r/movies and r/games et al is just another “What movie/game was this for you?”.
There’s no way someone doesn’t get this, I don’t care how long it’s been since the war
They probably know what a yellow star on your clothes means.
It's why these asshats think they can get away with it again. Won't be long until they start "tagging" the immigrants when they put them in the camps.
And that's why Holocaust Denialism is a scary thing that's been around for decades, gaining traction as time passes 😭
Not only that, it is scary!
I think it’s less of not knowing and just not drawing the connection in the moment. Not anything against OP, but reading comprehension is a learned skill no longer taught in schools
Honestly, not surprised
OP knows what they represent. Check the reply to the automod.
It's really concerning.
Hell, its a joke retold from the first xmen movie... which was somewhere between 4 -25years ago.
Pretty sure it was 4. Yeah, feels right.
No! That's why this is happening again in Western democracies.
For any given day, about 350000 people learn about this fact.
It’s by design
i was obviously taught about the holocaust in school but not these tattoos specifically, which i never knew about until this thread.
and tbh, i don’t really think this one specific detail is all that important for everyone to know.
I’m over 40, not from the US. I’ve read The Tattooist of Auschwitz and many other related works, and I still didn’t immediately link the tattoo to the meme. I agree that not knowing about the history is bad, but not getting the meme isn’t the same.
A lot of these 'how did OP not understand this' posts have to be engagement-bait.
Have the not fucking seen Xmen?
Tbh my first confrontation with that was That one X-Men movie
It really isn't. If it's not my first thought, it doesn't mean I'm not educated on the topic of the Holocaust. The fact that it's a branding number didn't even occur to me, I thought it was a tattoo with some political meaning behind it, like 1312
Why do you think Republicans want to slash education budgets?
Not my fault nobody told me about the tattoos, in fact this comic is the first time I've seen it.
Straight up half the posts here I'm like, unless English is your second language, how the fuck do you not understand this?? Especially this one lmfao, hmm numbers tattooed on an old guy's forearm. What could it possibly mean
Here in Brazil they do not teach about these numbers, I guess.
If only through context. I don’t think I knew about it before I read this comic, but I was able to piece together what it was just from knowing about the Holocaust
I think it's clear they're full of shit based on how willing they are to drop the n word non stop.
And why we are where we are today.
It's five digit too. One of the first 99 999 tattooed. That's a long time to survive in a camp
I actually learned about the number tattoos used to mark the Jews from watching the movie Monster Squad. I'm it, the creepy old man on the block is shown to have them. My mom happened and I asked her what the tattoos meant and she explained them as concentration camp tattoos. It really changed the movie for me.
Scary German Guy!
These numbers where tatooed to Auschwitz inmates, not every inmate of every concentration camp got those. They are a sign of the dehumanizing treatment, making humans to numbers to dead bodies and ashes.
Auschwitz was a concentration and extermination camp, so everybody who survived had much much luck.
Saw that in real life in the early 2000s, dude came in to make copies of his memoirs and rolled up his sleeve to show me. He was force marched from Hungaria and ended up at Auschwitz. Seeing the tattoo in real life and knowing what it meant, still chilling.
But what's an ms-13 tattoo?
"There are no men like me!" "There are always men like you."
They still have the tattoos?
Much respect for them.
What does the MS 13 part mean?
Explained it in a different reply.
In the holocaust, people had id tattooed on them , so the elderly man is a holocaust survivor. This was based on the assumption that someone with random tattoos had a MS13 symbol on them
Ok but whats MS13
Street gang
Unrelated but... Remember back when Stranger Things came out and people used to get numbers tattooed on their wrists?
Oof, I as a child in school, I wrote my class number on my wrist. Yeah... one of the chill yard duties kinda briefed me on why I had to wash it off
What did it mean in that show?
I haven't watched it, but I've heard enough that I'm pretty confident that Auschwitz doesn't feature.
“Eleven” is the character played by Millie Bobby Brown, one of a group of kids that was experimented on in a spooky government facility - they had their numbers tattooed on them
If only there was a way, some device, where one could search, say, “meaning of numbers tattooed on arm.”
Google says 75267 is the zip code for downtown Dallas
I tried that first, but it kept telling me to “ask again later” /s
Oh no! Asking questions on a Subreddit to answer questions!
meaning of numbers tattooed on arm
I searched it and all I got was tatoo shops suggesting people to get numbers tatoo.
Idiot.
How old is OP? Cause I don’t think they took history class yet.
I hope that’s the case. And not that they were never taught this?
If they’re American they probably glossed over it. It’s wild how little class time WWII at all gets.
I’m American and my school covered this in the 2010s so I don’t know what’s up with OP.
It varies wildly by region. I legit don’t remember how much we covered in school because my childhood is a black hole and I always learned way more shit on my own than in school but I do remember we talked about it. I don’t think a lot though. Like I really think kids need to be shown the videos from the liberation of Auschwitz. At least.
Concentration camp ID number during the holocaust
Those who forget history are bound to repeat it….
I think maybe the confusion was about the ms-13 tattoo part, basically the ICE want to make an holocaust survivor tattoo looks like a tattoo from one of the most violent gang
did they teach any history?
Are you serious
Everyone knows what what is German death camp tatoo. But what is MS13?
LA street gang. The current administration uses them as a boogeyman for kidnapping and trafficking brown people.
I thought that's what would be explained...it's just the last panel I didn't get but everyone is focusing on the second panel
A gross comparison.
Fuck, is that for real do we have people who don't know that tattoo? Shame on the country that doesn't teach that in basic school. He who doesn't know history....
I’m sorry how could anyone not know this, go to school!
Tbf, i'm not american but I never heard of those tatoos. Might be because we talk more about the war itself than the camps. Edit: might also be because it only applies in auschwitz
Yes they are Holocaust survivors numbers, however, these responses aren’t connecting the association with MS13.
Julio Abrego Garcia has tattoos on his hands that were photographed and are being LOOSELY interpreted to mean MS13.
I'm Tom Tucker and here's a report. It saddens me that their are people that don't understand that tattoo.
The numbers link to a hentai doujin showing futanari lesbian dog-girls fucking each other.
The gooner guy has been fighting men because he supports lesbian futas.
Ironic that the left depicts ice as doing this, when in reality a holocaust survivor was murdered in Boulder by someone supporting "Free Palestine."
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At least they are wearing a uniform
Based
"Maus, Spiegelman"...?
Fuck all of you right wing pricks here who think ICE deporting hard working individuals who made a life in America is an excusable offense. You’re deplorable sacks of shit. Take your insecurity and shove it so far up your ass you reach an epiphany about equality that your lord and savior might approve of.
They are here illegally, they arent supposed to be here
Did you go to school in Florida
You uneducated buffoon. Delete Reddit and take a history course.
Inaccurate portrayal of ICE, they’re not wearing masks
Wasn’t there a scene from a movie that was like this where a character was like “I’ve delt with people like you before” and revealed their camp number to the main villain. (Except he didn’t get killed right after.)
Maybe I’m just confusing it in my head with the “there will always be men like you” scene from the first Avengers.
X-Men Last Stand
Where on earth do you not know this? The joke and your not existing knowledge shows what is wrong with humanity.
The people who are dressed up are ice fans. The other guy hates ice and has a number written in his arm that represents a temperature that will melt ice very fast.
He has seen this shit happen once before.
Damn you didn't pay attention to anything in school did you?
How can people ignore it ? Are we that much into shit that some people somewhere in the world don't know about the concentration camp tatoos ? At this point I fully believe that every 100 years we'll fall into full fascism again, and every time we'll say "never again, never forget" and once the last survivors will be dead the world will forget and will elect fascists again.
Jews got number tatoos in the concentration camps during the holocaust.
Uh...do they not teach kids about the holocaust in school anymore?
Clearly we've gone too long without an X-Men film.
It's propaganda
The fact that this isn’t common knowledge anymore is alarming
Wonder who had the lowest number
Propaganda
Failed history class did we?
The 80 something year old is gonna get ‘em!
Dead rails bank passcode 🤔
The fact that there are actually people who exist that dont know what the number on arms tattoo represents is troubling
Holocaust survivor.
This joke has already been posted recently. Rule 2.