Monday, November 20, 2017

Denying the Holocaust?

First of all, I do not and I cannot deny the horrific cruelties, atrocities and murders of the Nazis and the Third Reich--I just don't think that "holocaust" is an especially good name for it.  For one thing, the implication of of the word "holocaust" is that it (which I think might better be called simply World War II) was visited on only one segment of humanity, the Jews.  Which it certainly was not. I think it has been calculated that, of the ten million who perished in the Nazi death camps, six million were Jews; which leaves four million assorted homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, and so on; the point being that these hapless victims--an appalling number of whom were children--were just people.  And if numbers, as such, are important, then the unthinkable twenty millions of Russians who were murdered by the Nazis must have pre-eminence--and I like the stoïc dignity and brevity of the Russians' "Great War" as the name for the horrors that they endured.  And again, the Greek word "holocaust" has a peculiarly religious etymology (an offering which is wholly consumed) which, frankly, I find offensively extraneous, euphemistic and cowardly.

1 Comments:

Blogger Vincent said...

Long may you continue to puncture, derail &/or overturn unthinking bandwagons. Which are, often as not, offences against truth & the English language. Yet we do what we can with what we've got. Blessings upon you!

3:55 AM  

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