OT--Holocaust thing

[naama_gat at hotmail.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 11614

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., John Walton <john at w...> wrote:
> foxmoth at q... wrote:
> 
> > --- In HPforGrownups at y..., John Walton <john at w...> wrote:
> >> Amanda Lewanski wrote:
> >> 
> >>> As I'm forever pointing out to people, please to remember that 
in
> >>> addition to the Jews, the Slavs and Gypsies were also 
exterminated. Just
> >>> as many Poles, Gypsies, and homosexuals died as did Jews. It 
wasn't just
> >>> a Jewish thing. It was a non-Aryan thing.
> >> 
> >> Don't forget the 20 million Russian civilians who were killed on 
the Eastern
> >> Front by the advancing Armies of the Third Reich. Oh, and the 
tens of
> >> thousands of Southeast Asian people massacred by the Japanese.
> >> 
> >> --John
> > They should never be forgotten, but they were not Holocaust
> > victims.
> > The term Holocaust refers to those destroyed in the Endlosung, 
the
> > "Final Solution', not Axis victims in general.
> 
> ::takes a deep breath and counts to ten::
> 
> Pippin, I'm sure that you didn't mean it to come across as such, 
but that
> last message really made me angry in that it seemed to insinuate 
that the
> deaths of those who were not specifically singled out for genocide 
by Hitler
> on his insane Aryan crusade were "less important" than those not
> specifically targetted.
> 
> Remember, there were MORE "non-genocide" victims than those killed 
in the
> name of the Aryan "race". Three to four times as many, in fact. And 
what
> does the international community do to the perpetrators of THOSE 
crimes?
> Nurnburg? Nope. Trying them well into their eighth decade? Naw. 
Zip. Zilch.
> Nada.
> 

So, any old war is just as bad as genocide? Come on! War is a 
indeed a terrible thing. Moreover, besides being terrible in itself 
it is terrible in that it brings the worst in people. Atrocities 
happen. Civilians are needlessly killed. Cruelty and brutal 
indifference to human lives flourishes. BUT genocide is the attempt 
to SYSTEMATICALLY annihilate a nation. In a war *armed* soldiers 
fight other *armed* soldiers. The atrocities that the civilian 
populations suffer are a by product, so to speak, of the *armed* 
conflict. It bears repeating that the Holocaust was the systematic 
massacre of defenceless civilians. 
Besides, to claim that event A (the war itself) is worse than event B 
(the Holocaust) because it caused more people to die is a fallacy, 
pure and simple. It completely takes out of the account the 
perpetrators. The reason the Holocaust is so unimaginably awful is 
not because millions have died in agony, it is because they were 
cold-bloodedly murdered by a state machinary, for no other reason 
than pure hate. *Thats* what makes it different from any other 
man-caused disaster.

Amanda, the point you make about the Holocaust being a non-Aryan 
thing is true, of course, but within this reservation: The Jews were 
viewed as the complete negative opposite of the Aryan race. They were 
the principle of darkness, the germ of all evil. They carried disease 
- both physical and spiritual. The hatred of Jews was virulent and 
fanatic in a special way.

Naama