OT--Holocaust thing

[coriolan at worldnet.att.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 11642

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., John Walton <john at w...> wrote:
> naama_gat at h... wrote:


>I object to this last statement in the strongest possible terms. 
Jewish
>people CANNOT claim a monopoly on being the object of Hitler's 
hatred. Yes,
>millions of Jews died in the Holocaust. Millions of other people 
died as
>well -- people who are NOT recognised, NOT remembered by the world, 
do NOT
>have wealthy contingents in the West to build ethnic museums to their
>Holocaust victims. As I said to Pippin yesterday in private mail, I 
was
>shocked and outraged that not ONCE in the ENTIRE coverage of 
Holocaust
>Memorial Day that I saw was ANY mention made of the non-Jewish 
deaths in the
>Holocaust.

Oh great.  Affirmative Action comes to Holocaust studies.  We must 
endeavor to portray Mr. Hitler as an Equal-Opportunity Offender, who 
thoughtfully desired  to equally persecute and exterminate every  
righteous minority group, without respect to their Non-Aryan race, 
creed or color. 

While taking nothing away from the suffering of the other victims of 
the Holocaust, I think it is clear that the Jewish people served a 
unique role in the Nazi persecution.  They, and they alone were the 
only significant ethnic group marked for complete and total 
extermination by Nazi ideology. The Slavs, Poles, and other national 
groups were to be subjected and enslaved, but  not eliminated.  Gays 
were only sporadically persecuted, as a good number of high ranking 
Nazis were queer to the bone.  It may be noted that Gypsies  and 
Jehovah's Witnesses were also been marked for total elimination, but 
both their population and cultural impact was quite insignificant 
compared to the Jews.  Ridding Europe of its Gypsies or JWs  could 
have been easily accomplished with a few mass arrests; it was hardly 
worth the bother of the constructing Auschwitz and Buchenwald, 
those "ingeniously devised habitations of death"

As Lucy Dawidowicz demonstrated in her monumental study The War 
Against the Jews (1975), Hitler's anti-Semitism was the *fons et 
origo* of the Nazi Party. Hitler blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat 
in WWI and as early as 1918 – long before anyone had any idea who he 
was, and vowed to eradicate them on behalf of the German nation.  The 
impetus of the Nazi Party as it soared to increasing prominence in 
the 1920s and early 30s was its fervent anti-Semitism, which struck a 
strong responsive chord in the German people.  Milton Himmelfarb 
wrote a 1984 essay titled "No Hitler, No Holocaust," arguing against 
the "impersonal forces" theory of history,   We might similarly 
declare, No Anti-Semitism, No Hitler, No Holocaust

Again, this is not to minimize the sufferings of other non-Semitic 
Nazi victims. But the vast majority of them were the usual victims of 
any war, or groups who happened to be in the way. as opposed to a 
systematic ideologically-based war against one's own people. 

   - CMC