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The Jews went through something much worse than black people did during slavery. Hitler was trying to wipe out their entire ethnicity. But you don't see them rioting and destroying their own neighborhoods...why do you think that is?
I've been tired of hearing about this so called "Holocaust" for decades now. Its getting old. There have been many episodes of genocide and this is nothing special.
I have noticed its getting less and less mentioned. As the old jewish population in the US died off and Jews have lost much of their media influence, there is less concern about the "holocaust".
I've been tired of hearing about this so called "Holocaust" for decades now. Its getting old. There have been many episodes of genocide and this is nothing special.
I have noticed its getting less and less mentioned. As the old jewish population in the US died off and Jews have lost much of their media influence, there is less concern about the "holocaust".
Its the most recent one that has directly affected the lives of Americans living today. Sorry youre "sick of hearing about it." But those of us who prefer to learn from history generally like to recognize events that happened to people that are STILL ALIVE TODAY.
I've always wondered, why do Jews reserve the right to call that specific experience "the holocaust"? There have been lots of "holocausts" throughout the history of the planet. Therefore, a more appropriate term for it would be "the Jewish holocaust".
The Holocaust has come to mean the mass extermination of millions of Jews, gypsies, Slavs, communists, homosexuals, the physically disabled, and other groups by the Nazis during the 1940s, so the term Jewish Holocaust would be incorrect, because it was not limited to the Jews. About 6 million of the 11 million total killed were Jewish.
And for complete understanding, the term holocaust in this regard was not originally used by Jews, but by a British newspaper in 1942, and then was used again the following year in a debate in the House of Lords, and from there it passed into common usage.
The word holocaust is from the Greek, meaning something that is burned whole, as in an inferno. When first used in that News Chronicle article it was not yet known just how horrific the slaughter would eventually become, nor were details of the death camps and their ovens known, so the use of that particular word was actually a bit prescient.
The change in usage from "A holocaust" to "The Holocaust" was effected by historians in the 1950s to denote that the scale of this disaster dwarfed all previous, and set it aside as a unique historical event. And the Jews and other use that term today to keep the memory of those horrors alive as a warning to future generations not to allow such genocide to occur again.
For this reason I don't believe that the Jews, or anyone else for that matter, should forget The Holocaust. Nor do I believe they ever will.
It's not just the Jews that went to concentration
camps, gays, gypsies, Slavs, and Jehovah's witnesses also.
As well as black French POWs and "brown babies" descended from British and French colonial and European women born during and after World War I.
Quote:
Here is a little known fact that most in the US are not familiar with, the
group that was even worse than the nazis, the Ustashi ran the most brutal
concentration camp ever, Jasenovic, in the Balkans where Jews, Orthodox Serbs,
gypsies and Roma were killed in the most brutal ways imaginable. The Ustashi was
run by the Jesuits, cardinal Stepinac of Zagreb was the highest ranking member
of the Catholic Church to be convicted of a war crime.
Exterminated? Doesn't the United States alone have the 2nd largest number of Jews on the planet?
I've always wondered, why do Jews reserve the right to call that specific experience "the holocaust"? There have been lots of "holocausts" throughout the history of the planet. Therefore, a more appropriate term for it would be "the Jewish holocaust".
To answer your first question: Yes, the US does have the largest population of Jews after Israel. But that's not the point. There were more Jews worldwide in 1939 than there are today. The Sephardim were almost entirely wiped out and the Ladino language is all but lost. To give an example of what extermination means, I am one of only a handful of decedents from a town in Ukraine that once was home to thousands of Jews. My great grandfather fled in the late 1920s, thankfully. One day in 1941, the Jews were rounded up and executed one by one. Less than 10 residents survived - many later starving or freezing to death hiding out in the woods. There should be tens of thousands of descendants worldwide. There are not. My family and 5 or 6 other families are all that's left. How many villages and communities have no one left?
For your second question, we don't call it the Holocaust except as a way to make sure we're understood. It's the Shoah to us (and that's what I heard most frequently when I visited many of the ghettos and concentration camps across central and eastern Europe). The term "The Holocaust" was coined by English speaking gentiles. And as others have highlighted, almost half of those who were killed in the Shoah were not Jewish.
Last edited by charolastra00; 08-21-2014 at 04:54 PM..
The Holocaust has come to mean the mass extermination of millions of Jews, gypsies, Slavs, communists, homosexuals, the physically disabled, and other groups by the Nazis during the 1940s, so the term Jewish Holocaust would be incorrect, because it was not limited to the Jews. About 6 million of the 11 million total killed were Jewish.
And for complete understanding, the term holocaust in this regard was not originally used by Jews, but by a British newspaper in 1942, and then was used again the following year in a debate in the House of Lords, and from there it passed into common usage.
There is a psychological game of one-upmanship that people often use. Many people have died in mass genocide besides Jews. Certainly slavery in the Caribbean was an order of magnitude worse than slavery in British North America. Slaves in the Caribbean had to be replenished constantly since deaths outnumbered births. The famines in China in the 1960's were far more horrible than the famines in the Ukraine in the 1930's.
The caretakers of the holocaust museum in Washington want people to stand up for all genocide, if it is in Cambodia or Rwanda. There is almost no tragedy in human history that cannot be objectively shown to be only one in dozens. It hardens your heart to make those comparisons.
Its the most recent one that has directly affected the lives of Americans living today. Sorry youre "sick of hearing about it." But those of us who prefer to learn from history generally like to recognize events that happened to people that are STILL ALIVE TODAY.
I'm lost. What recent holocaust is going on today in American lives? Yes, we should learn from history but beating it to death over and over in modern times where no such thing is occurring is puzzling.
I'm lost. What recent holocaust is going on today in American lives? Yes, we should learn from history but beating it to death over and over in modern times where no such thing is occurring is puzzling.
Many Holocaust survivors live in the US. The traumatized children of Holocaust survivors make up my parents' generation. Their children are Millennials who are deeply impacted by the horrors that uprooted our family trees.
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