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Germany has been giving Jews reparations for years now. Other countries who were part of the mass extermination process will be forced to do the same. You can google search this. Everyone knows this. At least I thought they did.
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3. Should blacks that were found to have ancestors involved in the slave trade also have to pay reparations and be removed from possibility of collecting such?
This thread isn't about black people though. It's about if Jewish people should forget the holocaust, the same way some others believe that blacks should forget about slavery and Jim Crow which officially ended in 1964, but "technically" ended in the late 80s and still continues in many mindsets throughout the country to this day.
I don't think people should forget. For any group, I don't think you should complain about things that didn't happen to you personally. Like for example, if you look far enough into your history (white, black, Asian, Jew, whatever you are), you will find a family member who was raped. Can you claim you are a victim of rape? No, that's silly. I don't see how a Jewish person can claim they are a victim of the Holocaust if they born in say 1970. I think most of them understand it, but they're playing the "card". Like people play the race card or sick card. The people I've noticed (of all ethnic backgrounds) only bring it up at bad times. I.e. "You didn't hire me, because I a Jew" vs "I got a free trip because I'm Jewish. Now, let's all talk about the Holocaust". (Yes, Jewish people get a free trip to Israel.)
The same thing was said about the word "ghetto". But the reason behind the words Holocaust and Ghetto are because a long time ago, those words were created and had a Jewish meaning. For example, Ghetto meant a place where Jewish people were forced to live and work. But several hundred years later, the word ghetto somehow got turned into meaning Detroit.
The words Ghetto and Holocaust were originally Jewish meaning words. Why they were ever changed to mean something else, I don't know.
Ghetto is actually Italian, not Jewish and it means "waste" or "slag". In the 1500's the Venetian government set aside such an area for the Jewish population, hence the area being called such. Ghetto has since been expanded to mean any area of mainly a minority population.
Word Holocaust has also been around for hundreds years before WWII. It was usually applied to great massacres of persons and did not become widely associated with the plight of European Jews during WWII until the 1978 movie of same name. The Holocaust - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Prior to this persons may have used the word because again it had been used in Europe previously to describe mass killing, which is what the Germans did to the Jews. It was the film which added the definite article proceeding and making the word into a proper noun.
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".
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Originally Posted by OpenD
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. ...
I believe the Jews call this specific genocidal mass murder by the Nazis the Shoah.
I must say most Jewish people I met are never violent or live in the past. By past I mean talking about what injustices happened to them.
To me they don't have a grudge against society and they don't expect forgiveness from anyone. They are peaceful and don't cause trouble like other races.
I personally could never forget the holocaust, even though I was never in Germany and have no Jewish relatives. The image that stands out most in my mind is German soldiers throwing Jewish children into fires and watching them burn alive.
I've suffered pain worse than broken bones, pain most people can't even imagine, but it never made me cry. I've been desperate and homeless to the point where life seemed hopeless, but it never made me cry. I've always recovered from everything, and always regained a positive attitude eventually. But when I think about those German soldiers throwing those children into those fires and watching them burn alive, that makes me cry every time. I don't cry for those children, because I never knew them and they don't mean anything to me. I don't cry for how evil those soldiers were, because most of them were probably hanged at Nuremberg, and I never met any of them nor was impacted directly by any of them in any way. What makes me cry is that it's even possible for human beings to do such things. Not the evil itself, but just the fact that it's possible. If it hadn't happened, I never would have believed it was possible for anyone to do such a thing. I'm like the first grader who cried when he found out how "one" was spelled. It shattered his world. Until he found out about "one", his world was much simpler and easier to understand. The spelling of "one" shatters that simplified world in which things can be understood logically. He could have said "of course it's not spelled that way, that would be silly." Because he had logic, and it was a valuable and practical tool for him. But when he found out it doesn't always work, and a word pronounced like "one" can be spelled "one", he lost a large part of the value of that tool. It was a loss of a large part of his world. And that's what finding out about the holocaust did to me. The fact that such behavior was even possible, shattered my image of the world, and part of my trust in the innate goodness of the human soul. I had always assumed that adults in general loved children, and that even those who seemed mean were just mean superficially, and had the same love for children deep in their hearts, even if it never seemed to show. But the holocaust made me realize not even that characteristic of humans could be relied on. It shattered my world by making me realize humans were not reliable in their characteristics, and that there is no such thing as universal good that all humans share.
The reason why we need to remember the holocaust and understand it is because it's the only way we can see what kind of evil human beings are really capable of. Without that memory, we would be living in an oversimplified world, like the boy who hadn't yet found out about "one". The reason why those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it is that the "one" is always out there, waiting for however much trauma it takes to discover it. Even when that trauma means throwing children into fires and watching them burn alive.
IMO, they should remember it within their own group instead of reminding the rest of us about it constantly. Especially here in the U.S. that kind of thing would never happen. Mass murderers won't be swayed from their heinous deeds from reminders of the atrocities of the past anyway.
German Jews - and certainly Jews in other parts of Europe - would have said that before Hitler came to power. Thinking it couldn't happen here, today, is EXACTLY why we can never forget. And it could happen to any minority ethnic group. Look at how Muslims are treated by many people in this country.
Germany has been giving Jews reparations for years now. Other countries who were part of the mass extermination process will be forced to do the same. You can google search this. Everyone knows this. At least I thought they did.
Germany has been giving German Jews reparations only. The money has gone only to actual survivors and not their descendants. So when they are all deceased, then the monetary reparations will cease. As to other countries, most paid nothing and some paid out lump sum pocket change which was basically a slap in the face.
Maybe a link from a previous post needs to be added again showing that the money only goes to about 60,000 German Jews.
Last edited by Oldhag1; 09-11-2014 at 11:15 PM..
Reason: Merge
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