Lyndon Hood - Cock-up theorist, Lower Hutt
Monday, April 18, 2005
Surely there should be a question mark in there somewhere.
Anyway, as a description of what's so bad about the holocaust and why offhand comments about it tend to rile people, the article that follows is pretty good.
So it's odd that I'm bitching. I don't want people to think I have a crush on McLoughlin.
My beef is this: there are exactly two sentences on the whole page mentioning that anyone other than Jews were mudered.
The Nazis began rounding up Jews as well as political dissidents, homosexuals, gypsies and other groups and sending them to concentration camps.If you add the dead from all of those groups, plus Russian prisoners of war (also mentioned in the article in passing), Slavic civilians and the intellectually and physically disabled, then the toll of the Holocaust rises from the suspiciously accurate figure of 5,860,129 (a sidebar table sums the number of Jews murdered by country, with Poland at exactly 3 million and so on) to closer to 11 million.
The type of person who complains about this kind of omission usually goes on to imply that dark forces are deliberately distorting our vision of history. I believe I could hear letters to the editor being scribbled all over Wellington all weekend.
There's no conspiracy. While I'm a more than a little bemused that this particular article turned out as it did (the range of the victims was one of the first things that struck me when I looked into the subject), I see it more as what's called a 'cock-up'. Or maybe just lazy.
Perhaps because of its sheer enormity, societies tend to concentrate on the part of the Holocaust that applies most to them. The Polish have tended to thing of it as a Polish tragedy. Jewish groups concentrate on the Jewish aspect (which, let's face it, is a hell of a big aspect). And when citing Martin Niemoller's famous quotation which begins ...
First the came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist - so I did nothing...... Americans have been known to skip that bit and start later in the quote.
Another example of this effect is the Spanish Inquisition. This was very much something that happened to Jews; my impression is that people who are aware of this are mostly Jewish.
Anyhow, New Zealand doesn't really have it's own angle, and as it happens that Jewish element of the Holocaust has primacy, not least because of the relative scale and the sense it was the core around which everything else was built. But we should strive for the fullest awareness of the Holocaust's victims as we can, and for a number of reasons.
Firstly for historical understanding; every lesson that can be learned should be. For instance, it may well be the most glaring instance of Homosexuality being persecuted and then that persecution being written out of history.
Secondly, for people who aren't deep enough thinkers to work it out anyway, it shows that the Holocaust wasn't just something that happened to Jews, it was something that happened to people. The same generalisation should also be drawn from the perpetrators: the holocaust was a human tragedy.
Thirdly, for a variety of reasons, it will surely annoy the Holocaust deniers, who no doubt imagine a holocaust that only kills Jewish people something of a soft target. For one thing, with the admission of all that additional evidence, they go from having no case to having less than no case.
I think that's something we can all get behind.
