What do you think was done to several million Kossacks in Siberia? What do
you think happened to several million Chinese used for Bio-war testing by
the Japanese in WW-II?
Among those 11 million were my grandparents so yes, I too can get a bit
emotional when this comes up (not that I ever knew them, being born in 1972
- but they were family). In spite of this I do not believe there's no
fundamental difference. Except that it happened 'on our doorstep'.
>Are the survivors of Chad, Somalia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Ceylon,
>Birma as scarred mentally as the survivors of the Holocaust were? Some
>Holocaust survivors still sleep with a loaf of bread at night.
Go to the video store and hire "The killing fields".
Watch it 3 or 4 times, then tell me what you think.
Make sure you have someone nearby to discuss it with.
>The Nazis took genocide to a new level, not in numbers,
>but in cold-blooded cruelty.
Again, in spite of my own emotional involvement, I can't see the difference
between the horrors of '39-'45 and the terrible things that happened in
various communist country's right up to this moment (China - N-korea).
>I wouldn't argue with anyone who called Chad, Cambodia, or a crack ghetto a
>"continuing Holocaust". Far from mocking the dead, this would prevent
similar
>tragedies. Nor would I argue if someone wanted to add a fourth floor to the
>Holocaust exhibition, documenting ongoing genocides around the world.
Now, there's a good, contructive, idea! This is an Exibition in the US? or
somewhere else?
>But, as human history demonstrates, genocide was once as fashionable as
>theories of racial superiority. If not for the Holocaust, we might today
>cheerfully dismiss Chad and Cambodia as the extinction of vermin.
I sure as hell would not!
And I can only hope that you would not either, you're much to smart to such
a thing anyway.
>By
>associating something not instinctively abhorrent, genocide, with something
>that is instinctively abhorrent, torture, the Holocaust made genocide as
>unfashionable as theories of racial superiority.
Both may be unfashionable in your neighborhood, racial theories still kill,
asks any Rwandese genocide victim. this happened just a few years ago! in
the nineties! It's not over folks, it's just not being covered so extensively.
>But, speaking as a
>human, we are simply not sensitive to the deaths of people we don't know.
>It provokes no instinctive reaction in us.
I'm sorry here we have a most serious disagreement (*most* serious).
But maybe you've never seen someone die. I hope you won't ever have to,
even though it is quite a learning experience (beats years of university,
hand down)
>Suffering, on the other hand,
>provokes compassion and anger. And the Nazis systematically inflicted the
>greatest density of suffering ever seen in human history.
What is the basis for this last statement? There is no way to measure human
suffering, Can you imagine a thousand bodies? So how do you imagine the
difference between 11 million gassed/starved nazi-victims to unknown
millions of chinese farmers that worked themselves to deah to bring about
Mao's 'Great Leap Forward'. Both are simply 'unimaginable'.
>The Holocaust
>surpasses our capabilities of compassion and anger. Perhaps any genocide
>should. But we cannot grasp a genocide directly; we can only read reports of
>it. The Holocaust stands alone in that even the reports and the pictures are
>enough to overload our responses.
I appreciate that the exibition shocked the hell out of you, that is not a
bad thing, it merely shows you're human (Sorry Anders).
Maybe I'm different but those images have not 'overloaded' my responses
since I was ten. Seeing the UN do nothing for several years whilst women
and children were being shelled with artillery got me pretty pissed though.
Seeing a little boy die from sniperfire (no not on TV!) damm-near did the job.
Eliezer, in other coutry's persons you're age are seasoned veterans of some
pointless civil-war, they have *done* the kind of things you get overloaded
by just looking at pictures of them.
Read some contemporary history, and hold-on to someone you love while
you're at it. It helps.
Sorry for this rant, and sorry if I seem to be a cold-blooded son-of-bitch.
It's just a protective mechanism.
I need a drink.
Arjen
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Arjen Kamphuis | Learn as if you will live forever.
mountain@knoware.nl | Live as though you will die tomorrow.