6,000,000 people
How NOT to talk about the Holocaust on a tv news program.
As well as millions of others THAN WHAT?
They erase women by saying “people” and they erase Jews by saying “people” – and they do it right in plain sight.
Tip Jar
How NOT to talk about the Holocaust on a tv news program.
As well as millions of others THAN WHAT?
They erase women by saying “people” and they erase Jews by saying “people” – and they do it right in plain sight.
Charitably speaking, I can imagine that if someone were trying to humanize the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, they might think that it would be appropriate to use the “people first” construction, and say something like, “6 million people were killed because they were Jews, as well as…”
But by leaving out that important detail, the statement says something else completely.
Women and Jews; oppressing everyone else since the beginning.
/s
The vast majority of Jews/people killed in the Holocaust weren’t killed in the concentration camps; the Holocaust *survivors* were in the concentration camps. Mostly they just shot (primarily) Jews and shoved them into pits.
The “Final Solution” got paused several times because the Nazis were running out of labor during a war they’d already lost to the Soviets.
No.
About 2.7 million at killing centers.
2 million in mass shootings.
Aside from erasing Jews, the wording makes it sound as if the “Polish, disabled,” etc. victims weren’t people.
As everyone seems to agree, dehumanising whether intentionally or not.
I’ve followed the Auschwitz Memorial on social media. three or four times a day they post the photograph of a victim. Not always jewish, although most are Jews, Poles (sometimes both at the same time), or Austrian Jews. over time I’ve found my reaction to each photo has changed. Initially I would glance and read the details. now I find myself taking a few seconds to study the persons face, bearing, clothing. To consider their age. had they lived a full life? Barely had a chance to imagine what their lives would bring? What could I imagine them to have been like? it’s amazing how much can flit through your mind in that few seconds. it also makes those people, long dead, seem to live for a moment as real humans – imagined though that is. Weirdly, although it makes me feel pensive, it’s not depressing. Instead it makes me more determined that we not allow this kind of evil to take hold of us again.
@WaM:
I was going by what I remember from “Bloodlands”… Definitely started out with lots of shootings, then you get “fun” stuff like gas cans, etc. Timothy Snyder’s point is something along the lines of the Auschwitz/gas chamber story fails to fully capture the horrifying scope of what the Nazis did.
But that may have been just me misinterpreting what I heard him write.
Did I really hear her say “to celebrate eighty years of the Nazi death camps”? Please tell me I’m mistaken.
The thing about shooting was that it took way too long, was way too noisy and conspicuous, was too hard to clean up after, etc. Death camps & Zyclon B were the solution.
Night Crow – no, she didn’t say that.
The other thing about shooting was that it was bad for morale. Mass murder can be hard, bloody work, and apparently it’s not good for mental health.
BK, if you haven’t seen it, check out the movie “Conspiracy”. It’s based on the only surviving transcript of the Wannsee Conference, and it really underscores the evil of the men who planned the final solution. Kenneth Branagh is especially chilling as Heydrich.
WaM, have you read “Ordinary Men” by Christopher Browning. I did, some years ago.
What was it that someone once said about the banality of evil?
I have. Outstanding book.
Thanks for the recommendation, Rev. I managed to lose 3000 books during my move (the movers left random things behind), so I need to find replacements. I’ll add that to the list.
But Hitler hardly allowed the Jews that ‘people’ status. To him and his obedient followers they were the despicable untermensch, and his pogrom of 6,000,000 was the last and by far the worst in a long series going right back to before the time of the legendary Moses (who arguably existed in the person of someone or other.) But whoever Moses was, he established himself as a prophet and the founder of a new religion, the function of which, as in all religions, was to act as a social glue, ideologically speaking.
The Jews were held together as a community within whatever nation (Egypt, Babylonia….) by their separate cultural identity and religious rituals and doctrines, one of the most important being the idea that they were “God’s Chosen People.” (Hitler, born and baptised a Catholic, and never excommunicated by any pope) had his own ubermenschic version of that.
The Jews also needed trades that enabled them to clear out and set up anew somewhere else following an emergency evacuation ahead of a pogrom. So they became prominent in the professions, and as self-employed small traders, and importantly, as money-lenders. (eg Shakespeare’s Shylock.)
Hitler, unsurprisingly, had a lot of popular resentment to work on, and could promise overnight clearance of a lot of the debts of his fanatical and obedient followers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses#:~:text=Rabbinical%20Judaism%20calculated%20a%20lifespan,BCE%20as%20his%20birth%20year.
‘It’s one of those must-do’s, isn’t it? To be there once in your lifetime…’ (I shan’t go on.)
How could she, or her script-writer, even begin to think of uttering such words – and with that half-smile on her face? Auschwitz – just another tourist attraction where you can take selfies & snapshots, and have photo-ops with Ben Shapiro if your name is Musk. The frivolousness appalls.
I recommend reading the Polish writer Tasdeusz Borowski’s ‘This Way for the Gas, Ladies & Gentlemen’ for an account (in the form of short stories) of what it was like to be in Auschwitz. After the war and the ‘liberation’, he, like Primo Levi, eventually committed suicide – in his case, not so many years after German’s defeat and after being forced to write what the newly installed Communist government in Poland demanded he should write.
Musk was virtually forced to make a visit to Auschwitz not so long ago after endorsing a blatantly ‘anti-Semitic tweet on X as ‘the actual truth’. It does not seem to have changed him much, does it?
There is an account by the partner of a survivor of the death-camps about Musk’s behaviour as she accompanied him around Auschwitz. It may be found on the Unilad website under the title ‘Woman who went to Auschwitz with Elon Musk explains how the billionaire acted during the visit’; it includes the following:
“Elon did not care. He was about his press junket and his bodyguards. I was ten feet from him as he posed for the cameras of his entourage. He was utterly detached. He cared about how he looked.”
Thanks for the reminder, Rev. I’ve heard (and read about) that book, but never got around to reading. I’ll put it on my list (after I get through all the books that I’ve accumulated over the years–if there is an eternity, I hope it has a well-stocked library).