.

[cybercoma]

That's because,in both of those cases,the sufferers,or decendents of those who suffered,are stilll with us...

It's kinda hard to be detatched when you've got a number tatooed on your wrist and you watched family and friends take a shower but they never came out...

Yeah, but that's what's so important about this. We have a massive corpus of historical writings on the Holocaust, but the survivors' stories still trump all of that. This is a major problem for historians because it brings into question the validity and effectiveness of historical narratives.

[Guest Manny]

I'm of German decent,as well...

And you're about to cross a line...

What do you mean? Is this conversation now for Germans only? Will I be sent to a camp or something?

[Guest Manny]

Being that my family arrived in Canada in the 1870s, that is a physical impossibility. Now piss off.

I have made my position on the holocaust quite clear in other posts. That is, most other countries in Europe were in collusion with the nazis to eliminate their long-standing Jewish "problem", and in North America, if not helping, were at least wholly indifferent to what was going on. So was your family among one of those?

[DogOnPorch]

Dropping bombs on German cities.

[jbg]

Much different motivation to the Atlantic slave trade. Sugar and tobacco, mainly.

I'm thinking cheap labour (see free) more than anything...Never the less,still genocidal...It just took longer..

The difference was that the goal of the slave trade was not to eliminate blacks; it was to make money off of them. Far different goal than killing the Jews for the sake of killing.

[August1991]

I'm not sure how familiar people here are with the concept of modernity, but let's oversimplify it as "progressive thought." In order to progress, there needs to be a meta-narrative or a grand scheme which quite literally everything and all societies are following. From modernity, you get the idea of some states, people, and cultures being more "progressed" than others. Well the argument here is that progress's rational end was the Final Solution. A society began executing "undesirables" in order to foster human thoroughbreds, so to speak, which they believed would eliminate all social ills.

This is how I understand the Holocaust.

I recall a 1990s documentary in which the journalist asked a Polish man if he had a problem with Jewish neighbours and the man answered that he had no problem because there were none.

-----

Progressives want to solve problems. Like puritans, progressives want to improve us. They want us all to arrive on time. They want to stop addictions, make people literate. For progressives and puritans, the end is more important than the means.

[Jack Weber]

The difference was that the goal of the slave trade was not to eliminate blacks; it was to make money off of them. Far different goal than killing the Jews for the sake of killing.

None the less...

Millions dead over a longer period of time is just a side issue???

And what do you think the underlying reason for the enslavement was?

[Jack Weber]

What do you mean? Is this conversation now for Germans only? Will I be sent to a camp or something?

It might have to do with your intimation that because someone is of German decent they are inherently guilty on some level of being complicit in The Holocaust...

Funny you mention "camps"...

My recently deceased fathers cousin was a pilot in the RCAF.He was shot down over Germany but ejected and survived.He was captured by the NAZI's...In an ironic twist of fate,he was marched at gunpoint through the very city my Great Grandfather emmigrated from (Stettin...You find it on a map because it's part of Poland now)...He spent the rest of the war there...My dad has the obituary from the Hamilton Spectator because everyone thought he was dead...

My Grandfather on my Mom's side was involved in the clearing of The Scheldt...

[Guest Manny]

It might have to do with your intimation that because someone is of German decent they are inherently guilty on some level of being complicit in The Holocaust...

Ach so... jetzt vershtehe Ich was du meinst. Aber das habe ich nicht gesagt!

And don't forget how the whip snapped across their back for tobacc-o, I'm the Marlboro man, uh.

Ok, so not trade. You people kept your slaves for your own, personal labour camps.

I have made my position on the holocaust quite clear in other posts. That is, most other countries in Europe were in collusion with the nazis to eliminate their long-standing Jewish "problem", and in North America, if not helping, were at least wholly indifferent to what was going on. So was your family among one of those?

I forgot how touchy some of you squareheads are about the holocaust. Forgive me

[jbg]

And what do you think the underlying reason for the enslavement was?

Slavery is abhorrent, under current ethics. It was rife from Biblical times to the early 1800's, and still is in Araby.

The underlying reason for the enslavement was cheap labor, obviously.

[jbg]

I finally got to read the article cited in the Opening Post (link) and I find its premise fatally flawed. I draw attention to this excerpt:

These are the concluding lines from Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life. Published slightly more than a decade ago, shortly after my encounter with Siggie, Novick’s book provided me with an epiphany about the oddness of my vocation. A historian at the University of Chicago, Novick was attempting to explain how the Holocaust—an event that had happened more than a generation earlier on a different continent and affected a mere fraction of those living here—became by the late 1960s the central experience in the American Jewish historical narrative. Novick suggested that this sudden communal awareness of the Holocaust, far from being the result of deep trauma, instead resulted from a series of political events that prodded American Jewry to embrace the destruction of European Jewry as its defining narrative. The rise in racial tensions in the United States, the existential character of the Yom Kippur War, the growth in “identity politics” and its dark side of victim culture: These are some of the factors, Novick suggested, that led to American Jewry’s belated discovery of the Holocaust.

First of all, the Holocaust was not "an event that had happened more than a generation earlier on a different continent and affected a mere fraction of those living here". If one looks at the impact on targeted groups, i.e. Jews and Gypsies, the numerical impact was far higher. The overwhelming majority of Jews on the European Continent (except, ironically, Spain, Portugal and Italy) were killed or driven to death through starvation, disease and overwork.

It's "(becoming) by the late 1960s the central experience in the American Jewish historical narrative" is untrue both chronologically and factually. The defining event was in late 1944 or early 1945 (I'm not in the mood to Google right now) when Dwight D. Eisenhower described, and Life Magazine preserved photographically, the horrible images of what was occurring in the camps liberated by Allied forces. In short, it's prominence did not date to the late 1960's and had little in common with the "identity politics" and "victim culture" that sprung from the civil rights movement. If anything it triggered those movements. If I'm wrong on this why did West Germany pay out millions during the early 1950's to the new State of Israel? Out of the goodness of German hearts? I highly doubt it.

The only thing that made "American Jewry’s... discovery of the Holocaust" "belated" was the slow release of the facts of the events. The Allies did not want its sanitized "de-Nazification" efforts to be complicated. Further, none of these countries really wanted to further spark Jewish demands for their own state. Luckily, the stars lined up correctly for that. If not prompted by the same British abdication of responsibilities that triggered the bloodshed in India and Pakistan, motivated by Britain's own fiscal difficulties, more procrastination on the establishment of Israel would have been the order of the day.

[Guest Manny]

Point I made was, such cheap labour was also used extensively by Nazis in WW2. It wasn't JUST about killing the Jews. Those who were able bodied were put to work.

"The use of forced labour in Nazi Germany and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rule_during_World_War_II

This is an account of the most important instance of forced labor by foreign workers outside their own country in the twentieth century, when millions of workers from the USSR, Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, Italy and elsewhere toiled in the service of the Nazi regime.

The Nazis could pursue World War II only by replacing the skilled German workers who had been sent off as soldiers by a foreign work force brought to Germany and employed in agriculture and industry. After this scheme had failed to work on a voluntary basis, from the spring of 1940 huge numbers of foreign workers were brought to Germany by force. By 1944 one in three members of the German work force was a foreign forced laborer. In total, more than 12 million such laborers were put to work, for varying periods. The monthly peak was reached in August 1944 when 7.8 million were working, of whom 5 million were civilians and 2.8 million prisoners of war. This is the first major study of what in effect was slave labor on a massive scale, whose reverberations are still felt today in current debates about work compensation and the legacy of the Third Reich.

Hitler's foreign workers: enforced foreign labor in Germany under the Third Reich

Edited December 28, 2011 by Manny

[jbg]

Point I made was, such cheap labour was also used extensively by Nazis in WW2. It wasn't JUST about killing the Jews. Those who were able bodied were put to work.

The difference between the Nazis and the slave traders is that the slave traders definitely did not want inevitable death for what they were selling.

[cybercoma]

These are the concluding lines from Peter Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life. Published slightly more than a decade ago, shortly after my encounter with Siggie, Novick’s book provided me with an epiphany about the oddness of my vocation. A historian at the University of Chicago, Novick was attempting to explain how the Holocaust—an event that had happened more than a generation earlier on a different continent and affected a mere fraction of those living here—became by the late 1960s the central experience in the American Jewish historical narrative. Novick suggested that this sudden communal awareness of the Holocaust, far from being the result of deep trauma, instead resulted from a series of political events that prodded American Jewry to embrace the destruction of European Jewry as its defining narrative. The rise in racial tensions in the United States, the existential character of the Yom Kippur War, the growth in “identity politics” and its dark side of victim culture: These are some of the factors, Novick suggested, that led to American Jewry’s belated discovery of the Holocaust.

The only thing that made "American Jewry’s... discovery of the Holocaust" "belated" was the slow release of the facts of the events. The Allies did not want its sanitized "de-Nazification" efforts to be complicated. Further, none of these countries really wanted to further spark Jewish demands for their own state. Luckily, the stars lined up correctly for that. If not prompted by the same British abdication of responsibilities that triggered the bloodshed in India and Pakistan, motivated by Britain's own fiscal difficulties, more procrastination on the establishment of Israel would have been the order of the day.

You're not actually contradicting Novick's argument (which isn't the point of the entire article, but an example that the author points to). You admit that he's correct about American Jewry's discovery of the holocaust being belated, but you disagree with the factors. Instead, you claim that it's from the "slow release of the facts." This could just be added to his list of factors and would still support his argument that awareness of the Holocaust was not the result of deep trauma and personal experience with it.

[Shady]

The premise of the Holocaust being irrelevant is absurd. Although I'm quite sure that this notion is well received by the anti-semites around the world.

[cybercoma]

The difference between the Nazis and the slave traders is that the slave traders definitely did not want inevitable death for what they were selling.

Neither did Hitler at first. Instead, a bunch of Jewish refugees hopped onto the St. Louis and tried to find a new home. When we turned them away because we didn't want to "deal" with them, Hitler dealt with them himself. There are many nations that are implicit in what had happened to European Jewry during WWII.

[DogOnPorch]

Neither did Hitler at first. Instead, a bunch of Jewish refugees hopped onto the St. Louis and tried to find a new home. When we turned them away because we didn't want to "deal" with them, Hitler dealt with them himself. There are many nations that are implicit in what had happened to European Jewry during WWII.

Actually, not all the passengers of the St Louis were dealt with by Hitler. My aunt (age 16 at the time) and her family were one of the last Jewish family to escape France after being dropped off by the St Louis on the return voyage to Europe. She now lives in NYC where she has lived since 1940. The Jews of the St Louis didn't want to go to Canada, btw. Their plan was to wait in Cuba for the 1941 intake but the Cuban government betrayed them and stole all their money and then kicked them out to sea.

[cybercoma]

Actually, not all the passengers of the St Louis were dealt with by Hitler. My aunt (age 16 at the time) and her family were one of the last Jewish family to escape France after being dropped off by the St Louis on the return voyage to Europe. She now lives in NYC where she has lived since 1940. The Jews of the St Louis didn't want to go to Canada, btw. Their plan was to wait in Cuba for the 1941 intake but the Cuban government betrayed them and stole all their money and then kicked them out to sea.

All true, but if you read None is Too Many by Abella & Troper, you'll see that our bureaucracy rejected European Jewry with zeal. We were actually one of the least accommodating nations.

Edited December 28, 2011 by cybercoma

[Guest Manny]

According to authors Rabbi Ted Falcon, Ph.D & David Blatner in Judaism for Dummies, when the “St Louis was turned away from Cuba…, America not only refused their entry but even fired a warning shot to keep them away from Florida’s shores”.[6] Legally the refugees could not enter on tourist visas, as they had no return addresses, and the U.S. had enacted immigration quotas in 1924. Telephone records show discussion of the situation by Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, members of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's cabinet, who tried to persuade Cuba to accept the refugees. Their actions, together with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, were not successful.[7] The Coast Guard was not ordered to turn away the refugees, but the US did not make provision for their entry.[8] As St. Louis was turned away from the United States, a group of academics and clergy in Canada attempted to persuade Canada's Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to provide sanctuary to the ship, which was only two days from Halifax, Nova Scotia.[9] However Canadian immigration officials and cabinet ministers hostile to Jewish immigration persuaded the Prime Minister not to intervene on June 9. (1939)

Seems to me plenty of people knew what was going on, not just for the St. Lois but the fate of Jews at large in Europe, in the coming years. Religious and political leaders around the world. In this age of intense espionage and fast communications, the notion that people were "slow to realize" is merely a modern revisionism, designed to excuse what the whole world perpetuated upon the Jews.

[jbg]

Neither did Hitler at first.

Actually he did. He knew two things though: 1) Some Jews were beloved in their community as the butcher, the baker and the tailor so he had to move a bit slow, lest people be unhappy with his plan; and 2) That the shock to the economy would be too great if he started the "Holocaust" phase immediately.

All true, but if you read None is Too Many by Abella & Troper, you'll see that our bureaucracy rejected European Jewry with zeal. We were actually one of the least accommodating nations.

Thanks for the tip. I may very well buy and read.

[cybercoma]

Actually he did. He knew two things though: 1) Some Jews were beloved in their community as the butcher, the baker and the tailor so he had to move a bit slow, lest people be unhappy with his plan; and 2) That the shock to the economy would be too great if he started the "Holocaust" phase immediately.

Thanks for the tip. I may very well buy and read.

Here's the American Amazon link for details. It's an excellent read.

http://www.amazon.com/None-Too-Many-Canada-1933-1948/dp/155263289X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1325096586&sr=8-1

[DogOnPorch]

All true, but if you read None is Too Many by Abella & Troper, you'll see that our bureaucracy rejected European Jewry with zeal. We were actually one of the least accommodating nations.

Yes...but don't haul the Jews of the St Louis into the frey. Their destination was America and a number of them did get there. If you want to blame somebody...blame the Cubans.

[monty16]

I have a Polish friend who lived very close to Auschwitz Birkenau during the period of time in question. He has told me the true story of what happened and didn't happen in that camp.

Edited December 28, 2011 by monty1

[DogOnPorch]

...and?

[monty16]

...and?

And what? Can you separate fact from fiction. For example, are you a rational thinking person who is able to understand that the earth is billions of years old or do you think there is a possibility that it's more like a few thousand years old. If you are capable of the former then you won't have a lot of difficulty with understanding holocaust fact and separating it from fiction. What you do with your conclusions will then be up to you and that will also determine your character, or lack of. It's really not all that difficult to come to correct conclusions on the holocaust. My friend put some facts and fictions to me in a logical way and I was able to figure it out pretty easily. You can too if you want to. It was easy for me when I listened to him that he was not motivated in any way to tell me lies.

I hope that answers your question. And I hope that allows you to rise above this rabble here on this thread. If you have any further questions then just p.m. me. But be aware that I will probably have no further satisfaction for you than what I have already given you. This goes for any of you.