defining the Holocaust?

[jbor]

----------
>From: KXX4493553 at aol.com
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: defining the Holocaust?
>Date: Sun, Oct 1, 2000, 8:42 PM
>

> In einer eMail vom 30.09.00 11:17:20 (MEZ) - Mitteleurop. Sommerzeit schreibt
> jbor at bigpond.com:
>
> <<  In one of the forgotten Holocausts of the Third Reich, more than 2
>  > million of some 3.5 million Soviet prisoners were dead by February
>  > 1942 as a result of mass starvation and disease
>
>  That's a *pluralisation* of the term. It denotes another, or different,
>  "Holocaust" to "the genocidal murder of the Jews by the Nazis in
>  WW II", which is the generally accepted definition of the proper noun. >>
> Indeed, jbor, there are many different ways of killing and different kinds of
> people you can annihilate. It remembers me at the "discussion" in Germany
> about the Wehrmacht exhibition which was  also shown in the US in the
> meantime.

I can't figure out whether you're agreeing or being sarcastic. I think it is
*extremely* important to distinguish between "the Holocaust" and Nazi POW
camps and German colonialism and arms technology and production. Just as
it's important to distinguish between the Russian pogroms and the Shoah, or
between the decimation of different races of indigenous peoples in different
parts of the world by different groups of imperialists or war-mongers. It is
first and foremost a mark of respect to the victims and survivors; and I
think it is something Pynchon is very concerned about with his focus on the
Hereros in Sudwest. Using some simplistic catch-all like "the Holocaust"
means that such specifics are lost.

But what a generalisation such as this also allows is the vilification of a
particular race and culture (those "evil" Germans) as the guilty party, in
order to exonerate other races and cultures and belief-systems. It is
certainly a "simple" solution, and a simplistic one. But I don't think that
this is what GR is attempting to represent at all.

best