defining the Holocaust?

[jbor]

----------
>From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>

> In addition to Jews, the larger group of Holocaust victims is
> generally understood to include political dissenters, homosexuals,
> victims of medical experimentation,  "Gypsies" (the Roma people), and
> other groups of human beings that the Nazis considered undesireable.
> Neufeld speaks of the millions of Soviet prisoners left to die by the
> German Army as Holocaust victims, too.

This is an example of dishonesty -- *prevarication* -- on your part. The
above definition is not at all "generally understood". It is most certainly
*not* the accepted reference for the term "Holocaust-denial", which has been
the thrust of your libellous attacks. Furthermore, your (sudden, alleged)
misinterpretation of the term doesn't alter what is depicted in GR.

The texts, definitions and articles you have cited don't even support your
argument.

Neufeld:

> 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. The
usage here is idiosyncratic: Neufeld's appropriation.

The online dictionary:

> hol·o·caust (hl-kôst, hl-)
>      n.
>
> 1.Great or total destruction, especially by fire.
>
> 2.
> a.Widespread destruction.
> b.A great disaster.
>
> 3.
> a.Holocaust. The genocide of European Jews and others by the Nazis
> during World War II:
> "Israel emerged from the Holocaust and is defined in relation to that
> catastrophe" (Emanuel Litvinoff).
>
> b.A massive slaughter: "an important document in the so-far sketchy
> annals of the Cambodian holocaust" (Rod Nordland).
>
> 4.A sacrificial offering that is consumed entirely by flames.
>

Definitions 1,2, 3b and 4 refer to the common noun "holocaust", used with
the indefinite article. You have been constantly using the capitalised noun,
preceded by the definite article: "the Holocaust". This is *only* applicable
to definition 3a.

The Holocaust Remembrance Day website:

> "Whereas, the Holocaust
> was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of
> European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and
> 1945. Jews were the primary victims - six million were murdered;
> Gypsies, the handicapped, and Poles were also targeted for
> destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons.
> Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet
> prisoners of war and political dissidents, also suffered grievous
> oppression and death under Nazi tyranny."

The first clause defines *precisely* what "the Holocaust" refers to, and
distinguishes it from what it *doesn't* refer to.

Even if we extend the usage as you have (and thereby *diminish* the specific
horror and tragedy of the Shoah), the Dora labour camp inmates still fall
into a separate category to those interred and executed at Auschwitz,
Buchenwald and elsewhere; Pynchon makes the distinction very clear on p.
666. Just as he nowhere depicts the annihilation of Jews, he nowhere depicts
the annihilation of gypsies, Slavs, communists, Jehovah's Witnesses or
homosexuals either. But regardless of this what we (and *you* in particular)
have been talking about all along is the centrality or absence of "the
Holocaust" -- "the genocidal murder of the Jews by the Nazis in WW II" --
from GR.

Apologise you coward.