Holocaust (Re: avoid the shitstorm!)

[Otto Sell]

"Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
We need decentralization."
(Jim Capaldi, "Living on a Marble," >Short Cut Draw Blood<, Island Records,
1975)

----------- schnipp -----------
>   at this point the "nazi-system" does not really differ from the
>   "commie-system", does it? dozens of millions were killed for not being
>   "comrade" enough.
>

To cover both totalitarian systems under the same roof because of what
they've got in common and forget about the differences won't help much to
explain the 20th century, and I think this is something history books and
novels like GR are both trying.
Of course there are striking similarities between the two lager systems.
Generally the way of forcing too many people into camps without having the
real possibilities to feed them bears an element of genocide by letting
"nature" do the work through hunger, cold and disease.

But if we speak of the tradition (religious and racial) of German
anti-Semitism that finally led to Auschwitz we must remember that
monarchist Russia had her tradition of forcing people into banishment in
the 19th century too. Joseph Conrad (born 1857) whose family was in the
Polish resistance in the 1860s against Russia might be one example. His
parents were sent to Vologda in North Russia in 1861, 1963 allowed to go to
Chernikov in the Ukraine where his mother died of tuberculosis in 1865.

But there's a big difference between the declared will of the nazis to
concentrate and eliminate all Jews (and getting all "dangerous minorities"
under control) and the stalinistic Gulag. The Gulag was a threat for every
Russian, independent from party membership, religious belief or "race"
(which doesn't make it better!). Even "good" communists were sent there. In
Germany no nazi went to a camp for simply doing his work but this has
happened to communists in the USSR in those days. Even in the murder
organizations the nazis had set up primarily in Poland and Russia repeatedly
people refused to kill Jews and were not punished but used as guards or for
transport tasks further on. The nazi concentration camps were directed at
clearly defined groups of the population.

Plus I cannot remember having read somewhere that in the Gulag the prisoners
were deprived of their names and identity by tattooing a number.

----------- schnipp -----------
>   rosa luxemburg's famous saying - "freedom is always
>   the freedom of those who think different" - is usually reported wrongly.
>   unlike the legend says, this was never meant as a general statement for
>   free speech, but only as an intervention concerning internal left
>   debates.
>   mrs. luxemburg never thought that the "kapitalistischen
>   ausbeuterschweine"(capitalist exploiter pigs[!]) or the
>   "scheißliberalen" (shity liberals) should have the same right
>   to express their opinion (...)
>

1. According to the standard you expect from others you should give
evidences for this.
2. Imho those two groups you refer to had the freedom of speech for a long
time already when Aunt Rosa did her famous sentence. To be honest about it,
in the given historical context of the Twenties I'm not sure if freedom of
speech for the Right would have been the appropriate political strategy to
stay in power if the Ultra-left had gained it. But they did not and Aunt
Rosa's fate is known. The semi-Left, the Social-Democrats came into power
and the Right kept their freedom of speech, among them that "poor" painter
from Austria.

----------- schnipp ---------
 > us oh so "progessive"
>  (whatever that might mean today...)folks. marxist philosopher ernst bloch
>   still said during the 60s "ubi est lenin ibi jerusalem".
>

"Ubi bene ibi patria" is the original quote I believe. But he says Lenin,
not Stalin.

----------- schnipp -----------
>  the "world civil war" between 1917 and 1989 fooled the best of several
>  generations ...
>

Nothing more true than this.

----------- schnipp -----------
>   (right, it still makes a difference that the nazi-system relied
>   on a purely wrong and racist philosophy, while communism
>   had - theoretically - some good points to make.
>

Theoretically, or maybe better nostalgic? A nostalgia I am, I admit, not
totally free from. But postmodernism helps against old ideological lenses
and a prism divides the light into rainbow colors.

----------- schnipp -----------
the dead people, however, probably don't care much).
>

But the living should, so let's not forget that GR is directed towards us in
the end, towards the future, and even after the end of the major opposition
the nuclear threat and various others are still there. So I very much
appreciated what Phil wrote:

"but I always come back to Their totalitarianism, realized fully with the
image of the rocket threatening "all of us",
figuratively packed into a movie theatre, enjoying our own destruction as an
aesthetic event."

Otto