Holocaust or holocausts?

[Dave Monroe]

Offlist, I'm axin', this in any significant
disagreement with anything I've said on the matter,
besides my perhaps, perhaps not, overly broad
"noncombat casualties" or whatever?  I respect your
opinion here, but I think that there's some tilting at
windmills, at strawmen, going on here, esp. in re:
"definitions" of 'The Holocaust" and, esp., the
"centrality" thereof in GR.  Atrocities is atrocities,
complicity therein be the issue, methinks ...

--- JBFRAME at aol.com wrote:
>   The Holocaust is the "final solution to the Jewish
> question" as put forth 
> by the idealogues of the Third Reich.  Can it mean
> anything other than the 
> attempted extermination of the Jews in Europe? 
> Atrocities committed by 
> German forces in the Second World War against Allied
> military personnel (I'm 
> thinking here of the Malmedy Massacre of American
> troops during the Ardennes 
> Offensive of the winter of 1944) are not part of the
> Holocaust.  I would put 
> the killing of the Gypsies in that category,
> however.  The Gypsies & the Jews 
> were singled out for death.  This meant that just
> being a Gypsy or a Jew was, 
> in effect, a capital crime.  To a certain extent,
> the deliberate subjection 
> of the Poles & other Slavic people to conditions
> that would have eventually 
> meant their destruction may belong in that category.
>  I also think the 
> "euthanasia" programs carried out against certain
> categories of 
> institutionalized hospital patients (who were
> treated in some ways worse than 
> way we treat "unadoptable" dogs) can be considered
> as part of the Holocaust. 
>     I would not put the killing of French civilians
> rounded up as hostages 
> for the actions of the resistance as part of the
> Holocaust.  The masscre of 
> Lidice in the Czech Republic (in retaliation for the
> assassination of 
> Heydrich) in 1942 is a terrible atrocity, but it is
> not part of the 
> Holocaust.  To say that a death did not take place
> as part of the Holocaust 
> does not diminish its tragedy or lessen the guilt of
> the perpetrators.
>     To use the word holocaust without capitals is to
> refer to a very hot, 
> consuming fire.
> 
>                                                     
>                     jbf
> 


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