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Thoughts in remembrance of the 6 million (est.) murdered in the Holocaust

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IainB:
These people are quietly remembered on Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah), which begins in the evening of Wednesday, April 18, 2012, and ends in the evening of Thursday, April 19, 2012.

There's a post at The Times of Israel entitled: The Holocaust in film
There are 4 YouTube videos with the post.
For many, the observance of Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, revolves around the two-minute siren sounded throughout the country at 10 o’clock in the morning and the Holocaust films from Hollywood blockbusters to documentaries and testimonies — broadcast on television throughout the day.

At the Hebrew University film archive, movies have always been considered as relevant as books in documenting history, particularly with regard to the story of the State of Israel. Founded in 1969, the Mount Scopus-based archive — known since 1988 as the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive after film director Spielberg helped fund the project — holds 18,000 titles, said Deborah Steinmetz, director of the archives.

Within those titles, there are more than 400 movies about the Holocaust, but the focus of the archive “isn’t the Holocaust, but Jewish life for everyone,” commented Steinmetz.
That said, the archive staff pulled out the following four films for Holocaust Remembrance Day, a mixture of testimony and history ranging from the war to the 1980s.

* 1. Hitler-Mussolini on the Eastern Front (1942) – A rare color movie shot by a German soldier stationed in Eastern Europe. The movie depicts soldiers on the front and documents a meeting between the two Fascist leaders.
* 2. Habricha (1947) – Jewish refugees escape Europe and journey to pre-state Palestine after the Holocaust.
* 3. Report on the Living (1947) – Holocaust survivors in Europe are rehabilitated by the Joint Distribution Committee.
* 4. A Bunch of Grapes (1985) – Child survivor Eveline Goodman-Thau talks about her personal experiences during the Holocaust, from her childhood in Vienna to the family’s escape to Holland.
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IainB:
My newsfeed from the Times of Israel had an intriguing post "The Intelligent Person's Guide to Holocaust Denial", so I clicked on it thinking it (The Times) must be extraordinarily balanced to publish such an article at this time - and got Rickrolled!  ;D

Renegade:
By no means do I wish to trivialize the deaths of 6 million people, but really, this is completely distorted in terms of attention paid to it.

In the 20th century 262,000,000 people were murdered by their governments. The Nazi holocaust represents around 21,000,000 people. Remember, they murdered the sick, elderly, disabled, mentally retarded, homosexuals, political dissidents, and basically just whoever they didn't like. i.e. The Nazis murdered about 8% of the victims of democidew in the 20th century. The Jews represent about 2.3% of the victims of democide in the 20th century.

That means that we're basically ignoring the 97.7% of people that were murdered by their governments.

Human is human. Whether that's Jew, white, black, yellow, red, Chinese, Ugandan, Russian, gay, straight, bi, genius academic, invalid cripple, or whatever.

I would ask that alongside the heinous murder of 6 million Jews, we also take time to remember that there have been many, many more than that.



And it is continuing today. And it will continue tomorrow. We need to know and understand that the largest single cause of unnatural death is government. Governments always think they are doing "good".

Sorry - I don't mean to derail this thread or demean the deaths of anyone. I merely want to point out that the Jews were very far from unique, and we need to come to grips with that vast scale of evil before we can try to prevent it from happening again.

IainB:
By no means do I wish to trivialize the deaths of 6 million people...we need to come to grips with that [Mortacracies] vast scale of evil before we can try to prevent it from happening again.
-Renegade (April 18, 2012, 09:34 AM)
--- End quote ---
+1. I quite agree.   :Thmbsup:

I could change the subject of the opening post to something more appropriate to all historical humungamass-murders, but I'm not sure what it could be.
What would you suggest?

By the way, though you say:
...the Jews were very far from unique...

--- End quote ---
- several things about the Holocaust do make it, historically, kinda unique, including for example:

* There is a "Remembrance Day" held for the 6 million. I'm not sure, but as far as I am aware, there is not a similar remembrance day held for (say) the Armenian genocide. (Is there?)
* I think the word "genocide" was coined to describe the 20th century's then known systematic exterminations committed by a nation/government on a people (I think the Armenian genocide was the first, and the Holocaust was the second), and the term was originally used in the Nuremberg trials.
* The perpetrators of the Holocaust meticulously recorded most of what they did for posterity, thus creating lots of incriminating historical evidence, used in the Nuremberg trials.
* The Nuremberg trials were arguably the turning-point where civilization (or democratic Western civilization, at least) said "Enough" to humungamass-murders, and showed how these "crimes against humanity" could be addressed in an unbiased, international law.
* The Holocaust led to the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was manifestly adopted for humanitarian and civilizing purposes - the idea being to discourage the repetition of history in this regard, or at least, if it was, then how it would be punished under international law.
That is, the Holocaust was a historical landmark and a trigger that released the idea of an indelible and greater humanitarianising and civilizing force into a world which previously had nothing quite like that before. So the 6 million deaths might not have been entirely in vain. The Holocaust taught us something which has arguably enabled humanity to take a further social evolutionary step - not that all societies/nations necessarily want to take that step, unfortunately.

Renegade:
By the way, though you say:
...the Jews were very far from unique...

--- End quote ---
- several things about the Holocaust do make it, historically, kinda unique, including for example:
-IainB (April 19, 2012, 05:35 AM)
--- End quote ---

Quite right there. I'm simply very inarticulate at times. I mean unique in the sense that people were murdered. I didn't consider any surrounding circumstances.

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