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

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wraith808:
By the way, though you say:
...the Jews were very far from unique...

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- several things about the Holocaust do make it, historically, kinda unique, including for example:
-IainB (April 19, 2012, 05:35 AM)
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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.
-Renegade (April 19, 2012, 08:34 AM)
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I don't think that makes it in and of itself unique.  That just makes the remembrance unique and effect unique, and is such because of the retained cultural identity.  And the extent to which this tragic occurrence created a power structure is also unique, and helps in that remembrance, and continues to sustain that power with a resonance based on this remembrance.

To take another example and contrast it to this, we can use the North American African slave trade.  Because of the fact that slaves were considered chattel, records were kept, though perhaps not to the same extent. (http://www.stanford.edu/~hklein/Klein_etal_Mortality_ST_WMQ-2001.pdf)

However, though over 10 million were killed during this exercise, the same level of remembrance is not paid, nor power conferred.  Perhaps it is because of a lack of shared cultural identity since the same exercise destroyed that cultural identity in a systematic manner. 

Worse can be said of the Native American genocide. 

from http://hnn.us/articles/7302.html
...according to Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado, the reduction of the North American Indian population from an estimated 12 million in 1500 to barely 237,000 in 1900 represents a"vast genocide . . . , the most sustained on record."

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Thus, I think if you were to draw any uniqueness from the Holocaust, it would be summarized in this one line:

So the 6 million deaths might not have been entirely in vain.
-IainB (April 19, 2012, 05:35 AM)
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CWuestefeld:
While the scale doesn't compare, I'd like to remind you all that today is also the 19th anniversary of the massacre at Waco. 74 men, women, and children were murdered by US government agents, and not a thing was ever done about it. The scale might be wholly different, but in this case the blood is on our hands.

mouser:
Would it be wrong for me to suggest this thread started off as being borderline appropriate for DC and is only becoming more so..   It's not that these discussions aren't valuable to have, just a question of whether they are most appropriate for this forum..  Of course there is great latitude for going off topic in the Living room section, but still..

mahesh2k:
How about members only section, so that politics, history, religion threads don't show up in DC public feed?

TaoPhoenix:
This is one of those cases where we might be able to use one more category, Other Discussions etc. There's value in getting this crew's opinions about any topic that isn't pure trolling, because y'all put more work into your posts than almost any other forum I've seen. Given our efforts to discuss the various censorship problems, it WOULD bother me (open mouth, insert foot moment coming up), "Oh, it's fine to refuse all censorship, until it hits YOUR pet topic, THEN it's "not appropriate".

That's precisely the profound fundamental problem with censorship - it starts with the edge cases of "not appropriate" and then according to people's agendas, slowly scope-creeps its way into people getting arrested for tweets.

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