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

[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.

[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! 

[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 democide^w 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.

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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.

+1. I quite agree.  

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...

- 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...

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

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.

[wraith808]

By the way, though you say:

...the Jews were very far from unique...

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

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.

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."

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.

[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.

[J-Mac]

Well, before this thread goes away, I'd just like to add my condolences, sorrow, and prayer in remembrance of the six million who were killed in the Holocaust. I didn't realize that there was such a period of remembrance every year. But I do now. It was a terrible time that thankfully ended when it did.

Jim

[IainB]

However, though over 10 million [North American slaves] 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."

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.

+1 from me - Very good points indeed.  
I did wonder how come the USA didn't seem to figure on the table of 20th Century Mortacracies provided (above) by @Renegade, but I didn't like to ask as it might have been going rather off-topic.

[IainB]

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..

I couldn't say whether it would be "wrong" per se, but I would suggest that it is arguably little different in intent to the humanitarian aspects (i.e., thoughtful remembrance of those who have been pointlessly murdered en masse) associated with remembering (say) the waste of life in the 911 attack, or the WACO massacre.

Therefore:

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.

+ 1 from me for what @CWuestefeld says.

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.

+ 1 from me for what @TaoPhoenix says.

...borderline appropriate for DC...

I would be interested in any non-arbitrary definition you might consider for this. It could form a basis for "Living-Room" censorship rules, where we could all know where we stand and thus what we need to conform to - i.e., the rules thus set. You would presumably (?) be the decision-taker on this.

It would be a shame if this was censored. Discussion of such things/incidents - Man's inhumanity to Man - are relevant to our humanitarian principles. If we wanted to be equitable about spreading our remembrances, we could probably group these incidents into 365 bunches - one for each day of the year - and have a Remembrance Day for each bunch.
Some (including me) might find that a bit too much to cope with, but I categorically do not have any difficulty with thinking upon, remembering and discussing the more modern 20th century incidents that (hopefully) have provided salutary lessons enabling us to make the choice to become more human, more civilised and less barbaric towards our fellow men.
This is not so much an opinion as a philosophical approach that my mother taught me, and which I see as standing up to hard critical scrutiny as a valid and useful philosophy for the development of the Self. It is decidedly not a PC approach.

So I would embrace in that the Armenian massacre, the Holocaust, the 911 massacre, the WACO massacre, the Native Indian massacres, and the American-African slave massacres, etc.. Sadly, only the second seems to figure in terms of lessons that have been extended so that they were properly addressed in Law - i.e., with legal remedies - so as to help deter/avoid/mitigate a future recurrence.

By the way, and getting back to topic, there is a rather spine-tingling video here of what happened in Israel when the Remembrance-Day sirens went off.
Holocaust Remembrance Day Tel Aviv, Israel
Hear that noise in the background? Those are the air-raid sirens going off...
That's right, the Israelis still need air-raid sirens. The only time I have heard them before was in old WW2 London blitz newsreel footage.

[wraith808]

...borderline appropriate for DC...

I would be interested in any non-arbitrary definition you might consider for this.  It could form a basis for "Living-Room" censorship rules, where we could all know where we stand and thus what we need to conform to - i.e., the rules thus set. You would presumably (?) be the decision-taker on this.

Not censorship per-say, but focus.  If this isn't a place to discuss religion and politics, then that's just not the focus, and calling that censorship is IMO cheapening the effect of the word when used if not an outright misuse of the word.  There's a big difference between having a set of rules so that people that come to the site know what to expect and censoring posts.

[IainB]

Not censorship per-say, but focus.

Yeah, right.
Bet I can I can think of more euphemisms for it than you!   

[Renegade]

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..

+1

Not censorship per-say, but focus.  If this isn't a place to discuss religion and politics, then that's just not the focus, and calling that censorship is IMO cheapening the effect of the word when used if not an outright misuse of the word.  There's a big difference between having a set of rules so that people that come to the site know what to expect and censoring posts.

+1

A couple days ago I emailed mouser about the frequency of posts I have been making on the topic of technology and censorship. The amount of it out there is alarming, and I probably post less than a tenth of what I'd like to, but, still, it's getting to the point that it's now over the top and the focus here is DC software and other software/technology topics.

I'll be scaling back as the volume has simply gotten too high. It's not that I'm "censoring" myself, but rather that it's detracting from the primary purpose of the forums here.

Incidentally, and somewhat on topic, I view censorship like we are seeing now simply as one step towards democide. I know that I'm far from alone in that view.

Regarding the suggestion:

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

I like that idea. The ASP has a newsgroup called "Soapbox" where the Sargent at Arms rarely steps in. It's basically a free-for-all, but topics are overwhelmingly politics and religion. People disagree about things, but it's mostly civil, or as civil as the ASP gets anyways. (Much more flaming there than in here, that's for certain - but that's not limited to soapbox -- most sites have a massive amount of flaming going on compared to DC.) "Soapbox" is basically a place to vent.

[wraith808]

Not censorship per-say, but focus.

Yeah, right.
Bet I can I can think of more euphemisms for it than you!   

Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, for I surely don't look at that as a euphemism- they're two totally different things.  I run a rpg board, and if you came in discussing programming that would be off topic.  Is that censorship?  No.  It's just off topic.  And if this is declared off-topic, then that's ok too.  I know that several people that used to post have fallen by the wayside because they came to DC for talk about coding and software, and kept getting hit in the face with the religion and politics because they came here for a break from that.  I know at times its been overwhelming for me, because there are such a wide range of opinions and stances on the boards, and to discuss such hotbed topics can make it hard to deal with at times.

[IainB]

Well, before this thread goes away, I'd just like to add my condolences, sorrow, and prayer in remembrance of the six million who were killed in the Holocaust. I didn't realize that there was such a period of remembrance every year. But I do now. It was a terrible time that thankfully ended when it did.
Jim

You have a good heart and have seen the salient point about this Holocaust Remembrance Day - condolences, sorrow, and prayer. I add to that in my mind the hope that we will never allow such a thing to happen again. "Lest we forget", as is said on that other Remembrance Day (Poppy Day) in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

I knew the Holocaust was remembered in lots of ways (e.g., Holocaust museums, films, books and related media) but I did not previously know that a remembrance day was set as an annual fixture - dates and time.
Nor did I know about the 2-minute silence whilst the sirens sounded in Tel Aviv.

[TaoPhoenix]

And somewhere in these last four or so posts comes the "diamond tip" of the problem. I like to view things on an slider scale. Per Renegade, if he thinks he's become too loud on those issues, and wants to slow down a little, then great! Per Wraith Part1, presuming that enough of the social discussions are indeed in Living Room, then someone who just wants to talk about software ... shouldn't be looking at the Living Room. They should ... wait for it ... Focus on the other *twelve* sections! Or, if they *still* want to go to the Living Room but yet not see these hot topics, then there's that subdivision thing, they shouldn't go the Soapbox Nook. "Don't go to the Soapbox Room and then complain that people are talking politics!"

We trust Mouser overall, but that Focus theme is sadly the legendary wedge used by other forces with agendas to begin censorship plans. "Let's keep Focus, let's keep it Family Friendly, let's keep it Pleasant." The best answer in my view is to make the wide-topic area less visible if we like, such as not in the public feed, or even on the "recent posts" down at the bottom, but still freely available.

[tomos]

mouser has always said that he feels that dc is not the right place for political and religious subjects. He's often ignored, but that wish does keep most of those discussions in check, which is helpful imo. I dont consider that censorship.
I've never seen a post censored here in the sense of removed.

[TaoPhoenix]

mouser has always said that he feels that dc is not the right place for political and religious subjects. He's often ignored, but that wish does keep most of those discussions in check, which is helpful imo. I dont consider that censorship.
I've never seen a post censored here in the sense of removed.

So far so good, but depending on how this development plays out, it could. But that is all I shall say. By now I have said what I wished to. The rest is up to you all.

[J-Mac]

I remember in a mobile/handheld computing forum where I was a moderator (Aximsite) the owner set up a separate subforum for politics and religion topics and made it so you had to request access and receive a separate password to enter! I felt it a bit extreme - though in all honesty I never did request access to the darned thing and never received it either, moderator or not!

Thank you.

Jim

[mouser]

The idea of making a special forum section specifically for moving threads that might otherwise be disruptive elsewhere is not a bad idea at all..

My feeling in general is that the site benefits greatly from having only two really big general purpose sections (Living Room and Software) where most of our conversation takes place.  I think that helps a lot in keeping us tight as a community.  I am not a fan of breaking up the site into little enclaves.

But having a section where topics could be MOVED if they venture too much into politics/religion might be a better solution than asking people to stop talking about them if they start to feel distracting.  It would also make it possible for people to more easily ignore that section if they don't want to be bothered with it.  I don't think we would need to have it so that you had to request to get into such a section -- it would be enough that it was a bit more out of the way than the main sections..

[wraith808]

I don't browse by section... but by unread topics since last visit.  I'm not sure how many people do the same, but this wouldn't help in that case.

[Ath]

+1 like wraith808, but you could exclude a forum or thread if the content isn't 'your cup of tea'?