Chap wrote:Smokey wrote:They never will define what the Holocaust is
Really? It's simply a term used by many people (but not me) to refer to the general phenomenon of the murder (by various means) of large numbers of European Jews, principally as a result of the activities of the Germans and their allies, in the later part of WWII. That's not a definition, it's just an unexceptionable description of how the word is used.
Smokey wrote:I appreciate you attempting to define “The Holocaust” - you are braver and more intellectually honest than the OP.
Don’t you find it a bit odd that the ancient Greek word for “burnt sacrifice” now refers to the deaths of Jews, and only Jews, during WWII?
I made it quite clear that I was not trying to give a definition of the word 'Holocaust', merely to explain the sense in which it seems to be generally used in the context of discussions such as this one. There is a difference.
I have also told you that I don't like using the term 'Holocaust' to refer to the deliberate seeking out and killing of European Jews in the later stages of WWII. Your question should be addressed to someone else.
(My reason for not liking the term is that its ancient usage and etymology referred to a religious sacrifice to a deity, and that seems to me inappropriate as a term for the deliberate seeking out and killing of members of a religion-ethnic group. If I did feel the need for a one-word label, which I don't, I'd go with 'Shoah", from שואה, the Hebrew word for 'catastrophe'.]
Chap wrote:What's your problem with that? That the alleged murder never happened? if so, the word used is hardly the main issue, is it?
Smokey wrote:Generally, deaths during wartime - especially from disease, starvation, and exposure are not called “murder”.
I would say that the fact that there was no systematic extermination of Jews in Germany is the main issue.
Well yes, the systematic extermination of Jews did not take place in Germany. Hitler was too smart not to shield the civilian population of Germany from seeing the ultimate consequences of the hatred of Jews he encouraged. So he had it done elsewhere, as for instance in Poland. I don't think that the location makes much difference, though.
This knowing causation of civilian deaths in wartime as a result of warlike acts such as the bombing of enemy cities is an act of dubious moral status. It is, however, hard to see how the Axis powers in Europe and East Asia could have been defeated without acts likely to lead to large amounts of civilian deaths.
Those acts are different in kind from the deliberate seeking out by police or paramilitary or military forces of civilians under their control, who pose no military threat and who wish only to pass unnoticed and unmolested, but simply fall within some ethno-religious category defined by those in power as undesirable, and their subsequent killing for no other reason than to achieve the death of the people in question, quite apart from any military objective. We need a different description for such a very different kind of killing, and 'murder' (the deliberate killing of a person for a bad motive) seems quite appropriate.