This weeks debate on BQ was "is the Holocaust still relevant".
This is a subject that many people shy away from because it is so emotive and has remained so because of the ability of the main group, the Jews who were persecuted, to gain media attention and remind us of the terrible things which happened under the Nazi's.
In so far as the parallel attempt to exterminate other groups of people, the Homosexuals, the Disabled, the Gypsy's, the Slav's, do not quite fit the memorial memory we have on behalf of the Jews and the special place Jewish people claim to have.
This is not to deny the terrible trauma but an attempt to gain perspective.
Of course to hear the description of the mechanised murder, to hear the description of walking skeletons in Belsen, substantiated by the horrific pictures taken when the concentration camps were liberated. Of the so called 'scientific experimentation' and the empty eyed horror in the eyes of the subject as the ice bath reduced the body temperature below what a human can withstand
Was this a different, a greater sense of depravity ?
There are always sadists on hand to carry out the act. People who turned the screw on the rack during the Spanish Inquisition. People who would 'draw and quarter' in this country during the Middle Ages. Mentally disturbed people who relish inflicting pain.
The people gathered to debate the matter were largely Jewish and perhaps it was a measure of the Establishments sensitivity not to line up the 'usual people' who would try to deny the Jewish case. Not, I must add, to project 'Holocaust Denial', but to ask why the Jewish diaspora insist that their loss, their disfigurement as a group, their place in the history is special when the Hutu genocidal mass slaughter of the Tutsi or Pol Pots massacres. Mao Zedong purges killing millions, Stalin's totalitarian murder on an even more massive scale. The question is "why should the Holocaust be special" ?
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This is a subject that many people shy away from because it is so emotive and has remained so because of the ability of the main group, the Jews who were persecuted, to gain media attention and remind us of the terrible things which happened under the Nazi's.
In so far as the parallel attempt to exterminate other groups of people, the Homosexuals, the Disabled, the Gypsy's, the Slav's, do not quite fit the memorial memory we have on behalf of the Jews and the special place Jewish people claim to have.
This is not to deny the terrible trauma but an attempt to gain perspective.
Of course to hear the description of the mechanised murder, to hear the description of walking skeletons in Belsen, substantiated by the horrific pictures taken when the concentration camps were liberated. Of the so called 'scientific experimentation' and the empty eyed horror in the eyes of the subject as the ice bath reduced the body temperature below what a human can withstand
Was this a different, a greater sense of depravity ?
There are always sadists on hand to carry out the act. People who turned the screw on the rack during the Spanish Inquisition. People who would 'draw and quarter' in this country during the Middle Ages. Mentally disturbed people who relish inflicting pain.
The people gathered to debate the matter were largely Jewish and perhaps it was a measure of the Establishments sensitivity not to line up the 'usual people' who would try to deny the Jewish case. Not, I must add, to project 'Holocaust Denial', but to ask why the Jewish diaspora insist that their loss, their disfigurement as a group, their place in the history is special when the Hutu genocidal mass slaughter of the Tutsi or Pol Pots massacres. Mao Zedong purges killing millions, Stalin's totalitarian murder on an even more massive scale. The question is "why should the Holocaust be special" ?
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