Another Word for “Holocaust”
11th November 2013
Hitler gassed 6 million Jews! Tragedy!
Stalin starved 4 million peasants to death! <yawn>
Estimates for the death tolls of the Holocaust and Holodomor range all over the place—usually correlated (surprise!) with how much ethnic and political sympathy the estimator has for the deceased—but a rough consensus is that the number of victims was roughly the same.
Wait—aren’t all dead bodies created equal? Why the galloping disparity in public awareness of these dueling atrocities?
Some would say it’s because Western academia is dominated by leftists who are loath to acknowledge their chosen creed’s historical capacity for totalitarian cruelty.
Others would say it’s because Western media is dominated by people who are more sympathetic to Jewish people than to Christians.
Yet others would assert it’s because the USA fought alongside the Soviet Union in WWII and thus wants to avoid appearing complicit in the deliberate starvation of millions.
I’ll pick “all of the above.”
November 11th, 2013 at 11:26
The reality is that once you reach a certain level of killing – say in the 100,000 body range – it becomes extremely difficult to keep count and even harder for those cleaning up afterwards to figure out the actual number. (Even in small body count ranges that can be difficult. A friend in the military explained to me that modern ordinance often leaves the enemy in many pieces. Soldiers end up counting convenient body parts – legs, for example – and then dividing and rounding off to reach the best estimate.)
With the Nazis, things were a bit different. Besides their natural tendancy to keep good records (is that raaaacist? Probably, but I don’t care), the Nazis running their killing operations no doubt expected bonuses (or at least bragging rights for their post-war resumes) and so they kept extraordinarly good records.
As a post-script to that, I’ve noticed that corporate attorneys are very big on destroying any records that are no longer absolutely needed and that they are not legally bound to maintain past a certain age. Erin Brockovich would never have been the subject of a movie if someone hadn’t been too lazy to destroy records as they were ordered.