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Originally posted by skdadl:
Why was it decided to have a Holocaust Day on 5/5? To coincide with VE Day?

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Originally posted by johnpauljones:

Skdadl i think that the day is chosen because of the Hebrew calendar. May 5 corresponds with the 27th day of the month of Nissan which is the Hebrew date for Holocaust Memorial Day.

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Ah. Thank you, jpj -- I didn't know that.

Auschwitz is and always will be a testimony to man's inhumaninty to man. It is and always will be a testimony to man's at best ignorance and at the worst total lack of caring of the suffering
of ones friends, neighbours and countrymen.
Are you arguing that fewer were slaughtered?

Those who have gone on the March of the living have remarked to me that it is amazing how a crowed of so many thousands can be so silent as they walk through the gate and then again are able to leave a place where so many did not.

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Originally posted by skdadl:

Ah. Thank you, jpj -- I didn't know that.

But then why was the 27th day of Nissan chosen? I can see the significance of commemorating the end of the war, in the sense that it finally liberated all who had been imprisoned in Europe, not just the captives at single camps. Perhaps for that reason?

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Originally posted by Fidel:
Well, since 1990 when the Pope blessed the site at which 4 million perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau, non-Russian historians have managed to revise that number downward considerably. If only the SS would have left some records for the advancing Russian army before fleeing the scene of a crime. How long before it never happened?.

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Your last comment really shakes me because it sounds exactly like what clever Holocaust deniers argue. As I recall this is not the first time you have made a questionable remark about the Holocaust. Please clarify for us why you wrote this and what you meant.

Edited to add:

Just found the lasdt comment you made which was troubling:

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Fidel
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5594
posted 15 February 2005 06:00 PM
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Counter-revolutionary to Bolshevism, the holocaust was about wealth redistribution among the rich in Europe. Just another case of appalling greed.
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From: I began revolution with 82 men. | Registered: Apr 2004 | IP: Logged

Macabee
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5227
posted 15 February 2005 06:29 PM
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quote:
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Originally posted by Fidel:
Counter-revolutionary to Bolshevism, the holocaust was about wealth redistribution among the rich in Europe. Just another case of appalling greed.
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You are kidding right? Please please tell me this is some kind of a sick sick joke..please

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To which Lagatta responded:

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lagatta
out and about moderator
Babbler # 2534
posted 15 February 2005 07:57 PM
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Has this thread gone completely off the rails? Fidel, I'm profoundly shocked by your comment. You aren't an ignorant person, and must know that the great majority of Jews who died in the Holocaust were poor shtetl and ghetto Jews, workers, small traders, or at most people in liberal professions. I'm pretty sure most of the Rothschilds were able to escape.
For someone who is anticapitalist, you should remember to what extent the Holocaust was a fulfilment of Rosa Luxemburg's choice of "Socialism or Barbarism".

I do think what Livingstone said was idiotic and that he should apologise - but not because I have any sympathy for the Standard.

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[ 07 May 2005: Message edited by: Macabee ]

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Originally posted by Macabee:
No, sadly the 27th of Nissan also corresponds to the date of the final liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

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Ah. Thank you, Mac. I figured there must be some specific reason.

I actually met a couple of Warsaw ghetto survivors and other Jewish people involved in resistance movements, but most have died by now, of natural causes, but after having the rest of their lives.

I don't think that was Fidel's point - it seems to me he was arguing the opposite but his post is not very clear. I don't like harping on posters' past posts but I do wish he would clear up that thing about greed. Once again, I think he was accusing the Nazis and collaborators, not the Jews, of greed, but it is reductive as obviously it is far worse to murder millions of innocent people than to expropriate property however unjustly.

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Originally posted by lagatta:
I don't think that was Fidel's point - it seems to me he was arguing the opposite but his post is not very clear. I don't like harping on posters' past posts but I do wish he would clear up that thing about greed. Once again, I think he was accusing the Nazis and collaborators, not the Jews, of greed, but it is reductive as obviously it is far worse to murder millions of innocent people than to expropriate property however unjustly.

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I did answer Mcabee at length in another post, but the entire thread was obliterated about a day or two after responding to Macabee.

I apologize for any misunderstanding here, but I finally had to read lagatta's interpretation of what I was being accused of in order to respond. I thought the rolling eyes at the end of the my own last post would have been a clue as to what I think of historical revisionism with respect to the holocaust. I sometimes don't express myself very well. I'd just like to make it clear that I have no interest in denying the Holocaust or mass murder of Jews or anyone else by the Nazis. I know what I am and where my political sympathies lie. I am a socialist and will never apologize for that.

As to the rounding down of the numbers who perished at Auschwitz, I don't know what to think. By what I've read, historians were in general agreement of the 3-4 million figure who died at Auschwitz. That was until 1990-91 and the retreat of Soviet communism. I was simply commenting on the fact that 4 million was the figure engraved on Auschwitz' memorial plaques for several decades which included the time of the Pope's official visit to bless the site where 4 million human beings spent their last moments. To me, rounding-down the total number by several million based on a severe lack of evidence for a smaller number amounts to holocaust denial and lesser indictment of the crime comitted. By what I've read, more evidence from Soviet archives will surface with respect to the holocaust and is predicted to add to the enormity of the numbers murdered as a result of the Holocaust, but certainly not add to the false case of denial.

Yes, lagatta, Nazi and corporate greed were the I was referring to several posts ago in another thread. Global slave labour would have been the ultimate in greed. Gold, property, assets and cash were stolen from millions of Jews and never returned to the owners. A lawsuit was brought against the Bush family by European Jews for Prescott's part in profiteering from slave labour. Slave labourers were apparently used by the Ford-Werkes car and truck factories in Nazi Germany and so on.

Millions of American's wonder how certain people could deny the Holocaust ever happened. And yet there are millions of American's who still believe that the doctor and the madman's crimes against humanity were justifed. Millions of them the unthinkable that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to save American lives. These were monstrous lies perpetrated by harry Truman and military lackies at a time when Admiral Leahy reported that Japanese military was beaten and ready to surrender. Flexing military muscle was the real intention for what they knew would be negotiations with Stalin and a cold war set in motion during WWI and the 14 nation invasion of Russia to put down the revolution.

And western capitalists have been funding terrorist mercenaries in Chechnya(oil), Khyrgistan, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and more places than those up to even now. The enemy is at the gates, once again.

[ 08 May 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

Skinheads and members of the extreme right National Democratic Party have gathered for a march but riot police are keeping them away from the Brandenburg Gate, a focal point for most of the ceremonies".

I know the boneheads are also planning a march in Munich. I wouldn't put such nasty events in this thread if it were not for the fact that there are important counter-events, ranging from one featuring performers and, as I read, "celebrity chefs" (no more details, but I surmise the idea is to celebrate diversity as opposed to "racial purity") to more explicitely left-wing protests against both fascism and capitalism. I'll try to find more details.

Meanwhile some Germans seem to be saying get over it already.

The Independent: Britons ignorant about Germany and still see us as Nazis, says ambassado

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Mr Matussek said that the two countries were "drifting apart" because British children were growing up with "dangerous misunderstandings" about Germany. "We have to make a distinction between clichèd stereotypes that are outright funny - like in Dad's Army or Fawlty Towers - and something that goes a little deeper. The humour stops when I hear that German children are regularly beaten up and abused by British youngsters who don't know what Germany's about."

A recent survey showed that when British 10- to 16-year olds were asked what they associated Germany with, 78 per cent said the Second World War, and 50 per cent mentioned Hitler. Youthful British ignorance of Germany and its past was demonstrated by the photographs published earlier this year, showing Prince Harry at a fancy dress party in Nazi uniform.

"Like the conquering of the West is part of the American myth, so it is the same with the British and the defeat of Nazism," Mr Matussek told The Observer.

"We Germans confront the guilt and shame of our past daily, and more thoroughly and obsessively than probably any other nation on earth."

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“We did not start it,” protests the German. “Yes you did, you invaded Poland”, replies Basil!

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After all, there was no shortage of Nazi-symps in Britain (starting from King Edward and Wallis Simpson, or the horrid Mosleys) or in continental Europe.

His point is very different from the Neo-Nazis calling for an end to the "cult of guilt", which is a sort of negationist rallying cry.

Oskar says he feels he can't be guilty because he wasn't a perpetrator, just a cog in the machine. And yet there are still uplifting memories for the old songs. Was he kidding or just emphasizing how propagandized he was at the time?.

[ 10 May 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

I've often referred to Enzo Traverso's books, but he wrote one that is an overview of the developments in European industrial society that made both "scientific racism" and such an efficient killing machine possible. The Origins of Nazi Violence

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In the half-century since the appearance of Hannah Arendt’s seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism, innumerable historians have detailed the history of the Nazi years. Now, in a brilliant synthesis of this work, Enzo Traverso situates the extermination camps as the final, terrible moment in European modernity’s industrialization of killing and dehumanization of death. Traverso upends the conventional presentation of the Holocaust as an inexplicable anomaly, navigating an excess of antecedents both technical and cultural. Deftly tracing a complex lineage—the guillotine and machine gun, the prison and assembly line, as well as widespread ideologies of racial supremacy and colonial expansion—Traverso reveals that the ideas that coalesced at Auschwitz came from Europe’s mainstream and not its margins.

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Review of "Nazi Violence" in The Nation

Traverso in Le Monde diplomatique