Locodogz
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Re: Fuck it!
Sep 05, 2018, 11:03
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"The fact that 80 Million people died and 50 Million were civilians means that extracting bizarre statistics and trying to make points 80 years later is simply a fickle statistician's historical retro-grief"
What a oddly conflicted sentiment (all the more so, for someone who has just bandied around those same statistics)? So anyone flagging up the historical sadness of, for example, the vast numbers of the poor that died in Victorian slums, the Cultural revolution, or more recently in the Ethiopian famines is guilty of "historical retro-grief".
Poor Santayana.....wasted on you eh?
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Howburn Digger
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Re: Fuck it!
Sep 06, 2018, 08:12
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tjj wrote: Howburn Digger wrote:
The fact that 80 Million people died and 50 Million were civilians means that extracting bizarre statistics and trying to make points 80 years later is simply a fickle statisticians historical retro-grief.
It is easy to quote a couple of lines from someone's post to slant it in a different context. I was specifically talking about the Holocaust in relation to Jews - i.e. the rounding up and gassing of 6 million people. And no, I haven't forgotten Romanian gypsies and other minority groups of people the Nazi's wished to exterminate. Stating this is a historical fact not 'retro-grief'.
I understand there are plenty of right wing Holocaust deniers around.
I am pointing out that the other 74 Million human beings slaughtered in WW2 deserve equal "not forgetting". No-one is denying any of the horrors of WW2 happened. The deliberate designing, building and loading of incendiary bombs onto purpose-built planes to drop on a minority group in another country the Nazis wished to exterminate is a horror equal to any other they dreamed up. Argue with the burning children of Clydebank about that one. Those planes were built specifically for the purpose of dropping those specially designed incendiary bombs on unsuspecting and unarmed civilians who were a threat to no-one.
Selecting one group of victims over another is selective statistic seiving. Whether they were gassed, incendiary bombed or herded out of Ukrainian villages, robbed and then shot into tractor-excavated pits. Or kept in forced labour camps until Typhus and TB killed them. Or beaten to death over two and three day periods in Sports Stadiums in Singapore for Japanese Troops amusement (while they were waiting for ships). Or worked to death on railways and used as fenceposts. The underlying inhumanity is what we must remember. You have to back up and see the bigger picture.
Although it was 80 years ago we should never forget any of those 80 Million people.
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nigelswift
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Edited Sep 06, 2018, 08:57
Re: Fuck it!
Sep 06, 2018, 08:39
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Howburn Digger wrote:
Selecting one group of victims over another is selective statistic seiving.
But that implies it's invalid to highlight anything without highlighting everything, which has the effect of preventing anything from being highlighted....
I think people should be entitled to their concerns without them being diluted by reference to the wider picture. The wider picture is the massive cold universe, against which no human concerns are significant.
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Howburn Digger
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Re: Fuck it!
Sep 06, 2018, 16:58
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tjj wrote: Howburn Digger wrote: lawrence2 wrote: What I thought was a good article turned out to be an anti-Semetic wack-job site. Sorry, nothing to see here...
What! Anti-Semetism? I don't believe it! What was it saying? Did it criticise the Israeli Occupation of Palestine and the systematic civilian bombing and intimidation of the Palestinian People? Maybe it even criticised the taking of Jerusalem as the new Israeli Capital? Maybe some people remember it used to be Tel Aviv? Maybe the site spoke of three and four generations of Palestinian Families who have been in Refugee (prison) Camps in the Lebanon... unable to return to their family homes in Palestine since the "Israeli" Occupation of 70 years ago. There are 400,000 of them. That's right - nearly half a million. Perhaps this anti-semetism by people should stop? ANY criticism of such Warlike Terror will NOT be tolerated!
I agree with all you have said above but ... being appalled by the illegal, aggressive behaviour of the State of Israel is not the same as...
The Holocaust happened, six million Jews died. We must never forget.
No-one was talking about The Holocaust of the Nazis.
I was referring to the Here and Now and the treatment of Palestinian farmers and citizens driven out by successive Israeli occupations.
No-one was denying Jewish deaths during WW2. I certainly wasn't.
The topic was anti-semitism and I was pointing out how any criticism of Israel's violence, aggression and warmongering on those neighbours it moved in beside in 1948 after a violent terrorist campaign, is immediately pounced on as "anti-semitism". Everyone knows it. Everyone sees it. It is an ancient, worn-out weary and tired tactic.
I was not surprised to see your response trying to derail the discussion into talking about gas chambers. Some people find it more comfortable to dwell in historical grief tourism than to actually see what is happening now.
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tjj
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Re: Fuck it!
Sep 06, 2018, 23:41
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Your "quotes" of anything I've written here are very selective. You left out the bit where I said
"I agree with all you have said above but ... being appalled by the illegal, aggressive behaviour of the State of Israel is not the same as the deep unease a lot of Jewish and non-Jewish people feel about the growing anti-Jewish movement in European countries such as Hungary ... "
Of course I feel anger and yes, grief about the suffering and injustice being inflicted on the people of Palestine. I could write a lot more too about the suffering of the Iraqis and Syrians but I would just be agreeing with, and repeating, what you have already said (again). Neither am I blind to the fact that the growing right wing movement in Europe is directed as much at Muslim refugees as it ever was at Jews. One evil does not negate the other was all I was trying to say. And that is my last word on this subject - it is far too important and emotive for point scoring on a forum. You win.
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