It is Lyotard who says "Shoah". I tend not to, although for the
mundane reason that people tend to flinch when non-Jews use language
that doesn't belong to them. In general I don't believe that language
"belongs" to anyone, but the flinch is real enough and one flinches at
it in turn.
I'm not sure that "death camps" by itself is adequate, as it doesn't
indicate a systematic project of extermination based on a theory of
racial and eugenic purity. The extermination did happen quite
specifically to Jews, even if it also happened quite specifically to
the Roma, "degenerates", and any other category of person the
exterminators took a disliking to. I would want to acknowledge that in
the first instance because there are people who want to deny it, as an
initial step on the path to further denial. Heidegger's infamous
description of the camps as an extension of modern factory farming
methods to the production of corpses is a good example of that kind of
erasure: for him, it is the technological organisation of killing that
is noteworthy, not the identity of the victims (or the perpetrators).
By convention, and because it is the name given to the thing the
deniers deny, I normally say "holocaust", in spite of the wrongness of
the term in several regards.
Speaking of flinches, I defy anyone to talk about terminology here
without wincing.
Dominic
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