-----Original Message-----
From: Dominic Fox <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Monday, August 08, 2005 1:26 PM
Subject: Re: Not exactly Hiroshima but about unhealed wounds

I think I'm in a broad agreement with much of this, Dominic, though I have
learned from it too. Coming at it from my perspective rather than yours,
there are aspects to your response which are helpful to me.

I had never, for instance, thought of the flinch in using a word that
doesn't belong to me. I'd had a different take perhaps partly because I have
or had a moderate amount of Yiddish in my vocabulary and have been taken for
Jewish though I'm not to my knowledge. Maybe I am just insensitive to
flinches

Of course, language doesn't belong to anyone, yet... where there is a
perfectly good word in one's own language, it's a little odd to use somebody
else's. It may be to show off, it may be to show sympathy...

I tend to interpret use of _Shoah_ by those I dont know to be Jews as
sympathy for a number of things Israeli I do not have sympathy with. And
that was my general point about the ousting of the Palestinians and their
word for it

It is true that "death camps" doesn't *directly indicate a systematic
project of extermination based on a theory of
racial and eugenic purity. But that would always be a long word. Apply it,
structurally, to something less revolting and it might sound funny, like one
of the supposed ten million words for snow in the arctic

My understanding of the word Shoah in terms of its usage is that it refers
specifically to Jews; but as you say the Jews were one category among many
even though they were the principal target.

I think "death camp" is a pretty strong term. It doesn't offer much scope
for the view of death as part of life. It emphasises destruction and loss.

Emphasis on what happened to Jews in Europe, rather than what happened to a
lot of people in Europe, has been directly and indrectly used to justify or
discourage criticism of the racist behaviour of those who set up and
maintain Israel; and I would want to emphasise that not so much directly but
by bringing back into the discussion the gays, the Roma and other
supposedly inferior races and, as you say, anyone else the exterminators
took a disliing to.

As you say _it is the technological organisation of killing that
is noteworthy, not the identity of the victims (or the perpetrators)_

I think though it is industrial scale and automation you refer to (?) rather
than technology as such, because most killing is technological to some
extent

death camps, as a term, brings that out well. by its brevity and by the use
of a word for which many search desperately for a euphemism

What do you do? Oh I am in death

>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.

We just don't have a word for it. There's too much of it. There are those
among us did this? the film of Bronowski picking at the bone dust of
Auschwitz comes into my mind

cruise missiles might sound almost nice with the connotations of cruise. but
Mass kill anywhere nice? doesnt

And in the future leaders to come will be able to justify the use of WMDs
not atom bombs or germ bombs. Acronyms may sanitise

war reality can always be explained away, they think - _war is war_ is the
cheekiest. it would be much clearer if Bush declared death on Iraq

or if we had civil death arrangements declared after the various african
govts received their arms

if there is no word, perhaps because there can't be, then I guess it's up
for grabs

i would wish though that it were not particularised.

yes people deny _the holocaust_; but the other side, perhaps more
widespread, is that in particularising those events, they can be left as
part of _then_, hiding the nonsense side of _never again_, as if it ever
stopped - people sent across borders they didnt want to cross as part of the
cease fire and, as I said, within a year napalm dropped on Greeks

what Hitler started, if it started then, has never ended - the
mass-destruction organisation of killing is big business today; and I'd like
to have a term that includes all the technological mass killing

and that a lot more strongly than i am interested in nailing the word games
from Israel, they're just part of the next generation carrying on the work


L