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what happened to the last person to question the 6,000,000 figure?
The last person to inquire objectively? Not a great deal, I would think. The last person to trot out the whole tedious 'never was a holocaust' malarky probably got deservedly thumped. You will recall that Hitler's executioners were remarkably systematic with their records, and were eventually brought to trial. The Ezhovchina was conducted on the basis that it was not taking place, and records were either never made or erased - though the opening of the KGB archives was a gold mine - and those involved were mostly executed themselves. Objectively, it's wildly difficult to establish what Stalin himself knew - and yet he must have known.
Basically, the 'whiter' the perpetrators, the sicker the crime is judged to be by other Europeans. That is more plausibly why "the shock deriving from it" was subjectively so "immense", maybe.
I agree that, especially in the context of the time, the idea that 'folk like us' were capable of such a thing was hard to accept - and there's no question that the same logic applies to Stalin's apologists. I don't accept, however, that the coincident arrival of mass media and information distribution can be so readily brushed aside. If you want me to agree that it's "more plausible", you're going to have to prove it, not assert it.
There's no point playing 'spot the holocaust'. I know there are many of them twisted though history like the writing in a stick of rock. And amazingly, to the liberal heart, not all of them are artifacts of colonialism. Each one of them merits sorrow and horror. That doesn't make your position all that much stronger.
I still don't understand what a. makes Nazi atrocities so special,
Timing. Records. Media. Trials. Organisation. Spin. They're important because they were made that way, and we live with that. In the context of the course Janina's talking about, possibly because of the effect they had on an influential group of German (and in Adorno's case, Jewish) left-wing thinkers who had by then emmigrated to the States. Because this was an extermination carried out by ordinary, even familiar people in what appeared to be a non-conflict, non-stress situation. The Milgram experiments, and others, were intended to find out how and why. Whatever the validity, Auschwitz is iconic now, and it echoes wherever there's a massacre.
b. [what] makes people think only Jewish people were affected
Who does?
c. how this sort of course can go on in the light of what's happening in Palestine.
Arguably, this course should be obligatory on that basis. But I don't know that it's going to be as slanted as you seem to think. We'll have to ask Janina.
And this:
If lefties were capable of objectivity this issue would have been faced years ago
You frankly abandon claims to 'scientific' or 'objective' discussion when you say something like that. It's infantile. As, incidentally, is thanks for getting scientific, at least for a moment. I won't bother to assail the futility of 'scientific' discussion of politics, nor the roots of Terror in science. But if you want to be taken seriously in your claims to 'scientific' discussion, then you may want to check your premises a little more carefully. |
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