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Nazi
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Sender: H-NET List for History of the Holocaust
<[email protected]> Author: John
P Fox 26 October 1999. "The
Holocaust was the apex, or nadir, of anti-Semitism
[and] it is this tradition that led to and
supported the Nazi Endlosung" (Robert Michael,
26.10.1999). Would Robert Michael care to explain, if he
can: - a) why it was, in the whole of modern
European history, that only under the National
Socialist dictatorship of Adolf Hitler - but
never before, and never since - that the attempted
extermination of a mass of European Jewry was put into
effect? And that, in the especially extreme context of
the Russo-German war of 1941-45.
- b) what, in the meantime and
afterwards, happened to all the rest of supposed
European "anti-Semitism"? Was that murderously
genocidal as well? If so, why did "it" not act as
Hitler did?
- c) why, if the supposedly genocidal
anti-Semitism Michael is talking about - and here one
must presume that what is meant is the usual
simplistic misnomer notion of so-called "Christian"
anti-Semitism - why was it that late on the evening of
7 April 1933, Adolf Hitler swore to a group of
colleagues that he was determined "to eradicate
Christianity in Germany root and branch"? How, now,
Robert Michael for this usual simplistic connection
between "Christianity" (whatever that meant in
practice for non-Jews), anti-Semitism, and Nazi
genocide?
- d) why, in common with millions of
other Europeans after the Great War and the
Russian-Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Hitler totally
identified Jews with Bolshevism in his speeches and
other political formulations in the 1920s and beyond -
in other words, placing "the Jews", but in this
context the Russian Jews, into a completely and
totally different category from their usual historical
category in the European experience?
- e) why the systematic extermination of
Jews in the Second World War only began as of 22 June
1941 in connection with the anti-Bolshevik ideological
war of National Socialism against Russian Bolshevism,
and not before? For, if Michael's repetition of the
usual run of simplistic arguments and tendentious
connections is to be taken as the gospel truth about
the origins of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, he,
Michael is required to explain this: why not before,
in the middle of Europe, where supposed "Christian
anti-Semitism" was supposed to have been alive and
kicking?
At the end of this murderous century of ours, I find
myself increasingly fed up with some of the utter
nonsense which is spread around about anything connected
with the Nazi genocide of the Jews. Even this week in the
London "The Times", we are told that "the Holocaust"
happened in 1939, because that was when a British "spy"
in Berlin up to August 1939, Frank Foley,
supposedly "rescued" German Jews "from the Holocaust"!
And some people prattle on about "education" about "the
Holocaust"? Amazing. What I also find quite utterly offensive, from a
humanitarian point of view, is the British Government's
submission to the pressure it has sustained from the
(British) Holocaust
Educational Trust, that there be a special "Holocaust
Remembrance Day" established in the United Kingdom. A
week ago yesterday, on Monday 19 October, I was
interviewed on the BBC Radio 4 "Today" programme
[reported on in "The Times" on 20 October], where
I outlined my opposition to this measure since use of the
term "the Holocaust" would wipe out from the historical
memory the other victims of Nazi genocidal policies (some
10-12 million of them), let alone the tens of millions of
other victims of other genocides this century. Instead, I suggested that what should be implemented
now is an "International Genocide Day". Such a day would
remember all victims of genocide, not merely one group
alone who suffered an horrific genocide, but a genocide
no less or more horrific than that suffered by other
victims of genocide. John
P Fox [H-Net
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