The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word “holocaust” as follows: 1) A sacrifice wholly consumed by fire; 2) A complete or large-scale sacrifice; 3) A complete or wholesale destruction, esp. by fire; a great slaughter or massacre; 4) spec. The (period of the) mass murder of the Jews (or transf. of other groups) by the Nazis in the war of 1939 – 45.
On the basis of these definitions, the 20th century qualifies eminently as the century of the holocaust. Let us take a look at a few of the major events of that 100-year span.
1) The Anglo-Boer War (1899 – 1902) in South Africa (in which the British, at great cost to both sides, seized the gold and diamond fields from the Boers) was significant in that it led to the invention of the concentration camp designed especially for women and children – an all-British idea which was subsequently developed by the National Socialists in Germany. In these concentration camps was an early holocaust of the century – the death of thirty thousand women and children from starvation, typhoid and measles. In proportion to later holocausts, the numbers don’t sound very impressive, but they constituted a significant proportion of the Boer population at the time.
2) Contemporaneous with the Anglo-Boer War was the Spanish-American War of 1898 –1902 in which some three or four hundred American soldiers were killed and 270 000 Filipinos died of wounds, disease or starvation. What both these wars of aggression had in common was, of course, greed.
3) Between 1914 and 1918, the First World War killed thirteen million soldiers and seventeen million civilians – indeed a holocaust which could have pleased only a Malthusian. During this period, to add to the slaughter, was the Turkish/Ottoman massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in about 1915 – yet another holocaust to blot the pages of that century.
4) In the early years of the USSR under Lenin (1917 – 1923) it is estimated that about seven million people died during the civil war, either from starvation or military action. I should note here that numbers vary from five to ten million, depending on whose figures one accepts, so I have given an average. We can skip a few years to the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Josef Stalin collectivised the kulaks of the USSR, killing millions of them either by the sword or by disease and starvation throughout Russia and Siberia. In 1932-1933, Stalin also summarily appropriated all the grain in Ukraine and had this essential foodstuff transported to Russia or sold abroad for much-needed foreign goods. The result of this was mass starvation in Ukraine and the death of approximately five to seven million Ukrainians – a period and a holocaust known in Ukraine as the Holodomor.
5) It was only about three years later that Stalin began the great purges of 1936 – 1938, the Yezhovshchina, in which it is believed that about eight million Soviet citizens died either by execution or by disease and inanition in Siberia.
6) World War Two. The numbers of deaths vary slightly, but a generally acceptable figure is fifty-six million military and civilian dead. This is doubtless the greatest holocaust in history. As a footnote to it, we can mention that amongst the casualties were three gratuitous massacres – the devastation of Dresden by Sir Arthur (“Bomber”) Harris who killed between 40 and 70 000 civilians when the city posed no military threat to the Allies and refugees were streaming into it, fleeing from the advancing Russians; and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and then Nagasaki ordered by President Truman one month after Emperor Hirohito of Japan had made a personal appeal to him for peace negotiations. The combined death toll of these two bombs was between two and three hundred thousand (immediate and short-term).
7) In the Asian theatre, the Japanese were responsible for the death of approximately five million people in China, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, Malaya, Singapore and other East Asian countries.
THUS BY 1945, EVEN BEFORE MID-CENTURY, WE CAN REPORT A HOLOCAUST OF 120 MILLION PEOPLE.
Exact figures are difficult to obtain and vary widely from one authority to another, so generally I have averaged them out in an attempt to get a fairly balanced count.
8) In the late 1940s, in the Mao v. Chiang Chinese civil war, untold, unknown millions of Chinese were slaughtered. The estimates vary and an accurate count is probably impossible. In 1966, Mao, egged on by his lovely wife, initiated the Cultural Revolution in China, which led to a few more million dead – exact numbers unknown. Meanwhile, there was the Korean “Police Action” as Harry Truman nicely phrased it – a vicious civil war between North and South Korea which were in fact puppets of the USSR and the USA. Another few million dead Koreans – we don’t know exactly how many, but do know exactly how many white folk (Americans, Brits etc) were killed. Hardly had that slaughter been calmed when the French were badly beaten in Vietnam at Dien Bien Phu and the US gladly took over from them in due course. The tragic irony of that unnecessary conflict is that it needn’t have happened at all and would not have, had Secretary of State John Foster Dulles not walked out of peace negotiations. It also could have ended in 1968, but this is not the place to discuss the idiocy of Robert McNamara and his Pentagon cronies before and after the Tet offensive. The Vietnam war gave rise to a new term –escalation – which proved to be apt, as Kissinger, President Nixon’s pro-consul to the world, extended the war into Laos and Cambodia, where, in the killing fields, an estimated two to three million people were massacred while back in Vietnam itself the US continued to devastate the country and kill off about three million Vietnamese.
9) Meanwhile, down in Indonesia, great danger presented itself to the United States – there was a chance that a government hostile to the US might take power, so in 1965, the US sent troops and military materiel to ensure that Suharto, their blood-stained friend, would be the dictator of the country. There was a holocaust of about half a million civilians.
10) In 1975 – 1978, the number of dead under the Pol Pot regime was between 1.6 and 1.8 million – about one-fifth of the population. This doesn’t include those millions already killed by Kissinger.
11) During that same period, approximately 100 000 civilians were murdered in East Timor – about 24% of the East Timorese population.
12) Probably the biggest killing field of the lot was the continent of Africa from Sudan to the borders of Zambia, and from Eritrea to West Africa. Countless millions were slaughtered or starved to death by sundry warlords and dictators – the syphilitic Idi Amin, the megalomanic Mobutu Sese Seko (one of whose close business associates for some time was the Reverend Pat Robertson who recently recommended – on two separate occasions - the assassination of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela), the attack by Rwanda and Uganda on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (3.8 million dead), the ongoing disturbances in Darfur (400 000 dead) the civil war between the Hutus and the Tutsis, the madman Robert Mugabe… the list is long and tiresome. I think it is fruitless even to attempt to count the number of Africans slaughtered in the last fifty or so years. The numbers are probably in the tens of millions.
By comparison, the Balkan massacres of the 1990s were numerically minor, while the Bush/Clinton/BushII/Blair murder of over a million Iraqis between about 1991 and the present, is a significant testimony to Anglo-American blood-lust (or is it just lust for oil?). Saddam Hussein murdered approximately 300 000 of his citizens – far fewer than the killers named above. And then we have estimates that over a million Iraqis and Iranians were killed in the long-drawn-out war between the two countries in the 1980s.
I have added up the numbers given above and present them with the caveat that they are not accurate but approximate and very conservative.
A BARE MINIMUM OF ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY MILLION HUMAN BEINGS WERE SLAUGHTERED DURING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
The death toll during the Chinese civil war and the cultural revolution, as well as the number of dead in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa are unreliable and are not included. There are also disputes about the death tolls in South Asia. I have no reliable figures on the number of dead in the India-Pakistan dispute and have omitted the relatively minor number of victims in the Balkans and Central America. All these figures probably add up to tens of millions, but WE ALREADY HAVE ENOUGH BLOOD DRIPPING FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
Now, in that century of holocausts in which at least one hundred and forty million human beings were killed, amongst that number were approximately six million Jewish people (the official number accepted by World Jewry with few exceptions such as Professor Norman Finkelstein whose parents were Nazi victims).
The term “holocaust” as generally understood today was first used by Elie Wiesel in his imaginative autobiography first published in Yiddish (“Und Die Welt hot Geshvign”, 1956) and then in French, (“La Nuit,” 1958). He used the term in the sense given under 3) in the Oxford Dictionary: mass immolation by fire, reporting that people were placed on the edge of flaming pits and then pushed into them. Interestingly enough, he does not once mention gas chambers in this book. Since the end of the second world war, the multiple holocausts of the last century have remained un-capitalised, with one exception – the Jewish Holocaust.
Now some Western countries, led by the USA, have Jewish Holocaust Memorials, Jewish Holocaust Remembrance Days, Jewish Holocaust Laws (it’s forbidden by law in some countries even to question the fact that six million Jews were Holocausted). The politicians in these same countries make pre-election pilgrimages to the Jewish State to garner the Jewish vote. The children in these countries have classes in school devoted to the Jewish Holocaust. I am told that in some American schools, the children sing the Israeli national anthem. Many universities have programs in what are called Holocaust Studies.
So I ask myself questions:
Why are ONLY THE JEWISH PEOPLE memorialised and remembered so fondly in the West?
What about the Cambodians?
The Ukrainians?
The Russians?
The many nations of Europe?
The Laotians?
The Chinese?
The Africans?
The Latin Americans?
The Armenians?
The one hundred and forty million or more dead human beings throughout the twentieth century?
Are the Jewish people really
so SPECIAL?
so REMARKABLE?
so IMPORTANT?
so… SUPERIOR?
that they alone amongst all nations are worthy of Memorials, Remembrance Days, special school lessons about the Jewish Six Million?
And if they are, can someone please tell me…
WHY?
Source: http://www.lewisnews.com/article.asp?ID=122389
More on the idea of 'specialness': check out Mark Glenn's SIX SIMPLE WORDS
