• orrk@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      it wasn’t even considered a singular event until the 70s, where everyone started to forget the other victims, you had the Jewish holocaust, the Romani holocaust, the Slavic holocaust etc… but ironically since most of the world still saw is as fine to be racist to these people, we gladly forgot about these groups. Hence, we are left with the holocaust of the only people to have a larger representative community in the allied powers as being the victims of the holocaust in everyone’s collective minds.

      And to be fair, it does sort of piss me off when people go around spreading the myth of the singular holocaust, something that is in its very essence holocaust denial, because you deny many of the differing victims of Nazi brutality and murder, to deny a modern day holocaust.

      Then again, try explaining to people that the genocide the Germans perpetrated didn’t start with millions dead, or that it mostly took place outside the camps (misconceptions Nazis also still use to this day, if you ever heard the “cookies” or “pizza” analogy from the far right).

      • bungalowtill@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        3 months ago

        Antisemitism, the Holocaust, genocide…these terms are often used as a political, argumentative weapon. I am pretty sure you‘d say the same thing. But, I think according to your definition of the Holocaust it, you’d like to use it as a weapon, too. Because your historical reference is not only wrong, it is upside down.

        It wasn‘t that easy to find the historical evolution of the term, but I think the Oxford dictionary explains it best:

        historical. Usually with capital initial and with the. The systematic mass killing of Jews under the German Nazi regime in Nazi-controlled areas of Europe between 1941 and 1945. Later also in extended use with reference to other victims of Nazi genocide, such as Romani people, gay people, or people with disabilities. The term The Holocaust began to be applied specifically in this sense by Jewish historians in the 1950s…

        This is pretty much what I read elsewhere. In Germany nobody talked about The Holocaust at all till the late 60s. Only slowly society allowed to speak about German atrocities. Since then the term is mostly, in Germany exclusively, used to describe the killing of Jews by the Nazi regime.

        And then, only in the 90s the Sinti and Roma, Slavic and homosexual victims were recognised, too.

        This chronology disproves the point you want to make: That the Holocaust is a propaganda trope only useful to the Israeli government.

        In the end you hijack the term holocaust denier and label Jews with it. You should think that through again.