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I still don't see why you can't post there but I can post something there on your behalf if you like. Mind you, they do insist on diffs there :) Selfstudier ( talk) 15:47, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
That would be WP:Meatpuppetry:)Of course with attribution. Pot and kettle seems quite appropriate here. Selfstudier ( talk) 17:56, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Me(Sic) and other editors have warned him about his disruptive behavior previously (for example: #1, #2, #3, and by an admin, Doug Weller, right here)
Selfstudier claims that I have strong opinions, but I don't believe that he or other editors working in the same field are opinion-free. The exact opposite. I(n) the past year, a lot of articles about Israel have completely shifted to the anti-Israel side, and I observe this trend every day. The ethnic component of Jewish identity is often completely rejected in discussions, the well-documented history of Jews in Palestine is dismissed as a biblical myth, and contemporary Israel's actions are frequently harshly criticized while the wrongdoings of the other side are frequently ignored. But again, though, I'm not criticizing Dan's beliefs; rather, I'm criticizing his disruptive methods of forcing them, bullying others to accept them.
I(n) the past year, a lot of articles about Israel have completely shifted to the anti-Israel side
. The ethnic component of Jewish identity is often completely rejected in discussions.
the well-documented history of Jews in Palestine is dismissed as a biblical myth,
contemporary Israel's actions are frequently harshly criticized while the wrongdoings of the other side are frequently ignored
If it wasn't pitiful, it would be laughable. Selfstudier ( talk) 15:18, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
Hello! I'm just stopping by to inform you about an RSN discussion I recently opened concerning the recent dispute at Genetic studies on Jews. The talk page discussion shows some telltale signs of becoming unproductive on its current course, and I think we've all pushed the conversation there too far on a tangent, so it's probably best to ask for outside perspectives.
Link to discussion:
I wish you all the best and appreciate your perspectives and participation both at RSN and at the talk page. - Hunan201p ( talk) 13:07, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Hi, Nishidani. I'm an arbitration clerk, which means I help manage and administer the arbitration process (on behalf of the committee). Thank you for making a statement in an arbitration request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case. However, we ask all participants and commentators to limit the size of their initial statements to 500 words. Your statement significantly exceeds this limit. Please reduce the length of your statement when you are next online. If the case is accepted, you will have the opportunity to present more evidence; in any event, concise, factual statements are much more likely to be understood and to influence the decisions of the arbitrators.
Requests for extensions of the word limit may be made either in your statement or
by email to the Committee through this link or arbcom-enwikimedia.org if email is not available through your account.
For the Arbitration Committee, ~ ToBeFree ( talk) 18:28, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
Mike Pompeo 'it is in the US’s interests to back Israel whatever its policies.' The Guardian 16 February 2023a
An interesting variation,i.e., Your country right or wrong,, on Stephen Decatur's by now proverbial statement. Though off-the-cuff, it represents an innovation in one of the standard principles of international relations going back to Lord Palmerston’s remark,
‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.'
He came to succour the Turkish Empire when Muhammad Ali Pasha challenged its hegemony in Syro-Palestine, saying that international interests must trump considerations of fairness. The Trumpian Pompeo goes one step further. The assertion of Interests are not a matter of realist calculations so much as fulfilling God’s designs for mankind as set forth in the bible. A mirror Evangelical imaging of the same mentality we find so disturbing in the notion of Islamic fundamentalist statehood. In timing, it is a clear greenlight signal to Netanyahoo's legislative proposals to put an end to Israel's separation of powers, which, the religious price he is prepared to pay, puts paid to what is left of its democracy. Nishidani ( talk) 13:12, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
Each day one learns something new. Today I learned that "jejeunely" is a word (and what it means). Thanks :) Also thanks for your non-jejeunely comments in general :) Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 14:08, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
Hey, just wanted to let you know that the comment you made at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case [1] is both incorrect and wildly anti-semitic. The words Holocaust and Shoah are in fact synonyms, note that they go to the same article. Would you like me to recommend some reading? Horse Eye's Back ( talk) 16:01, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
I just don't have much time these days but perhaps I should give one example about the emotional crux undrlying wiki clashes over the Holocaust in Poland, between exclusivist (Jewish) and inclusivist approaches to that topic. Here's one example. It is remarkable for the delicacy of its mediation between Poles and Jewish Poles and yet, utterly crass, if read through (an imaginative exercise) through Polish eyes:-
John T. Pawlikowski, in his memoir-reflection on Polish Jewish relations in connection with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, tried as a President Carter appointee to its Council, to get Polish American groups to do something towards improving thel exhibitions, which mentioned Poles at the beginning as suffering the initial brunt of Nazi violence, and at the end (as rescuers) but said litte of their engulfment in the central killing programmes. He takes that constituency to task for not responding to his request. Later, the issue arose as to whether the Museum should put Polish victims (2 million) on a par with the 3 million Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Bożena Urbamowicz-Gilbride had even resigned from the Council for its failure to address this precise issue of commemorating the Polish victims. The general consensus of experts then was that a distinction does exist that militates against any idea of equation. No decision was reached when on a further occasion, she and several Polish survivors of the death camps, came to give their testimony. Pawlikowski writes:
while Urbanowicz-Gilbride, Lukas, and the several Polish survivors of concentration camps tell a story that very much needs to be heard, their failure to make proper distinctions weakens their ability to get a hearing for their story. Saying this in no way undercuts the continued need to make the story of the Nazi brutality against the Polish people as part of its racial ideology better known. We must mourn the Polish victimxs; we must make their story important components of Holocaust education programmes. But we cannot efface the special nature of the attack on the Jewish community within the Nazi programme of racial cleansing. And until people interested in achieving this fully appreciate the distinction, we will never be successful in making the Polish story better understood.' John T. Pawlikowski, 'The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge for Polish-Jewish Relations,' in Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski, Antony Polonsky (eds.),Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 19: Polish-Jewish Relations in North America, Liverpool University Press,2022 ISBN 978-1-802-07943-2 pp.415-429.p.425
Pawlikowski notes that at an NPAJAC conference in 2004 the Catholic theologian and historian Ronald Modras gave a presentation defending the use of the word Holocaust for Polish victims of Nazi racist policies. Paulikowski, himself a priest, then glosses this with his personal view:-
For myself, I do accept the possibility of using 'Holocaust' as an overarching term for the entirety of victimization under the Nazis, but only if the proper distinction mentioned above is clearly maintained. p.426
If anyone can't see the extraordinarily arrogant putdown implicit in this discrimination, then tomorrow I will parse the passage to tease out the ethnocentric prejudice instinct in this piece of rhetoric. Nishidani ( talk) 23:07, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
Unless you guys get your act together and admit that, despite the identical circumstances, you must endorse the idea that Jewish suffering was in a category of its own and qualitatively different (superior) to what Polish victims of Nazi genocide experienced, your narrative is not going to get the kind of hearing it otherwise deserves. We won't help you unless you accept our terms, admit your relative marginality and second-class status in Holocaust history.
lol nableezy - 18:25, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
If someone said a bagel is uniquely Jewish, and I rejoined, ‘no it isn’t. It is just the Jewish version of a wider type of pastry’, someone might assert that my comment was ‘wildly antisemitic,’ before even asking me to clarify on what basis I made that remark. That would tell me more about the person's frail assumptions, than about my own. Your assumption of your interlocutor’s bad faith, or, worse still, ignorance, constituted a personal attack, because if someone,- esp. like myself with my long editing history on these topics, and even a half century of study- were to use ‘wildly antisemitic’ or even ‘’’just’’’ anti-Semitic language, then the conclusion would be obvious. That I am antisemitic.
The option of pausing to think (I love that phrase, because it betrays a proverbial insight into the fact that while expressing our views, we are, as often as not, not thinking. We have to stop the inner chatter and reflect on what is really being said in rapid exchanges). Some people patient enough to actually read through my edit TLDR divagations, know that I think in terms of categories and subcategories. That I strive to think in terms of universal principles or laws, as opposed to particularistic narratives that assume the sui generis nature of, whatever, and thirdly that I like the comparative method. Thus, in the case of the bagel,. that is a subset of the broad category of breads, which breaks down into a stemma of (a) those made from yeasted wheat dough, (b) such bread prepared by boiling and baking, (c) idem, for the type sprinkled with seeds, and (d) shaped like a doughnut. Thus roughly defined, one then casts about for varieties which would fit these defining terms in the final subset formed by (a) to (d), foodstuffs like some regional varieties of the Syrian ka’ak, the Polish obwarzanek, bublik and the Polish-Jewish bagel, each of which can be further defined to mark differences from the others. All words lend themselves to this category analysis. I could do one with antisemitism, as a subset of one of the branches of the category of Prejudice, and with its own internal distinctions from T. S. Eliot’s to Hitler’s. Your remark is typical of people who use the word frivolously, without apparently grasping which of its numerous uses are prompting your throw-away line.
In any case, insults like yours should always be turned to advantage, ergo, my reflections below, which aim to isolate from my early formative reading some 50 years ago, those books which led me to make the judgment I made (Despite a vast subsequent output of studies on all of the neglected or fugitive details, case by case, throughout Europe, I don't believe our understanding of what happened has changed significantly, as opposed to how it could have come to pass- which remains refractive to reason). Endorsing a general opinion, chucking around abusive adjectives, resting one’s mental butt on something called commonsense or consensus, is something we’re all raised into. I like to think, after Nietzsche, that if I find myself with an opinion, it is not a public conceit, but personal, arrived at by duly studying why and how I came about, rationally, to entertain that notion. I’m waiting on an ordered copy of a book I’ve read but lack, which should arrive tomorrow. Nishidani ( talk) 21:44, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
I decided to accept the draft "The Holocaust and the Nakba....:" but to change it to a clearer title. For a further discussion of my rational, see Buidhe's talk page. DGG ( talk ) 05:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
'After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved- namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory- but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and the rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people.' Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (1951) Penguin Books 2017 ISBN 978-0-241-31675-7 p.379.
I am so sorry to learn about your wife but am happy that modern medicine was able to extend her life. Cullen328 ( talk) 21:37, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Is it Italian keyboard and the tilde is not the third position of n key? Selfstudier ( talk) 22:53, 5 March 2023 (UTC)
For an outstanding wikipedian, Doug Weller
'After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims. They balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims' fate.' Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Routledge (1973) 1990 p.361.
'Inman walked through the house and out the back door and saw a man killing a group of badly wounded Federals by striking them in the head with a hammer. The Federals had been arranged in an order, with their heads all pointing one way, and the man moved briskly down the row, making a clear effort to let one strike apiece do. Not angry, just moving from one to one like a man with a job of work to get done-' Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain1997 p.9 The allusion is something said to have taken place once nightfall set in, allowing a formal pause on the killing fields near Sunken Hill in the Battle of Fredericksburg. [a]
'the United States (US) dropped eight times more bomb tonnage in Indochina – over two million tons on Laos alone – in Vietnam than in World War 11, killing two to three million people, mainly civilians. When Western publics recoiled in horror from the often-televised destructive scenes of this war, air forces moved to more accurate technologies, namely guided missiles. Even then, military strategists and lawyers acknowledge that the “collateral damage” of “surgical strikes”- what drone operators call bugsplat -is unavoidable, if regrettable. [2]
The wiki articles I was referred to, to amend my perceived indulgence in a ‘wildly antisemitic’ distinction, reflect the POV that the Shoah and Holocaust are interchangeable terms for a phenomenon of racial victimization affecting only Jews:-
Yom HaShoah lit. 'Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day'), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period.
That could be read, giving proper weight to 'in the Holocaust', to imply a distinction using Holocaust as the larger phenomenon of which the Jewish victims form a core reality. Any nation has a natural right to focus on its own particular perspective, in any case.
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.[b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination.
This takes the terms, as is very commonplace, as interchangeable and commensurate and implicitly excludes the idea that the other half the victims of Nazi racially-designed genocidal actions are to be included in the category of the Holocaust.
Are the two terms synonyms that are denotatively exclusive of non-Jewish victims, then?
Cleave and hew are synonyms, but also antonyms at the same time (split/cling to). It is true that Shoah and Holocaust are now used as synonyms, just as it is true that Holocaust usage shows a much wider range of denotation than Shoah. Holocaust is a vintage word with usage attested for various events from genocide to devastating fires from around the turn of the 19th century down to the late 1950s [b], and was also adopted to refer to the mass slaughter of civilian populations in WW2. Shoah was so rare in English that the OED 2nd edition of 1989 didn’t even register the term. But among the earliest uses of Holocaust, the generic sense referring to all victims of Nazi genocide was available from the outset. As early as 1945, M.R. Cohen wrote:
’Millions of surviving victims of the Nazi holocaust, Jews and non-Jews alike, will stand before us in the years to come.’ [3]
Cohen was an acute logician and analyst of language, with wide interests, playing a seminal role in the establishment and growth of the journal Jewish Social Studies, which as our article states, concerned itself with the universal (all men) and the particular (Jews). And that is precisely the issue here. Both Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman define what happened to this other half, to the Poles for example in Auschwitz, as genocide, but argue that there is a qualitative distinction to be made nonetheless. [c] This is the premise affirmed by John Pawlikowski as we shall see.
So what does one do with the millions of other peoples who were exterminated – which no one challenges [d] and the larger number is widely remembered [e] – by implementing a broader policy of liquidating inferior races, some 50 million Slavs according to Generalplan Ost. [f] In the end, from 10 to 17 million people in Europe fell victim to actions that were inspired by genocidal racism, of whom half or a third were Jewish: 5.1 (Raul Hilberg)/ 5.3-4 (Yehuda Bauer) or 5.7 [g] ( Snyder) million upwards [h] Given that at least 5 million were Jewish, how do we classify the phenomenon comprising ‘the other half’?(whose round number is also historically grounded in hearsay, as it was pulled out of the hat by Simon Wiesenthal [10].) To illustrate the point concretely, must the shoah at Auschwitz only refer to the 1.35 million Jews killed there, excluding the 250,000 non-Jews, (of whom 74,000 [11] -83,000 were Poles) who died in that same place, by the same means, on the same racist-ideological grounds?
There are strong grounds for arguing for the specialness of Jewish victimization. For one, in Snyder’s words, ‘The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.’ [i] In addition, numerous case studies show how local groups among Latvians, Lithuanians and the like, jumped with alacrity as war broke out, and Nazis hadn’t even set foot in their territory, to lynch, eradicate, murder, hang up on butcher hooks members of Jewish communities in their midst. Others stood by or actively approved, much as the Muhacir in Anatolia, themselves ethnically cleansed from Europe and elsewhere, did during the Armenian genocide. There is an important differentiating factor on a psychosociological plane among all those thrust into the forecourts of war, between the targeted Slavic nationalities and those, in their midst, who found themselves stripped of their primary identity as Poles, Ukrainians, Russians etc.,and, as Jews did, had to suffer the lacerating existential trauma of a people who, orphaned of those customary networks of tacit solidarity that inform national identities, suddenly found themselves facing the lethal hostility of the Wehrmacht/SS and the fear, insouciance or coldness of former neighbours, with drastically reduced margins for survival. [j] [k] The problem is, however, that this feeds into a concept of exceptionalism, with its rhetoric of uniqueness, which is not only counter-productive of understanding, but methodologically inane, as the greatest comparativist historian of the last century, as Arnold Toynbee, with all his admitted faults, pointed out almost 90 years ago.
Two survivors from the holocaust concentration camps meet up and exchange some black-humoured repartee concerning the Shoah. They are interrupted by God who happens by and overhears their banter. He interjects:’How on earth do you dare banter and joke about this catastrophe?’ The two survivors snap back:’how could You know what it was like? You weren’t there!” [l]
It took some time for scholarship to settle on an appropriate word to describe the phenomenon. [m] The words used to refer to the phenomenon of WW2 mass slaughter are many,- from the ethnospecific khurbn, shoa, continuous pogrom, Final Solution, Event, judeocide, the unnameable/unspeakable, and pseudo-sacred sacrifice etc., to the more generic genocide, (H/h)olocaust, univers concentrationnaire, (Great) Catastrophe, Götterdämmerung and ethnocide. [20] to name but a few,- and the denotative extensions and connotations of each differ.
Shoah in Israeli usage refers to a 12 year time span, while Holocaust tends to evoke (a) broadly the institutionalization of ethnic murders over the roughly six year period of WW2, from the invasion of Poland, or, (b) more restrictively, to the three years embracing the industrialized murder of Jews specifically that accelerated massively from 22 June 1942 onwards when the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched. Usage that restricts, implicitly or explicitly, the Holocaust to (b) means that the earlier propaiudeutic operations that set precedents for administratively organized group murders, such as Aktion T4’s euthanization of from 70,273 [n] to 275,000 [o] deemed unfit to live, or the 61,000 members of the Polish elite prescriptively targeted in the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, [p] of whom two thirds were liquidated largely in the opening months of the war, are scanted from the narrative or marginalized in contemporary Holocaust commemorations, as is the gypsy Samudaripen, 70% of whose Polish population alone was exterminated.
The AktionT4 story, in particular, is a crucial precursor for the holocaust process. One estimate made at the time was that 1,000,000 Germans would have to be exterminated on the grounds of being of unsound body or mind. [22] The original technique consisted of killing the mentally ill with a bullet to the neck. This method of disposing of 'useless mouths' (whose murder was duly calculated to have saved the Reich 885 million marks in expenses) was replaced by building 'shower' rooms in the extermination sites, where groups of 10 to 15 patients were ushered in. Once sealed off, the showers were flushed with carbon monoxide to kill them by asphyxiation. The bodies were then burnt in crematoriums made for that purpose in adjacent buildings. What later occurred at Auschwitz and other death camps was not 'unique' but replicated on a vast scale the methods devised for those diagnosed as insane. In short, as Poliakov notes, the rapidity with which the Nazi authorities implemented the later rational and efficient industrial murder factories drew directly on the model developed to exterminate Germany's mentally ill. [q] One striking difference, was that the euthanasia programme, despite its secrecy, generated widespread popular opposition and protests within Germany which eventually led to its suspension, as opposed to the persecution and deportation of Jews, which, according to one informal wartime poll, left 90% of the population indifferent. [r]
All this is further complicated by the shifts in debate position and focuses over successive decades, with geopolitical pressures playing not an insignificant role. The Yalta division of Europe into an Eastern Soviet bloc sphere and Western Europe under American auspices, played into this, esp. after the Cold War kicked in. The partition translated into a neglect of the Holocaust’s other victims in countries which now became adversaries of the West. Archives were closed off from external scrutiny, with the exception of Poland; no systematic centralization of documentation had been organized, leaving archival material dispersed throughout Eastern Europe, [25] and Soviet scholarship was given very restricted agendas. [s] Further events like the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, [t] the showcasing of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) [u] and the Six Days War (1967) also inflected reformulations of Holocaust discourse, as did the Yom Kippur War. [29] [v] To which one might add the impact of a renewed nationalism in the former Soviet states as they struggled to reconstruct their identities by addressing their respective histories, particularly with regard to WW2. [w] This last aspect is the gravamen behind Grabowsky and Klein's critique of wikipedia's Polish Holocaust articles. Whatever the biases, we have empirical evidence that affirms that in Western awareness the immense toll of 5.1 million Slavic, i.e. Polish and Russian victims of the holocaust, has been studiously wiped off the public record. They figure marginally, though constituting almost half of the victims, way under other minorities like the disabled, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, in the awaremess of schoolers in their formative years. [31] [x]
As early as 1941 Churchill, sizing up reports of atrocities trickling in from Europe of Nazi policies, stated that ‘we are in the presence of a crime without a name.' [32] It was Raphael Lemkin, three years later, who in his germinal study Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) [33] devised the neologism genocide to describe the ethnic and cultural restructuring being conducted by the Nazi authorities throughout occupied Europe, citing the mass murders 'mainly of Jews, Poles, Slovenes and Russians.' [34] Citing Hitler’s remark in Mein Kampf that 'the greatest of spirits can be liquidated if the bearer is beaten to death by a rubber truncheon', he defines this as referring concretely in his contemporary world to 'the practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders.' Lemkin had been from his youth struck by the impunity enjoyed by those who carried out the Armenian genocide. At age 18, he was shocked by the destruction systematically visited upon the Armenians and noted, 'A nation was killed and the guilty persons set free.' [y] [z] The term genocide was required because there was something distinctive about Nazi policy as opposed to ethnic massacres of the past and new conceptions require new terms. [35], for
'German militarism is the most virulent because it is based upon a highly developed national and racial emotionalism which by means of modern technology can be released upon the world in a much more efficient and destructive way than any of the pedestrian methods of earlier wars.' [36]
Several terms vied for the choice of a terminus technicus for the Holocaust as it affected Jews. The primary Jewish victims of the Nazi onslaught eastwards referred to the Holocaust in their Yiddish mother tongue as a khurbn (חורבן), ‘disaster’. A loanword from Hebrew, as opposed to the biblical connotations of Shoa this term resonates in both the original Hebrew and Yiddish with an allusion to two earlier disasters that inform Jewish historical memory, the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 587 BCE and of the Second Temple in 70.CE, and also to the exile from Eretz Israel. [aa] It maintains its currency among American Orthodox Jews, particularly those who speak Yiddish. [37] Given the resonance of historical antecedents, khurbn implicitly disowns the idea that the European holocaust as it affected Jews was unprecedented. [ab] In the new state of Israel, contrariwise, the term was rejected: it retained a resonance of the language of Europe’s persecuted Jews, from whom the new society of Israelis wished to both distance itself and shake off memories of their tragic fate. [ac] According to Birgitte Enemark, at the time only examples of armed Jewish resistance were considered heroic, and 'all other aspects of the Jewish experience' were lumped together,' under the label "Holocaust"."Holocaust" thus became the `non-heroic' category.' [39]
Shoah ( שׁוֹאָה) "calamity" was the word that emerged in a December 1938 deliberation of the Central Committee of the Mapai party, as the rampaging precedent set by Kristillnacht became routinized. [40] Though mentioned in a work entitled Sho’at Yehudi Polin (Devastation of Polish Jewry), published in Jerusalem in 1940 to describe the calamity that had befallen European Jews, [41] the term was rarely used during the war by the Yishuv in Palestine until 1946. [42] The term has a biblical resonance [ad]- in the Book of Job it is used for a sudden unforeseen disaster and desolation [ae]- and began to enter common usage after the summer of 1947 [44], when, after its establishment in 1946 to commemorate the annihilation of European Jewry, Yad Vashem held a conference dedicated to researching both the Shoah and the Kabbalistic concept of heroism ( Gevurah). [42] Khorbn and Shoah were thereafter used interchangeably in public discourse until, by the early 1960s, Shoah emerged as the dominant term in Israeli usage to refer more broadly to what European Jews underwent in the period from the Machtergreifung i.e., Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 down to May 1945. [45] [46]
As alluded to above, in 1945 M. R. Cohen could refer to the general annihilation of European peoples under Nazism, Jews and non-Jews, as a 'holocaust'. The transition in the use of this term from the generic to the particular, from all victims to Jewish victims, took some decades. [af] Hannah Arendt, in her seminal masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), speaks of 'extermination' broadly for what befell not only Jews but other peoples in both Nazi and Soviet hands, for which, outrageously, a relatively small phenomenon like 'the Jewish question' and antisemitism could become the catalyst of world war and its death factories. [47] Léon Poliakov recounted in his memoirs that at the time of his foundational study of the holocaust in 1951, the word 'genocide' was deemed not fit for publication, [48] and though he did employ it occasionally in his text, [ag] he generally uses the term 'extermination'. When Gerald Reitlinger undertook in 1953 the first comprehensive English study of the genocide of Jews, he chose to write. not of the Shoah or Holocaust, but of the Final Solution, the title of his book alluding to the specific Nazi decision for an Endlösung der Judenfrage. [ah]
In 1961 Hilberg, writing what was to become the cornerstone of later Holocaust studies, rigorously abstained from using the word in his monumental study. [50] Ever stylistically wedded to detached clinical language, he preferred the term 'destruction' - a generic term shorn of the various emotional resonances instinct in these other labels-in describing the 'annihilation' of European Jews as ‘the world’s first completed destruction process’ . [1] The decisive words here are (a) ‘first’ and (b) ‘completed’, both implicitly denying that, in his historian’s view, we may speak of the phenomenon as ‘unique’. For ‘first’ ominously suggests that the process may repeat itself in the future,(something that is sui generis cannot recur) and ‘completed’ affirms an awareness that the shoah was, at that point in time, the last of a series of comparable events, distinguished only from its predecessors by the thoroughness of its accomplishment. [ai]
That same year was to be a turning point in the assessment of the Holocaust in another sense, since the trial of Adolf Eichman contemporaneously taking place in Jerusalem had widespread repercussions on discourse framing the event. In contradistinction to the Nuremberg trials, where indictments were laid for "crimes against members of various nations," the priority of the proceedings was to focus on the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy, and, it was believed, justice could only be meted out by a Jewish court, which, paradoxically according to Hannah Arendt, citing the prosecutor Gideon Hausner's words, would make 'no ethnic distinctions.' [aj] This was understandable. given the extraordinary tolerance Adenauer’s Germany , for one, showed to the tens of thousands of minions of massacre in the midst of its citizenry, among them war criminals. Germany had jurisdiction to try Eichmann but studiously circumvented the idea of extradition, and given the extreme leniency of the courts in sentencing men with thousands of murders on their conscience, that country at least could not be counted on to render justice. We all know of the post-war Polish recrudescence of antisemitism, but who recalls incidents like that in August 1949 in Munich when police shot at a crowd of 500 Jews who had taken to the streets to protest the publication in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of a letter that referred to Jews as ‘bloodsuckers’ (Blutsauger)? [51] [ak]
In the aftermath of World War II, the Nazi holocaust was not cast as a uniquely Jewish — let alone a historically unique — event. Organized American Jewry in particular was at pains to place it in a universalist context. After the June war, however, the Nazi Final Solution was radically reframed. "The first and most important claim that emerged from the 1967 war and became emblematic of American Judaism," Jacob Neusner recalls, was that "the Holocaust . . . was unique, without parallel in human history." In an illuminating essay, historian David Stannard ridicules the "small industry of Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience with all the energy and ingenuity of theological zealots".' [53]
'According to Saul Friedländer: ‘The absolute character of the anti-Jewish drive of the Nazis makes it impossible to integrate the extermination of the Jews, not only within the killings the general framework of Nazi persecutions, but even within the wider aspects of contemporary ideological-political behaviour such as fascism, totalitarianism, economic exploitation and so on.’ I disagree.' [54]
As seen above in Pt.2, the East European Jewish victims of the Holocaust appear to have suffered none of the brain-wracking vexations, that arose in the diaspora and Israel in the postwar period, over the mot propre for what was happening to them. They used the emic, historically resonant term khurbn. The word drew an implicit analogy between the scale of the catastrophe that hit them, and two iconic events in antiquity that branded Jewish memory with a profound sense of loss, the destructions of the First and Second Temples. Thus, khurbn disavowed uniqueness, by affirming an essential continuity, the idea that the physical destruction of the diaspora’s core population repeated an earlier pattern: it was a recurrent, if exceeding rare, event. The symbolic force of this analogy lay in the fact that, in the legend of the foundations of the diaspora, the synagogue, wherever erected, slowly came to be experienced as a substitute for the temple in Jerusalem, with rabbis replacing the priesthood, and rituals of prayer and observance supplanting sacrifice. The unique specificity of the one sacred site millennia before has been preempted by a creative solution dictated by necessity: the ‘temple’ was any site Jewish communities built to celebrate their religion. The Final Solution, in aiming to extirpate their communities and raze their synagogal institutions, constituted the third in a series.
In Israel, to the contrary, this Yiddish khurbn was disliked just as the imputed ‘sheepishness’ of the victims and those who, surviving, made aliyah to the new state with its heroic ethos, was a source of discomfort and embarrassment. One slang term in Israeli usage referred to the martyrs of the camps, as opposed to the Warsaw ghetto rebels who fought back, as 'soap'. [al] In its stead, the word shoah, which had become current in the Palestinian yishuv, gained an ascendancy. The emergent preference for the biblical shoah marked a shift from profane history (secular time) to an idiom of religious thrust (sacred). On another plane, it was also emblematic of natural tendency, instinct in the structural dynamics flowing from the definition of Israel as the Jewish state for the Jewish people, to invest it with discursive authority, one with a final say on crucial matters of definition. [am] One might be tempted to think of a kind of unspoken tendency towards a Vaticanization of authority arising to reign over the disiecta membra of diasporic life which had always been characterized by an intense dialogic interplay, creatively dissonant, between far-flung communities which were unified in their sense of a shared Jewish identity but which, one by one, had to, as circumstances dictated, respond to very different historical social and political challenges. The emergence of a Zionist state, which had a completely different, because national and geopolitical, set of priorities, naturally bore a logic that militated towards the subordination of the diaspora, by redefining it as a contingent expedient, chaotically dispersed and historically defeated, to what was the new unifying narrative of Jewishness as defined by the state of Israel.
Political interests play an important role in suppressing analogies, in order to assert the uniqueness of the holocaust. In the late 1990s, according to Norman Finkelstein, Jewish lobbyists in Congress succeeded in blocking the passage of a bill to commemorate a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide. The USHMM, he adds, following declarations from both Elie Wiesel and Yad Vashem, and at the request of the Israeli government, virtually erased references to the Armenian genocide from its museum's exposition. [55]
Over the last quarter of a century highlighting the Holocaust as a unique event affecting only Jews has passed out of scholarly fashion. [an] though the idea that the holocaust refers to the genocide of Jews alone still holds the upper hand. [ao]
'(Genocide’s) usage in reference to the Shoah and similar events of comparable destructive intent, both prior and subsequent, has gradually increased, including by historians, especially since the 1990s. The word “genocide” in reference to the extermination of the Jews is, in some respects, more neutral than both “Holocaust,” which evokes an etymological notion of the sacrificial, and “Shoah”, which seems to exclude the affected non-Jewish groups. At the same time, the term “genocide” allows for a comparison of similar causes and effects, and emphasizes, by analogy with the legal definition of crime, the intent, which in this case is the endeavour to partially or completely destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.’( Sullam 2020, p. 4)
‘The Nazi plan of Genocide was related to many peoples, races, and religions, and, it is only because Hitler succeeded in wiping out 6 million Jews, that it became known predominantly as a Jewish case. As a matter of fact, Hitler wanted to commit G. against the Slavic peoples in order to colonize the East and extend the German Empire up to the Ural mts. Thereupon after the completion of the successful war he would he would have turned to the West and to subtract from the French people the 20 million Frenchmen he had promised in his conversation with Rauschning.’ Lemkin cited in ( Moses 2008, p. 20) [ap]
If one trawls the global past for evidence of genocide, history becomes a charnel house. Though the holocaust is ‘the most documented of genocides’, [59] genocide itself has always been a commonplace of history. It received powerful theological endorsement in the Tanakh/Old Testament, where the injunction was laid down to annihilate the Seven Nations ( Deuteronomy 7:2, 20:16-18) namely the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. [60] The logic and principle of exterminating any resistant population by murdering the males and enslaving the rest were first set forth in Western tradition in Thucydides’ vignette, The Melian Dialogue regarding the options given the islanders of Melos during the Peloponnesian War.
Lemkin was well aware of precedents stretching back to the deep past, [aq] but for our purposes, one should briefly reacquaint our fugitive modern memory with its selective, fragmentary interest in the past, with how the 19th century's periphery must have experienced the glorious march of progress whose beneficiaries, the West-is-besters, complacently celebrate. Incidents of mass killings in the name of civilization were commonplace, many implemented under impress of the Virgilian maxim drilled into the elites who emerged to gather up and govern their flourishing, expansive windfall empires, i.e., the purpose was to retread the path cut out paradigmatically by the Roman empire, whose Virgilian civilizing mission consisted of 'imposing the custom of peace, sparing the subjugated and warring down the proud.' [ar]. An illustration of how this worked out in practice was France's invasion of Algeria, beginning in 1834. At that time the country had an estimated population of roughly 2 million. Four decades later, by 1875 when the conquest was completed, approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians had been killed. The necessity of genocidal killings lingered on in everyday conversation. One author in 1882 commented that 'we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and if necessary destroy him'. [61] [as]
An important principle in approaching history is the relationship between (imperial) core and periphery. [au] Genocide as a twentieth century phenomenon arguably began with Lothar von Trotha’s campaign to decimate the Herero people in 1904-1905,-in one estimate 65,000 of 80,000 (80%) died- accomplished in broad daylight since it was duly covered in the German press. Remembrance of the holocaust is celebrated in postwar Germany but, until recently, this earlier episode of the country's colonial genocide was all but erased from memory. [av] The idea of herding at gunpoint uprooted townsfolk into arid zones where they might die en masse of famine was taken up by the Turks, with their forced exterminatory marches, and the technique, a typical case of blowback, was adopted and widely deployed by Nazis, and to a lesser extent by the Japanese in WW2.
But this is all too facile, and culturally self-regarding to single out three examples which happen to instance the genocidal practices of those countries which were later to emerge as adversaries of the Western powers in two successive world wars.If we take the years around 1900 as an angle from which to reflect on what was to follow in the 20th century, perhaps the best starting point is H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) where the complacent Western core becomes, by a brilliant piece of topical tableturning of imperial prejudices, a planetary periphery. Wells reimagined this annihilation with the modern world refigured as aborigines, invaded and under mechanical extirpation from Martians just as Tasmania’s aboriginal population of 5-7,000 people was all but annihilated within a short century, starting with the Black War. [aw]
In 1896-1898 Spain’s concentration camp policy in Cuba wiped out 10% of the island’s population. The British adopted the same system in South Africa in 1899, closeting Boer civilians, women and children into barb-wire enclosures where over 2 years over 25,000 died of disease and malnutrition as their army wardens maintained guard. On the other side of the world, the the United States’ suppression of the Philippine war of independence had the collateral impact of leading to the death through disease and famine of 10 to 20 times the number of guerilla fighters killed. In all three, concentration camps, scorched earth and starvation policies took the largest toll out on civilians. Over a 20 year period Leopold II of Belgium’s murderous policies in the Congo (1885-1908) were so vastin their application that the minimal figure for those killed is 1,500,000, with a maximum estimate ranging as high as 13,000,000. By 1900, only 10% of aborigines (50,000) had survived the impact of British colonialization, with an estimated 20,000 of the original estimated 500,000 members of 300 tribes, each with their distinct languages, killed by direct genocidal settler practices. [63] This was the international background for Germany's policies against the Herero.
After WW1, the metropolitan assault on peripheries resumed. In the Second Italo-Senussi War (1923-1932) Italy likewise killed one quarter of the population in the region of Cyrenaica, by the mass murder of civilians and surrendered soldiers, resorting to the mustard gas bombing of villages,(much as Spain was resorting to chemical weapons against the Berbers in the Rif War in Morocco at that time, [ax] as well as death marches into the desert). Having mastered the techniques there, they proceeded to Ethiopia where their spraying of areas with mustard and other gases, together with tactics of gunning down masses of surrendered soldiers and enforcing death marches. The conservative figure is that Italy's invasion of Ethiopia led to the death of perhaps 225,000 people. Mann comments:'This was the equivalent not of the Final Solution but (on a smaller scale) the Nazi mass murder of Poles.' [64] [ay] In the Terror Famine implemented in Ukraine in 1932-1933, Stalin intentionally starved to death over 3 million Ukrainians. At the time, the future core of the Luftwaffe’s new generation of pilots was, under a secretive Soviet-Germany pact to circumvent the Versailles agreement, being trained at Lipetsk fighter-pilot school with close to a thousand German military personnel, not far from the genocidal liquidations underway to their west. [az] [ba]
David Stannard, author of a foundational study on the massacre of American indigenous peoples, American Holocaust, has argued that the view that the holocaust as a 'unique, unprecedented, and categorically incommensurable' stand-alone event restricted to Jews, is a recent construction. Questioning the late 20th century arrogation of the term to refer exclusively to what befell the Jewish victims of Nazism, he then argues that
'it is the hegemonic product of many years of strenuous intellectual labour by a handful of Jewish scholars and writers who have dedicated much if not all of their professional lives to the advancement of this exclusivist idea.' [68]
While conceptually incoherent, the uniqueness model is defended, he then documents, with intimidating polemical vigour. Yehuda Bauer in taking President Carter to task publicly for mentioning the holocaust's 11, not 6, million victims, (perhaps influenced by Simon Wiesenthal's recent surmise) suggested in his excoriation such an attempt to 'de-Judaize' the holocaust was, albeit unconsciously, 'antisemitic'. Deborah Lipstadt, author of one of the most popular accounts of the holocaust, has also asserted that any comparison between the Jewish holocaust and other forms of genocide put such 'holocaust relativists' on an antisemitic spectrum, one end of which included Holocaust denial. [bb]
Hitler himself, on the eve of WW2, one week before the invasion of Poland, in his Obersalzberg Speech of 22 August 1939, has the Armenian genocide in mind when he set forth before his generals the genocidal thrust of the imminent assault upon Poland:-
Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality. Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. As to what the weak Western European civilization asserts about me, that is of no account. I have given the command and I will shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so, for the present only in the East, I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians? [70] [71] [72] [bc].
Those who refuse on principle to entertain the possibity that the genocide of Jews might be further illuminated by analogies or comparisons must of course deny that Hitler's stated intentions here to liquidate the Polish nation are relevant to assessing the ensuing broader holocaust. They must dismiss the explicit justification, that Germany could get away with genocide and enjoy impunity because Turkey had, as immaterial to our understanding of the holocaust affecting Jews.
The Armenian genocide (1915-1918), with perhaps 1,000,000 of 1,800,000 murdered (55%) is defined by Niall Ferguson as 'qualitatively different' from earlier Turkish massacres. The word holocaust itself appears to have been indeed first used, by the New York Times, to describe a new round (‘another Turkish holocaust’) of Turkish pogroms against the Armenian Christian population. [76]. '(I)t is now widely acknowledged to have been the first true genocide,' he continues, endorsing the view of the American Consul in Smyrna at that time, that it ‘surpasse(d) in deliberate and long-protracted horror and in extent anything that has hitherto happened in the history of the world.' [77] [bd]
In one sense Hitler was correct. Even today only Armenians recall their holocaust, and Hitler's onslaught on the Poles is lost to general public awareness. Western commemoration is overwhelmingly focused on the Shoah as a unique event, 'qualitatively different', affecting Europe's Jewish population. What would have been unimaginable in the European core in 1905, but proved perfectly practicable if, as with Von Trotta's extermination of the liminal Herero, the 'uncivilised' periphery of Africa was the field of implementation, had its blowback effect a mere three and a half decades later, as the technique was directed at Germany's immediate neighbour.
There is nothing surprising in the connection between antisemitism and economic distress. A similar relationship has been observed in many other cases, and there is no reason to believe that antisemitism is exempt from social causation, or that the sufferings of the Jews are something absolutely unique. Unfortunately, the annals of cruelty are inexhaustible and other minorities have experienced at some time or other all the iniquities inflicted upon the Jews. The extermination of the Christians in Japan was just as thorough as Hitler’s genocide. If fewer were killed it was because they were fewer. When massacring the Armenians, the Turks perpetrated all of the deeds of which the SS men are guilty. If the history of antisemitism is particularly long it is because the Jews have clung to their separateness with unique tenacity. Most minorities could not be persecuted for so long because they dissolved themselves in the surrounding population.'( Andreski 1969, pp. 305–306)
How does the Hollocaust relate to genocide as a concept and an event? This question has caused considerable controversy because scholarly discourse and identity politics cannot be separated neatly. While the term 'genocide' was coined during the Second World War and enshrined in international law in 1948, the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy did not become an object of consciousness until almost two decades later. Ever since, those highlighting a distinctive experience for European Jewry have sought to separate it from that of other victims of the Nazis as well as other cases of ethnic and racial extermination.'( Moses 2004, p. 533)
Analysing the explosion of Holocaust narratives in the United States in the 1970s, after decades of silence also within Jewish communities, Peter Novick argued that the phenomenon was in part motivated by a desire by many influential Jews to make Americans more sympathetic to Israel and Jews generally. [be] Novick went on to call the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum American Jewry's 'epistle to the Gentiles.' [bf] Originally funded by private donations, [bg] official government involvement was announced by the White House in 1978, on the 30th anniversary of Israel's foundation. This was a political measure to placate American Jews displeased by what they regarded as the President's "excessive evenhandedness" in trying to negotiate a peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. [81] The running expenses were thereafter largely taken over by the federal government. [82] Political calculations also contributed to government funding of such awareness programmes concerning the Holocaust, a way to woo the Jewish electorate. [bh]
It was President Carter's understanding that the Memorial Centre, following on the report he had commissioned which he appointed Elie Wiesel to preside over, [83] would commemorate all the victims of the Holocaust. [bi] In a public address on the occasion of its establishment, Carter happened to mention the 'eleven million innocent victims exterminated'. He was immediately soundly rebuked by Yehuda Bauer, Israel's foremost Holocaust historian, for attempting to 'deJudaise the Holocaust' by including all of the non-Jewish victims. [84] Indignant groups, led by Elie Wiesel reacted by launching a campaign, which eventually achieved its goals, to ensure that the Museum would refer only en passant to 'other' (non-Jewish) victims'. [84] Throughout the following decade tensions arose, for example, between Poles and the Museum's authorities over the way the Holocaust was being portrayed. In a recent memoir recalling that period, John T. Pawlikowski, a Carter appointee, states that difficulties arose in efforts to get Polish American groups to do something towards improving thel exhibitions. At that time, Poles were mentioned at the beginning and the end (as rescuers) but little was said of their engulfment in the central killing programmes at Auschwitz and elsewhere, which formed the main Judaiocentric focus of the Museum's depiction of the events.
Later, the issue arose as to whether the Museum should put Polish victims (2 million) on a par with the 3 million Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Bożena Urbamowicz-Gilbride had even resigned from the Council for its failure to address this precise issue of commemorating the Polish victims. The general scholarly consensus of experts at the time was that a distinction did exist which militated against any notion the two annihilations could be equated. No decision was reached when, on a further occasion, she and several Polish survivors of the death camps, came to give their testimony. Pawlikowski writes:
while Urbanowicz-Gilbride, Lukas, and the several Polish survivors of concentration camps tell a story that very much needs to be heard, their failure to make proper distinctions weakens their ability to get a hearing for their story- Saying this in no way undercuts the continued need to make the story of the Nazi brutality against the Polish people as part of its racial ideology better known. We must mourn the Polish victims; we must make their story important components of Holocaust education programmes. But we cannot efface the special nature of the attack on the Jewish community within the Nazi programme of racial cleansing. And until people interested in achieving this fully appreciate the distinction, we will never be successful in making the Polish story better understood.( Pawkowski 2022, p. 425)
Pawlikowski adds also that, at an NPAJAC [bj] conference in 2004, the Catholic theologian and historian Ronald Modras gave a presentation defending the use of the word Holocaust for Polish victims of Nazi racist policies. Paulikowski, himself a priest, then glosses this with his personal view:-
For myself, I do accept the possibility of using 'Holocaust' as an overarching term for the entirety of victimization under the Nazis, but only if the proper distinction mentioned above is clearly maintained.’( Pawkowski 2022, p. 426)
When on 17 June 2019 the Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called the Trump’s detention centres, “concentration camps” and added “Never Again,” her choice of words was challenged by the Republican Liz Cheney, who accused Ocasio-Cortez of deploying a ludicrous, demeaning analogy with the Holocaust and thereby setting up a false analogy, Both concentration camps and Never again [bk] preexisted Nazism, though both are commonly associated with it. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum stepped in to the dispute by stating that it, “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” [86] an assertion of the dogmatic position that the Holocaust, understood as referring to Jews, was unique. The declaration provoked an open letter of protest addressed to the director of the Museum, Sara J. Bloomfield, and published in The New York Review. The letter was undersigned by 560 academics, many of whom are Holocaust scholars, have supported the Museum, some in the capacity of fellows, and researchers given access to its archives. [87] They remonstrated that
'By “unequivocally rejecting efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is taking a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide. And it makes learning from the past almost impossible.'
This narrowing of Holocaust to evoke a specific ethnicized denotation, related to Jewish victims of Nazi ethnic cleansing and racial extermination alone, and its successful promotion in this restrictive sense, had an unforeseen collateral effect. One now remarks on how envy and admiration for the publicitarian efficacy in political discourse of the term generated its imitative adoption as a catch-all term among aggrieved constituencies in the rising vogue of Identity politics. [88] [bl] Yet, as the headquote from A. Dirk Moses above suggests, it was precisely the wresting of the term holocaust away from its generic usage and its exclusivist application only to the Jewish WW2 tragedy that constituted the first step in the ethnicization of holocaust discourse, and its modern deployment in identitarian discourse and its correlated politics of grievance.
There was, and still is, a very fine line between Israeli government politicization of antisemitism for furthering its national interests—through hasbara [Israeli propaganda] and other political interventions—and scholarly work being undertaken at universities and in research institutes. The blurring of any differences between propaganda and objective research is one of the key factors contributing to the bitter and divisive battles over antisemitism research in the academy.( Burley & Lerman 2022)
le commun des hommes est ainsi fait que si la vue d'un subit désastre émeut et provoque une pitié agissante, la contemplation d'une souffrance prolongée finit par irriter et par lasser.( Poliakov 1993, p. 336)
We recall the victims, but are apt to confuse commemoration with understanding.( Snyder 2015, p. xiv)
It is true that Israel’s current far-right government has turned dog whistles into fog horns.' ( Brown & Nerenberg 2021)
This has been proposed by Chess, who nominated in this regard the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for its 'institutional' expertise. That Wikipedia is self-regulating,-often ramshackle, provisory and imperfect in its day-to-day workings, but still remains a rare experiment in a project of an autonomous, anonymous self-governing production of an encyclopedia. Its nature means that all articles will be subject to a process of continuous internal development and analysis, and that the major, overriding rules consist in a goal of strict neutrality as a final outcome, as determined by a judicious weighing of all relevant positions emerging from the best available scholarly sources. This eminently internal democratic experiment fits the ideal Popperian criteria for the slow, incremental growth, by constant ameliorative tinkering, of articles informed by recourse to the best available, verifiable knowledge.
As I indicated above, an external institution has its own distinct values, aims and interests, and functions quite differently, however excellent the results generally. In the case of the USHMM, its consultancy would be problematical for a number of of reasons. It has been known to exert pressure to censure criticism of arguments concerning the political manipulation of holocaust discourse. When Norman Finkelstein published his devastating exposé, The Holocaust Industry, and the then doyen of holocaust studies, Raul Hilberg, endorsed the accuracy of its scholarship, the USHMM and Elie Wiesel reportedly pleaded 'relentlessly' with Hilberg to retract his support for the book, unsuccessfully. [89] [bm] If, further, as one of its Council members has recently recalled (2022), the Polish story of the Holocaust won't get a fuller hearing at the Museum until Polish advocates recognize that their Jewish confreres suffered qualitatively more than Polish victims, then their participation in a wiki dispute precisely over the Holocaust in Poland, and the proper representation of the two sets of victims would, a priori, support one side, namely the position advanced tendentiously in Grabowski and Klein's essay.
I have no set views on the underlying historiographical issues of that paper, as opposed to deep reservations about its quality and methodology. Research infused with a polemical animus and particularly of the personalised kind that weds a conspiracy theory, is not unknown in academia, and tends to have a half-life not dissimilar to an isotope like Francium 223. It is true that nationalist editing has seriously affected the three core areas under Arbcom restrictions. [bn] But it is extremely naive, epistemologically, or indeed manichaean to think that the vigorous interplay of, in each case, editors in disagreement can be spun simply as a conflict between an honourable RS-respecting party, and a group of inflammatory nationalists, who, alone, exhibit a POV. The assumption is that there is 'pure' scholarship promoted by one side to any textual dispute and contaminated thinking exhibited by their nationalistic antagonists. All research in the humanities is embedded in, curricular, human, and social intrerests, the difference being that the reliability of the results is in direct correlation with the epistemological sophistication of the research. Too abstract? Let me illustrate.
That in January 2018 a conservative Polish government passed a “anti-defamation” law which is coercive, enabling libel suits against people including scholars like Jan Grabowski when their interpretations of the past do not run in lockstep with an official narrative, is well known. [91] Less well known is that wresting narrative control over holocaust discourse, not only by insisting it be restricted to Jewish victims, has been a major concern over decades for several institutions, and various Israeli governments. The distinguished historian of Poland, Norman Davies was recently reported on Polish Radio as recalling that in 1974 Yehuda Bauer, the acknowledged contemporary doyen of the discipline, in a holocaust seminar for historians conducted in the Israeli embassy in London, stated that the historical actors should be broken down into perpetrators (Germans), victims (Jews) and bystanders (Poles). When Davies, whose Polish father-in-law had survived both the Dachau and l Mauthausen camps, protested, he was apparently shouted down as a Polonophile. [92] Davies was later denied tenure at Stanford University, according to him, because it was imputed that he was ‘insensitive’ to Jews. [93]
In reading the threads, I keep in mind what Timothy Snyder wrote in his Bloodlands (2010)
Beyond Poland, the extent of Polish suffering is underappreciated. Even Polish historians rarely recall the Soviet Poles who were starved in Soviet Kazakhstan and Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s, or the Soviet Poles shot in Stalin’s Great Terror in the late 1930s. No one ever notes that Soviet Poles suffered more than any other European national minority in the 1930s. The striking fact that the Soviet NKVD made more arrests in occupied eastern Poland in 1940 than in the rest of the USSR is rarely recalled. About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. For Poles, that bombing was just the beginning of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war, in which Germans killed millions of Polish citizens. More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933. Nearly as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered during the war as European Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. For that matter, more non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz than did Jews of any European country, with only two exceptions: Hungary and Poland itself. [94] Nishidani ( talk) 13:31, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
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help)Please do not engage in personal attacks as you did at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-03-09/Recent research. I'm sure you didn't mean to, but a pattern of this sort of thing is what gets long-term editors banned. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 02:06, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
Hello Nishidani,
You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland/Evidence. Please add your evidence by April 04, 2023, which is when the first evidence phase closes. Submitted evidence will be summarized by Arbitrators and Clerks at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland/Evidence/Summary. Owing to the summary style, editors are encouraged to submit evidence in small chunks sooner rather than more complete evidence later.
Details about the summary page, the two phases of evidence, a timeline and other answers to frequently asked questions can be found at the case's FAQ page.
For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration.
For the Arbitration Committee,
~ ToBeFree (
talk)
00:13, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
An informative, thoughtful and insightful recent conversation with the always erudite and fearless Norman Finkelstein, about some portions of his most recent 500-page book. --- Best, Ijon Tichy ( talk) 03:28, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
Hi @ Nishidani. Without going into any more detail regarding the subject, just wanted to send a personal note to say I am really glad to see someone engage in serious historiographical analysis. I am not sure whether you have an academic background (I would certainly assume so, but the public discussion was not a place for me to mention anything personal), but as a Polish researcher working in the U.S. I often find myself agonizing over the problems outlined in the article. I see myself as new-generation and find ultra-nationalistic bends abhorrent, and yet still all of this can affect one emotionally. So, thank you for being rational and objective, at least to the extent a case like this allows. Ppt91 ( talk) 18:35, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
I hope that allusion to Tyutchev wasn't offensive. In 1974 a friend and I greeted two Polish doctoral students who had just arrived in Japan by welcoming them in Russian, the closest language we knew to their mother tongue. They were upset and asked us to speak English
Heard this years ago from a Polish friend. Pole #1: "I wish Ghengis Khan would come back to life, attack Poland, then return to Mongolia." #2: "That's terrible, don't you know how murderous GK was?" #1: "Yes, but he'd have to cross Russia twice"!
Wanting to fill out the sketchy new citation you provided from the TLS, I went to look at the source. Now I can't be 100% sure, as the TLS is behind a paywall, but it does appear to show a list of the complete contents of each issue, and I can't see any mention of Steiner, nor of Adler in the issue you cite (22 July 2022). Are you able to check it, given your current inadequate computer? Thanks. NSH001 ( talk) 12:21, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
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The Editor's Barnstar |
Thanks for your work on Michael Astour Doug Weller talk 13:00, 17 April 2023 (UTC) |
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Six years! |
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-- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 07:16, 24 April 2023 (UTC)
Just my 2 cents: when I see how other organisations have dealt with him, and compare that with WMF's T&S "actions" (or rather: inaction); it makes "our" T&S look like ...😫😖😩😬🤢🤢🤢☠️
"Our" T&S exist only to protect ..the WMF. The sooner editors (in "contested" areas) here, understand that (and take their precautions), the better. Cheers, Huldra ( talk) 23:52, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
I am currently appealing a Topic ban (see here) where other editors there are asking that I have a volunteer mentor who will examine my edits in the ARBPIA area, prior to my posting them, in order to receive his approval or disapproval. Do you think that you will be willing to review such edits of mine, if I write the suggested edit on my Sandbox and link your name there for a quick review? I honestly do not think that I'll be making very many edits in the ARBPIA area, but only occasionally, and therefore it should not distract from your regular duties. If you should agree to act as a mentor for me, please comment in the AE section where my appeal is lodged. Thanks. Davidbena ( talk) 02:39, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
And when I came here, noticed your post above. Good response and I've learned from it. Doug Weller talk 08:24, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
Editing Wikipedia, even more than critiquing it, helps students realize why they should not trust Wikipedia. The strongest moment of realization takes place when students make worthy changes to an article, only to see those changes deleted, sometimes within minutes, by one of Wikipedia’s many anonymous editors, who evidently lack the expertise to recognize the value of the students’ new contributions.
A second benefit of Wikipedia editing lies in its impact. Unlike virtually any other assignment, students can educate the global community while enhancing their own knowledge, a form of service learning. Students, with their instructors’ guidance, have a tangible contribution to make to Wikipedia’s often faulty articles on Israel. Shira Klein, 'Using Wikipedia in Israel Studies Courses,' Chapman University Digital, 3-1-2018
I.e.. there are courses to (a) help students grasp that wikipedia is unreliable; (b) anonymous students, who by definition, lack expertise, can find their 'worthy' changes reverted by anonymous editors who 'evidently' lack the expertise to evaluate positively what students add.(Contradicting a student's edit only proves the reverters themselves are incompetent, while exacerbating the student's sense of grievance.) (c) Instructors ( Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) at this point can assist their students in 'educating the global community' about nations to which they are attached, Israel, for example, which, viewed from a nationalistic perspective, suffers from image-distortion. Instructors know articles on Israel (that holds for articles on most countries) are at fault, and teach their students to get the 'right' image constructed on any country's page. That is structured, programmatic coordination offline via proxies to further a national perspective in my book. Nishidani ( talk) 12:10, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn't want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."Rachel Shabi Jemima Kiss, 'Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups,' The Guardian 18 August 2010
A long-retired Russian military man was discussing current events by phone with a former colleague living in Ukraine. Both resented the war between the two recently fraternal countries and expressed the hope that this madness would soon end. A few days later, representatives of the special services raided the Russian. He did not give out any military secrets, and no one accused him of this. He was charged, however, with publicly discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. In turn, the former officer, who knew the laws, objected that the conversation had been a private one. And such a charge was meant to apply to public statements only. “But it was public,” objected the intelligence officers. “After all, we heard it!” Boris Kagarlitsky. Nishidani ( talk) 12:35, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.
Walt Yoder ( talk) 20:14, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
Hi, about ten years ago you added harvnb references "Adams 2009" and "Bar-Zohar and Haber 1983" to the article Operation Atlas (Mandatory Palestine). Unfortunately you haven't defined them, meaning the article appears in Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors and nobody can look up the references. If you could fix them that would be great. DuncanHill ( talk) 01:32, 8 June 2023 (UTC)
A word to the wise: take a look at this diff of yours. Note the "Tag: harv-error" at the top, immediately under "Nishidani". This is a very recent improvement to the wiki software, warning you that you have just added a harv/sfn no-target error. So you can fix it immediately! No need to wait for Asha to come along and either fix it, or draw it to your attention with a red q mark! Nor any more interruptions on your talk page from DuncanHill ! -- NSH001 ( talk) 14:35, 10 June 2023 (UTC)
I am working (on and off) on an article about "Perhaps the finest and best preserved of the ruined monasteries in Palestine" (according to SWP), see User:Huldra/Deir Qal’a.Alas, when it comes to Victor Guérin, the English presently in the article is a
translate.bing.com-version of his French. Would you care to check that the English-version isn't too far from the French original? Thanks, Huldra ( talk) 22:57, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
The Guerin at the Ein Samiya-article needs checking, and is presumably a bit more urgent, as that article is already "live", so to speak, Huldra ( talk) 23:55, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
(From Talk: The Holocaust) is this in a sandbox? Interested. Holocaust in Poland has 25 or 30 citations to Gerlach, who is no doubt a fine RS, but...what you said Elinruby ( talk) 23:09, 10 June 2023 (UTC)
Cormac McCarthy. Nishidani ( talk) 21:17, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
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Heh, I knew that link would get you going :) Good stuff. Selfstudier ( talk) 10:13, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
Arbs have an unenviable job. If they come out in favour of any of G&K’s polemical conclusions (which I think is probable because the scope dictates some accommodation to the charges made), a ruckus will ensue as many wikipedians will challenge the precedent set - which implies outside pressure, even if through an academic venue, can succeed in challenging the internal self-regulating mechanisms we have and in imposing an interventionist authority to strengthen surveillance of our work here. If they decide that G&K’s essay, its wild hypothesis of a coordinated nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy to manipulate article is unfounded, then reporting media that endorse the globally banned and ever-hyperactive IW’s spin of wikiworkings will be tempted to up the ante, and spin the outcome by pitching it as proof Arbcom cannot cope with antisemitism. I admire, privately, the canny tactical move-heads I win, tails you lose- in this perduring grandmaster’s chess game of disrupting our anarchic world – it looks like a vindictive attempt to right a perceived wrong by pulling Samsonically the pillars down on the wiki philistines, in forcing a defensive move from Arbcom (our reputation is at stake!) that technically favours, either way the dice fall, more chaos, if not a checkmate. One never knows. Perhaps a Capablanca, someone up there who takes the trouble (reading it should be obligatory for Arbcomers) to read Antony Lerman’s 2022 book, may pop up with a dazzling counterintuitive endgame to stop the rot. But I doubt that.
As one should always do when shirtfronted by complex challenges to someone’s bona fides, I began looking at how I arrived at my way of reading these things, so, as one can see from the bibliography, I will review the early postwar masterpieces which were formative for my own understanding of these issues. To tell the truth, after a relatively youthful acquaintance with Reitlinger, Hilberg,Toynbee etc. and dozens of eyewitness accounts (Primo Levi etc.,) I’ve never come across, to the degree I manage to follow the massive industrial output on the Holocaust in the last few decades, anything that has given me grounds for revising those early impressions, informed as they were by reading The Melian dialogue. The infinite tragic details require insistent documentation, but they only reinforce what was available decades ago by multiplication. They form a massive quantitative base, but don’t in my view alter the conceptual framework set out in grinding detail by Hilberg’s oeuvre, which surely ranks among the great works of the historian’s art in the millennial records of that discipline. What we need is a theoretical framework for how, for example, 11 million people could be swept up into an industrial slaughterhouse, and, to work towards that, one must dispose of evocations of a unique ethnic event in favour of a comparative historiography and sociology of genocides throughout all human history.
What embarrasses me in closely reading tirades and diatribes like this 'stuff' - esp. with its curious mélange of Holmesian pertinacity in manically hunting the spoors of an assumed crime scene while writing up the results in quarter-based tabloid speculations- is a personal malaise of profound distaste, regret at the way in which Holocaust discourse, and the correlated matter of antisemitism, now lend themselves to true-believers' ethnic and political grievances, cynical manipulation and nagging intimidation by a kind of tragedy-hogging, narrative clichéfying, semantic confusion of analytic categories and coercive browbeating that tries, with a restless spinning of minutiae to thresh out proofs of conspiracy via a pure and trivializing reductionism, to link these issues, overtly or subtextually, to Israel, or far more dangerously to the Jewish world at large which that country persistently makes out it represents. I regard the intense nationalist attempt in Israel to conflate what it may be with a perceived quintessence of the Jewish world at large, within Israel and the diaspora, 3,000 years of (pre-)history, most of it diasporic by preference, which cannot be shoehorned into a narrowminded experiment in nationalist self-assertion. It is a disaster not only to scholarship, or wikipedia's coverage of it, but to our public perceptions. No one can exercise a monopoly on the tragic without reducing the grief of all others to the banality of a minor footnote. Nishidani ( talk) 08:13, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
an external institution has its own distinct values, aims and interests. That's precisely why we should seek to include them in our processes. I wouldn't want to give them a controlling or privileged role relative to other community members, but your casual dismissal of the proposal as being
manichaean to think that the vigorous interplay of, in each case, editors in disagreement can be spun simply as a conflict between an honourable RS-respecting party, and a group of inflammatory nationalistsis contradictory to your characterization of the USHMM as being heavily influenced by Israeli nationalism vis-à-vis the
ideal Popperianstate of the topic area.
eminently internal democratic experimentthat has
constant ameliorative tinkering, of articles informed by recourse to the best available, verifiable knowledge. In reality, the vigorous interplay has led to domination by editors from a certain nationalistic viewpoint. Adding the USHMM as a faction would positively influence the state of the topic area. They might not always be right, but your criticisms that
research infused with a polemical animus and particularly of the personalised kind that weds a conspiracy theory, is not unknown in academiabelies that the current state of the topic area is any better. Right now, we allow and encourage editors who are likely biased to edit on Wikipedia with edit-a-thons at liberal arts universities or WikiEd in certain opinionated courses. The USHMM would be a good place to find editors that are willing to read through obscure documents, often in foreign languages, and provide cogent analyses of such to prevent source manipulation. Potential bias is not ipso facto an argument against their participation if you can't mechanize how that'll lead to violations of WP:NPOV. Chess ( talk) (please
The mythical "Wee Sheila" now has a name, "Asha", after err, Asha. She is now nestling contentedly in her new mother's arms. As you know, she was very upset at the sudden death of her previous mother (my old computer). She is soon going to have two additional mothers (a backup, plus a laptop I can use away from home).
No, don't worry, you didn't cause me to lose any sleep. Asha can usually correct (most of) your little blunders, along with your minor insubordinations to the Manual of Style, very rapidly (in a fraction of a second). She absolutely loves cleaning up her "Onki Nishi". (For some strange reason she calls you "Onkel", though she doesn't have a word of German, and I keep telling her that you're really her honorary great-uncle.) She often operates in conjunction with my own manual labours, and in this case I was reluctant to lose all the detailed work I had done, so I thought it would be easier just to merge in changes as they were being made (not as hard as it sounds, as most of them were just changes that Asha would make anyway). Oh, and please don't stop making your little blunders, they're part of your charm.
The weather here has been perfect for going on long walks, sunny and dry with a cool north-easterly wind; the countryside round here is very beautiful, lush green with an amazing variety of trees and wildlife, the local council has been very good at providing footpaths and preserving local habitats for rare species. Which is where I shall be going in a few minutes, so you won't have to worry about my edits clashing. -- NSH001 ( talk) 13:19, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
I noticed you reverted one of my edits which removed the assertion of the existence of the State of Palestine as an absolute fact. Please go to WP:DRN so we can hear your side of the story. RomanHannibal ( talk) 15:28, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
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Thirty-seventh government of Israel and the Palestinians Please chip in. Selfstudier ( talk) 16:43, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
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I still don't see why you can't post there but I can post something there on your behalf if you like. Mind you, they do insist on diffs there :) Selfstudier ( talk) 15:47, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
That would be WP:Meatpuppetry:)Of course with attribution. Pot and kettle seems quite appropriate here. Selfstudier ( talk) 17:56, 30 January 2023 (UTC)
Me(Sic) and other editors have warned him about his disruptive behavior previously (for example: #1, #2, #3, and by an admin, Doug Weller, right here)
Selfstudier claims that I have strong opinions, but I don't believe that he or other editors working in the same field are opinion-free. The exact opposite. I(n) the past year, a lot of articles about Israel have completely shifted to the anti-Israel side, and I observe this trend every day. The ethnic component of Jewish identity is often completely rejected in discussions, the well-documented history of Jews in Palestine is dismissed as a biblical myth, and contemporary Israel's actions are frequently harshly criticized while the wrongdoings of the other side are frequently ignored. But again, though, I'm not criticizing Dan's beliefs; rather, I'm criticizing his disruptive methods of forcing them, bullying others to accept them.
I(n) the past year, a lot of articles about Israel have completely shifted to the anti-Israel side
. The ethnic component of Jewish identity is often completely rejected in discussions.
the well-documented history of Jews in Palestine is dismissed as a biblical myth,
contemporary Israel's actions are frequently harshly criticized while the wrongdoings of the other side are frequently ignored
If it wasn't pitiful, it would be laughable. Selfstudier ( talk) 15:18, 5 February 2023 (UTC)
Hello! I'm just stopping by to inform you about an RSN discussion I recently opened concerning the recent dispute at Genetic studies on Jews. The talk page discussion shows some telltale signs of becoming unproductive on its current course, and I think we've all pushed the conversation there too far on a tangent, so it's probably best to ask for outside perspectives.
Link to discussion:
I wish you all the best and appreciate your perspectives and participation both at RSN and at the talk page. - Hunan201p ( talk) 13:07, 7 February 2023 (UTC)
Hi, Nishidani. I'm an arbitration clerk, which means I help manage and administer the arbitration process (on behalf of the committee). Thank you for making a statement in an arbitration request at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case. However, we ask all participants and commentators to limit the size of their initial statements to 500 words. Your statement significantly exceeds this limit. Please reduce the length of your statement when you are next online. If the case is accepted, you will have the opportunity to present more evidence; in any event, concise, factual statements are much more likely to be understood and to influence the decisions of the arbitrators.
Requests for extensions of the word limit may be made either in your statement or
by email to the Committee through this link or arbcom-enwikimedia.org if email is not available through your account.
For the Arbitration Committee, ~ ToBeFree ( talk) 18:28, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
Mike Pompeo 'it is in the US’s interests to back Israel whatever its policies.' The Guardian 16 February 2023a
An interesting variation,i.e., Your country right or wrong,, on Stephen Decatur's by now proverbial statement. Though off-the-cuff, it represents an innovation in one of the standard principles of international relations going back to Lord Palmerston’s remark,
‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.'
He came to succour the Turkish Empire when Muhammad Ali Pasha challenged its hegemony in Syro-Palestine, saying that international interests must trump considerations of fairness. The Trumpian Pompeo goes one step further. The assertion of Interests are not a matter of realist calculations so much as fulfilling God’s designs for mankind as set forth in the bible. A mirror Evangelical imaging of the same mentality we find so disturbing in the notion of Islamic fundamentalist statehood. In timing, it is a clear greenlight signal to Netanyahoo's legislative proposals to put an end to Israel's separation of powers, which, the religious price he is prepared to pay, puts paid to what is left of its democracy. Nishidani ( talk) 13:12, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
Each day one learns something new. Today I learned that "jejeunely" is a word (and what it means). Thanks :) Also thanks for your non-jejeunely comments in general :) Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 14:08, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
Hey, just wanted to let you know that the comment you made at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case [1] is both incorrect and wildly anti-semitic. The words Holocaust and Shoah are in fact synonyms, note that they go to the same article. Would you like me to recommend some reading? Horse Eye's Back ( talk) 16:01, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
I just don't have much time these days but perhaps I should give one example about the emotional crux undrlying wiki clashes over the Holocaust in Poland, between exclusivist (Jewish) and inclusivist approaches to that topic. Here's one example. It is remarkable for the delicacy of its mediation between Poles and Jewish Poles and yet, utterly crass, if read through (an imaginative exercise) through Polish eyes:-
John T. Pawlikowski, in his memoir-reflection on Polish Jewish relations in connection with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, tried as a President Carter appointee to its Council, to get Polish American groups to do something towards improving thel exhibitions, which mentioned Poles at the beginning as suffering the initial brunt of Nazi violence, and at the end (as rescuers) but said litte of their engulfment in the central killing programmes. He takes that constituency to task for not responding to his request. Later, the issue arose as to whether the Museum should put Polish victims (2 million) on a par with the 3 million Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Bożena Urbamowicz-Gilbride had even resigned from the Council for its failure to address this precise issue of commemorating the Polish victims. The general consensus of experts then was that a distinction does exist that militates against any idea of equation. No decision was reached when on a further occasion, she and several Polish survivors of the death camps, came to give their testimony. Pawlikowski writes:
while Urbanowicz-Gilbride, Lukas, and the several Polish survivors of concentration camps tell a story that very much needs to be heard, their failure to make proper distinctions weakens their ability to get a hearing for their story. Saying this in no way undercuts the continued need to make the story of the Nazi brutality against the Polish people as part of its racial ideology better known. We must mourn the Polish victimxs; we must make their story important components of Holocaust education programmes. But we cannot efface the special nature of the attack on the Jewish community within the Nazi programme of racial cleansing. And until people interested in achieving this fully appreciate the distinction, we will never be successful in making the Polish story better understood.' John T. Pawlikowski, 'The Holocaust: A Continuing Challenge for Polish-Jewish Relations,' in Mieczyslaw B. Biskupski, Antony Polonsky (eds.),Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 19: Polish-Jewish Relations in North America, Liverpool University Press,2022 ISBN 978-1-802-07943-2 pp.415-429.p.425
Pawlikowski notes that at an NPAJAC conference in 2004 the Catholic theologian and historian Ronald Modras gave a presentation defending the use of the word Holocaust for Polish victims of Nazi racist policies. Paulikowski, himself a priest, then glosses this with his personal view:-
For myself, I do accept the possibility of using 'Holocaust' as an overarching term for the entirety of victimization under the Nazis, but only if the proper distinction mentioned above is clearly maintained. p.426
If anyone can't see the extraordinarily arrogant putdown implicit in this discrimination, then tomorrow I will parse the passage to tease out the ethnocentric prejudice instinct in this piece of rhetoric. Nishidani ( talk) 23:07, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
Unless you guys get your act together and admit that, despite the identical circumstances, you must endorse the idea that Jewish suffering was in a category of its own and qualitatively different (superior) to what Polish victims of Nazi genocide experienced, your narrative is not going to get the kind of hearing it otherwise deserves. We won't help you unless you accept our terms, admit your relative marginality and second-class status in Holocaust history.
lol nableezy - 18:25, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
If someone said a bagel is uniquely Jewish, and I rejoined, ‘no it isn’t. It is just the Jewish version of a wider type of pastry’, someone might assert that my comment was ‘wildly antisemitic,’ before even asking me to clarify on what basis I made that remark. That would tell me more about the person's frail assumptions, than about my own. Your assumption of your interlocutor’s bad faith, or, worse still, ignorance, constituted a personal attack, because if someone,- esp. like myself with my long editing history on these topics, and even a half century of study- were to use ‘wildly antisemitic’ or even ‘’’just’’’ anti-Semitic language, then the conclusion would be obvious. That I am antisemitic.
The option of pausing to think (I love that phrase, because it betrays a proverbial insight into the fact that while expressing our views, we are, as often as not, not thinking. We have to stop the inner chatter and reflect on what is really being said in rapid exchanges). Some people patient enough to actually read through my edit TLDR divagations, know that I think in terms of categories and subcategories. That I strive to think in terms of universal principles or laws, as opposed to particularistic narratives that assume the sui generis nature of, whatever, and thirdly that I like the comparative method. Thus, in the case of the bagel,. that is a subset of the broad category of breads, which breaks down into a stemma of (a) those made from yeasted wheat dough, (b) such bread prepared by boiling and baking, (c) idem, for the type sprinkled with seeds, and (d) shaped like a doughnut. Thus roughly defined, one then casts about for varieties which would fit these defining terms in the final subset formed by (a) to (d), foodstuffs like some regional varieties of the Syrian ka’ak, the Polish obwarzanek, bublik and the Polish-Jewish bagel, each of which can be further defined to mark differences from the others. All words lend themselves to this category analysis. I could do one with antisemitism, as a subset of one of the branches of the category of Prejudice, and with its own internal distinctions from T. S. Eliot’s to Hitler’s. Your remark is typical of people who use the word frivolously, without apparently grasping which of its numerous uses are prompting your throw-away line.
In any case, insults like yours should always be turned to advantage, ergo, my reflections below, which aim to isolate from my early formative reading some 50 years ago, those books which led me to make the judgment I made (Despite a vast subsequent output of studies on all of the neglected or fugitive details, case by case, throughout Europe, I don't believe our understanding of what happened has changed significantly, as opposed to how it could have come to pass- which remains refractive to reason). Endorsing a general opinion, chucking around abusive adjectives, resting one’s mental butt on something called commonsense or consensus, is something we’re all raised into. I like to think, after Nietzsche, that if I find myself with an opinion, it is not a public conceit, but personal, arrived at by duly studying why and how I came about, rationally, to entertain that notion. I’m waiting on an ordered copy of a book I’ve read but lack, which should arrive tomorrow. Nishidani ( talk) 21:44, 23 February 2023 (UTC)
I decided to accept the draft "The Holocaust and the Nakba....:" but to change it to a clearer title. For a further discussion of my rational, see Buidhe's talk page. DGG ( talk ) 05:04, 22 February 2023 (UTC)
'After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved- namely, by means of a colonized and then conquered territory- but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and the rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving many millions of people.' Hanna Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (1951) Penguin Books 2017 ISBN 978-0-241-31675-7 p.379.
I am so sorry to learn about your wife but am happy that modern medicine was able to extend her life. Cullen328 ( talk) 21:37, 1 March 2023 (UTC)
Is it Italian keyboard and the tilde is not the third position of n key? Selfstudier ( talk) 22:53, 5 March 2023 (UTC)
For an outstanding wikipedian, Doug Weller
'After Auschwitz, our feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging the victims. They balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims' fate.' Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Routledge (1973) 1990 p.361.
'Inman walked through the house and out the back door and saw a man killing a group of badly wounded Federals by striking them in the head with a hammer. The Federals had been arranged in an order, with their heads all pointing one way, and the man moved briskly down the row, making a clear effort to let one strike apiece do. Not angry, just moving from one to one like a man with a job of work to get done-' Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain1997 p.9 The allusion is something said to have taken place once nightfall set in, allowing a formal pause on the killing fields near Sunken Hill in the Battle of Fredericksburg. [a]
'the United States (US) dropped eight times more bomb tonnage in Indochina – over two million tons on Laos alone – in Vietnam than in World War 11, killing two to three million people, mainly civilians. When Western publics recoiled in horror from the often-televised destructive scenes of this war, air forces moved to more accurate technologies, namely guided missiles. Even then, military strategists and lawyers acknowledge that the “collateral damage” of “surgical strikes”- what drone operators call bugsplat -is unavoidable, if regrettable. [2]
The wiki articles I was referred to, to amend my perceived indulgence in a ‘wildly antisemitic’ distinction, reflect the POV that the Shoah and Holocaust are interchangeable terms for a phenomenon of racial victimization affecting only Jews:-
Yom HaShoah lit. 'Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day'), known colloquially in Israel and abroad as Yom HaShoah (יום השואה) and in English as Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Holocaust Day, is observed as Israel's day of commemoration for the approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, and for the Jewish resistance in that period.
That could be read, giving proper weight to 'in the Holocaust', to imply a distinction using Holocaust as the larger phenomenon of which the Jewish victims form a core reality. Any nation has a natural right to focus on its own particular perspective, in any case.
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.[b] Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population. The murders were carried out in pogroms and mass shootings; by a policy of extermination.
This takes the terms, as is very commonplace, as interchangeable and commensurate and implicitly excludes the idea that the other half the victims of Nazi racially-designed genocidal actions are to be included in the category of the Holocaust.
Are the two terms synonyms that are denotatively exclusive of non-Jewish victims, then?
Cleave and hew are synonyms, but also antonyms at the same time (split/cling to). It is true that Shoah and Holocaust are now used as synonyms, just as it is true that Holocaust usage shows a much wider range of denotation than Shoah. Holocaust is a vintage word with usage attested for various events from genocide to devastating fires from around the turn of the 19th century down to the late 1950s [b], and was also adopted to refer to the mass slaughter of civilian populations in WW2. Shoah was so rare in English that the OED 2nd edition of 1989 didn’t even register the term. But among the earliest uses of Holocaust, the generic sense referring to all victims of Nazi genocide was available from the outset. As early as 1945, M.R. Cohen wrote:
’Millions of surviving victims of the Nazi holocaust, Jews and non-Jews alike, will stand before us in the years to come.’ [3]
Cohen was an acute logician and analyst of language, with wide interests, playing a seminal role in the establishment and growth of the journal Jewish Social Studies, which as our article states, concerned itself with the universal (all men) and the particular (Jews). And that is precisely the issue here. Both Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman define what happened to this other half, to the Poles for example in Auschwitz, as genocide, but argue that there is a qualitative distinction to be made nonetheless. [c] This is the premise affirmed by John Pawlikowski as we shall see.
So what does one do with the millions of other peoples who were exterminated – which no one challenges [d] and the larger number is widely remembered [e] – by implementing a broader policy of liquidating inferior races, some 50 million Slavs according to Generalplan Ost. [f] In the end, from 10 to 17 million people in Europe fell victim to actions that were inspired by genocidal racism, of whom half or a third were Jewish: 5.1 (Raul Hilberg)/ 5.3-4 (Yehuda Bauer) or 5.7 [g] ( Snyder) million upwards [h] Given that at least 5 million were Jewish, how do we classify the phenomenon comprising ‘the other half’?(whose round number is also historically grounded in hearsay, as it was pulled out of the hat by Simon Wiesenthal [10].) To illustrate the point concretely, must the shoah at Auschwitz only refer to the 1.35 million Jews killed there, excluding the 250,000 non-Jews, (of whom 74,000 [11] -83,000 were Poles) who died in that same place, by the same means, on the same racist-ideological grounds?
There are strong grounds for arguing for the specialness of Jewish victimization. For one, in Snyder’s words, ‘The project to kill all Jews was substantially realized; the project to destroy Slavic populations was only very partially implemented.’ [i] In addition, numerous case studies show how local groups among Latvians, Lithuanians and the like, jumped with alacrity as war broke out, and Nazis hadn’t even set foot in their territory, to lynch, eradicate, murder, hang up on butcher hooks members of Jewish communities in their midst. Others stood by or actively approved, much as the Muhacir in Anatolia, themselves ethnically cleansed from Europe and elsewhere, did during the Armenian genocide. There is an important differentiating factor on a psychosociological plane among all those thrust into the forecourts of war, between the targeted Slavic nationalities and those, in their midst, who found themselves stripped of their primary identity as Poles, Ukrainians, Russians etc.,and, as Jews did, had to suffer the lacerating existential trauma of a people who, orphaned of those customary networks of tacit solidarity that inform national identities, suddenly found themselves facing the lethal hostility of the Wehrmacht/SS and the fear, insouciance or coldness of former neighbours, with drastically reduced margins for survival. [j] [k] The problem is, however, that this feeds into a concept of exceptionalism, with its rhetoric of uniqueness, which is not only counter-productive of understanding, but methodologically inane, as the greatest comparativist historian of the last century, as Arnold Toynbee, with all his admitted faults, pointed out almost 90 years ago.
Two survivors from the holocaust concentration camps meet up and exchange some black-humoured repartee concerning the Shoah. They are interrupted by God who happens by and overhears their banter. He interjects:’How on earth do you dare banter and joke about this catastrophe?’ The two survivors snap back:’how could You know what it was like? You weren’t there!” [l]
It took some time for scholarship to settle on an appropriate word to describe the phenomenon. [m] The words used to refer to the phenomenon of WW2 mass slaughter are many,- from the ethnospecific khurbn, shoa, continuous pogrom, Final Solution, Event, judeocide, the unnameable/unspeakable, and pseudo-sacred sacrifice etc., to the more generic genocide, (H/h)olocaust, univers concentrationnaire, (Great) Catastrophe, Götterdämmerung and ethnocide. [20] to name but a few,- and the denotative extensions and connotations of each differ.
Shoah in Israeli usage refers to a 12 year time span, while Holocaust tends to evoke (a) broadly the institutionalization of ethnic murders over the roughly six year period of WW2, from the invasion of Poland, or, (b) more restrictively, to the three years embracing the industrialized murder of Jews specifically that accelerated massively from 22 June 1942 onwards when the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched. Usage that restricts, implicitly or explicitly, the Holocaust to (b) means that the earlier propaiudeutic operations that set precedents for administratively organized group murders, such as Aktion T4’s euthanization of from 70,273 [n] to 275,000 [o] deemed unfit to live, or the 61,000 members of the Polish elite prescriptively targeted in the Sonderfahndungsbuch Polen, [p] of whom two thirds were liquidated largely in the opening months of the war, are scanted from the narrative or marginalized in contemporary Holocaust commemorations, as is the gypsy Samudaripen, 70% of whose Polish population alone was exterminated.
The AktionT4 story, in particular, is a crucial precursor for the holocaust process. One estimate made at the time was that 1,000,000 Germans would have to be exterminated on the grounds of being of unsound body or mind. [22] The original technique consisted of killing the mentally ill with a bullet to the neck. This method of disposing of 'useless mouths' (whose murder was duly calculated to have saved the Reich 885 million marks in expenses) was replaced by building 'shower' rooms in the extermination sites, where groups of 10 to 15 patients were ushered in. Once sealed off, the showers were flushed with carbon monoxide to kill them by asphyxiation. The bodies were then burnt in crematoriums made for that purpose in adjacent buildings. What later occurred at Auschwitz and other death camps was not 'unique' but replicated on a vast scale the methods devised for those diagnosed as insane. In short, as Poliakov notes, the rapidity with which the Nazi authorities implemented the later rational and efficient industrial murder factories drew directly on the model developed to exterminate Germany's mentally ill. [q] One striking difference, was that the euthanasia programme, despite its secrecy, generated widespread popular opposition and protests within Germany which eventually led to its suspension, as opposed to the persecution and deportation of Jews, which, according to one informal wartime poll, left 90% of the population indifferent. [r]
All this is further complicated by the shifts in debate position and focuses over successive decades, with geopolitical pressures playing not an insignificant role. The Yalta division of Europe into an Eastern Soviet bloc sphere and Western Europe under American auspices, played into this, esp. after the Cold War kicked in. The partition translated into a neglect of the Holocaust’s other victims in countries which now became adversaries of the West. Archives were closed off from external scrutiny, with the exception of Poland; no systematic centralization of documentation had been organized, leaving archival material dispersed throughout Eastern Europe, [25] and Soviet scholarship was given very restricted agendas. [s] Further events like the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, [t] the showcasing of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem (1961) [u] and the Six Days War (1967) also inflected reformulations of Holocaust discourse, as did the Yom Kippur War. [29] [v] To which one might add the impact of a renewed nationalism in the former Soviet states as they struggled to reconstruct their identities by addressing their respective histories, particularly with regard to WW2. [w] This last aspect is the gravamen behind Grabowsky and Klein's critique of wikipedia's Polish Holocaust articles. Whatever the biases, we have empirical evidence that affirms that in Western awareness the immense toll of 5.1 million Slavic, i.e. Polish and Russian victims of the holocaust, has been studiously wiped off the public record. They figure marginally, though constituting almost half of the victims, way under other minorities like the disabled, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, in the awaremess of schoolers in their formative years. [31] [x]
As early as 1941 Churchill, sizing up reports of atrocities trickling in from Europe of Nazi policies, stated that ‘we are in the presence of a crime without a name.' [32] It was Raphael Lemkin, three years later, who in his germinal study Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944) [33] devised the neologism genocide to describe the ethnic and cultural restructuring being conducted by the Nazi authorities throughout occupied Europe, citing the mass murders 'mainly of Jews, Poles, Slovenes and Russians.' [34] Citing Hitler’s remark in Mein Kampf that 'the greatest of spirits can be liquidated if the bearer is beaten to death by a rubber truncheon', he defines this as referring concretely in his contemporary world to 'the practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders.' Lemkin had been from his youth struck by the impunity enjoyed by those who carried out the Armenian genocide. At age 18, he was shocked by the destruction systematically visited upon the Armenians and noted, 'A nation was killed and the guilty persons set free.' [y] [z] The term genocide was required because there was something distinctive about Nazi policy as opposed to ethnic massacres of the past and new conceptions require new terms. [35], for
'German militarism is the most virulent because it is based upon a highly developed national and racial emotionalism which by means of modern technology can be released upon the world in a much more efficient and destructive way than any of the pedestrian methods of earlier wars.' [36]
Several terms vied for the choice of a terminus technicus for the Holocaust as it affected Jews. The primary Jewish victims of the Nazi onslaught eastwards referred to the Holocaust in their Yiddish mother tongue as a khurbn (חורבן), ‘disaster’. A loanword from Hebrew, as opposed to the biblical connotations of Shoa this term resonates in both the original Hebrew and Yiddish with an allusion to two earlier disasters that inform Jewish historical memory, the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 587 BCE and of the Second Temple in 70.CE, and also to the exile from Eretz Israel. [aa] It maintains its currency among American Orthodox Jews, particularly those who speak Yiddish. [37] Given the resonance of historical antecedents, khurbn implicitly disowns the idea that the European holocaust as it affected Jews was unprecedented. [ab] In the new state of Israel, contrariwise, the term was rejected: it retained a resonance of the language of Europe’s persecuted Jews, from whom the new society of Israelis wished to both distance itself and shake off memories of their tragic fate. [ac] According to Birgitte Enemark, at the time only examples of armed Jewish resistance were considered heroic, and 'all other aspects of the Jewish experience' were lumped together,' under the label "Holocaust"."Holocaust" thus became the `non-heroic' category.' [39]
Shoah ( שׁוֹאָה) "calamity" was the word that emerged in a December 1938 deliberation of the Central Committee of the Mapai party, as the rampaging precedent set by Kristillnacht became routinized. [40] Though mentioned in a work entitled Sho’at Yehudi Polin (Devastation of Polish Jewry), published in Jerusalem in 1940 to describe the calamity that had befallen European Jews, [41] the term was rarely used during the war by the Yishuv in Palestine until 1946. [42] The term has a biblical resonance [ad]- in the Book of Job it is used for a sudden unforeseen disaster and desolation [ae]- and began to enter common usage after the summer of 1947 [44], when, after its establishment in 1946 to commemorate the annihilation of European Jewry, Yad Vashem held a conference dedicated to researching both the Shoah and the Kabbalistic concept of heroism ( Gevurah). [42] Khorbn and Shoah were thereafter used interchangeably in public discourse until, by the early 1960s, Shoah emerged as the dominant term in Israeli usage to refer more broadly to what European Jews underwent in the period from the Machtergreifung i.e., Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 down to May 1945. [45] [46]
As alluded to above, in 1945 M. R. Cohen could refer to the general annihilation of European peoples under Nazism, Jews and non-Jews, as a 'holocaust'. The transition in the use of this term from the generic to the particular, from all victims to Jewish victims, took some decades. [af] Hannah Arendt, in her seminal masterpiece The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), speaks of 'extermination' broadly for what befell not only Jews but other peoples in both Nazi and Soviet hands, for which, outrageously, a relatively small phenomenon like 'the Jewish question' and antisemitism could become the catalyst of world war and its death factories. [47] Léon Poliakov recounted in his memoirs that at the time of his foundational study of the holocaust in 1951, the word 'genocide' was deemed not fit for publication, [48] and though he did employ it occasionally in his text, [ag] he generally uses the term 'extermination'. When Gerald Reitlinger undertook in 1953 the first comprehensive English study of the genocide of Jews, he chose to write. not of the Shoah or Holocaust, but of the Final Solution, the title of his book alluding to the specific Nazi decision for an Endlösung der Judenfrage. [ah]
In 1961 Hilberg, writing what was to become the cornerstone of later Holocaust studies, rigorously abstained from using the word in his monumental study. [50] Ever stylistically wedded to detached clinical language, he preferred the term 'destruction' - a generic term shorn of the various emotional resonances instinct in these other labels-in describing the 'annihilation' of European Jews as ‘the world’s first completed destruction process’ . [1] The decisive words here are (a) ‘first’ and (b) ‘completed’, both implicitly denying that, in his historian’s view, we may speak of the phenomenon as ‘unique’. For ‘first’ ominously suggests that the process may repeat itself in the future,(something that is sui generis cannot recur) and ‘completed’ affirms an awareness that the shoah was, at that point in time, the last of a series of comparable events, distinguished only from its predecessors by the thoroughness of its accomplishment. [ai]
That same year was to be a turning point in the assessment of the Holocaust in another sense, since the trial of Adolf Eichman contemporaneously taking place in Jerusalem had widespread repercussions on discourse framing the event. In contradistinction to the Nuremberg trials, where indictments were laid for "crimes against members of various nations," the priority of the proceedings was to focus on the Holocaust as a Jewish tragedy, and, it was believed, justice could only be meted out by a Jewish court, which, paradoxically according to Hannah Arendt, citing the prosecutor Gideon Hausner's words, would make 'no ethnic distinctions.' [aj] This was understandable. given the extraordinary tolerance Adenauer’s Germany , for one, showed to the tens of thousands of minions of massacre in the midst of its citizenry, among them war criminals. Germany had jurisdiction to try Eichmann but studiously circumvented the idea of extradition, and given the extreme leniency of the courts in sentencing men with thousands of murders on their conscience, that country at least could not be counted on to render justice. We all know of the post-war Polish recrudescence of antisemitism, but who recalls incidents like that in August 1949 in Munich when police shot at a crowd of 500 Jews who had taken to the streets to protest the publication in the Süddeutsche Zeitung of a letter that referred to Jews as ‘bloodsuckers’ (Blutsauger)? [51] [ak]
In the aftermath of World War II, the Nazi holocaust was not cast as a uniquely Jewish — let alone a historically unique — event. Organized American Jewry in particular was at pains to place it in a universalist context. After the June war, however, the Nazi Final Solution was radically reframed. "The first and most important claim that emerged from the 1967 war and became emblematic of American Judaism," Jacob Neusner recalls, was that "the Holocaust . . . was unique, without parallel in human history." In an illuminating essay, historian David Stannard ridicules the "small industry of Holocaust hagiographers arguing for the uniqueness of the Jewish experience with all the energy and ingenuity of theological zealots".' [53]
'According to Saul Friedländer: ‘The absolute character of the anti-Jewish drive of the Nazis makes it impossible to integrate the extermination of the Jews, not only within the killings the general framework of Nazi persecutions, but even within the wider aspects of contemporary ideological-political behaviour such as fascism, totalitarianism, economic exploitation and so on.’ I disagree.' [54]
As seen above in Pt.2, the East European Jewish victims of the Holocaust appear to have suffered none of the brain-wracking vexations, that arose in the diaspora and Israel in the postwar period, over the mot propre for what was happening to them. They used the emic, historically resonant term khurbn. The word drew an implicit analogy between the scale of the catastrophe that hit them, and two iconic events in antiquity that branded Jewish memory with a profound sense of loss, the destructions of the First and Second Temples. Thus, khurbn disavowed uniqueness, by affirming an essential continuity, the idea that the physical destruction of the diaspora’s core population repeated an earlier pattern: it was a recurrent, if exceeding rare, event. The symbolic force of this analogy lay in the fact that, in the legend of the foundations of the diaspora, the synagogue, wherever erected, slowly came to be experienced as a substitute for the temple in Jerusalem, with rabbis replacing the priesthood, and rituals of prayer and observance supplanting sacrifice. The unique specificity of the one sacred site millennia before has been preempted by a creative solution dictated by necessity: the ‘temple’ was any site Jewish communities built to celebrate their religion. The Final Solution, in aiming to extirpate their communities and raze their synagogal institutions, constituted the third in a series.
In Israel, to the contrary, this Yiddish khurbn was disliked just as the imputed ‘sheepishness’ of the victims and those who, surviving, made aliyah to the new state with its heroic ethos, was a source of discomfort and embarrassment. One slang term in Israeli usage referred to the martyrs of the camps, as opposed to the Warsaw ghetto rebels who fought back, as 'soap'. [al] In its stead, the word shoah, which had become current in the Palestinian yishuv, gained an ascendancy. The emergent preference for the biblical shoah marked a shift from profane history (secular time) to an idiom of religious thrust (sacred). On another plane, it was also emblematic of natural tendency, instinct in the structural dynamics flowing from the definition of Israel as the Jewish state for the Jewish people, to invest it with discursive authority, one with a final say on crucial matters of definition. [am] One might be tempted to think of a kind of unspoken tendency towards a Vaticanization of authority arising to reign over the disiecta membra of diasporic life which had always been characterized by an intense dialogic interplay, creatively dissonant, between far-flung communities which were unified in their sense of a shared Jewish identity but which, one by one, had to, as circumstances dictated, respond to very different historical social and political challenges. The emergence of a Zionist state, which had a completely different, because national and geopolitical, set of priorities, naturally bore a logic that militated towards the subordination of the diaspora, by redefining it as a contingent expedient, chaotically dispersed and historically defeated, to what was the new unifying narrative of Jewishness as defined by the state of Israel.
Political interests play an important role in suppressing analogies, in order to assert the uniqueness of the holocaust. In the late 1990s, according to Norman Finkelstein, Jewish lobbyists in Congress succeeded in blocking the passage of a bill to commemorate a day of remembrance for the Armenian genocide. The USHMM, he adds, following declarations from both Elie Wiesel and Yad Vashem, and at the request of the Israeli government, virtually erased references to the Armenian genocide from its museum's exposition. [55]
Over the last quarter of a century highlighting the Holocaust as a unique event affecting only Jews has passed out of scholarly fashion. [an] though the idea that the holocaust refers to the genocide of Jews alone still holds the upper hand. [ao]
'(Genocide’s) usage in reference to the Shoah and similar events of comparable destructive intent, both prior and subsequent, has gradually increased, including by historians, especially since the 1990s. The word “genocide” in reference to the extermination of the Jews is, in some respects, more neutral than both “Holocaust,” which evokes an etymological notion of the sacrificial, and “Shoah”, which seems to exclude the affected non-Jewish groups. At the same time, the term “genocide” allows for a comparison of similar causes and effects, and emphasizes, by analogy with the legal definition of crime, the intent, which in this case is the endeavour to partially or completely destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.’( Sullam 2020, p. 4)
‘The Nazi plan of Genocide was related to many peoples, races, and religions, and, it is only because Hitler succeeded in wiping out 6 million Jews, that it became known predominantly as a Jewish case. As a matter of fact, Hitler wanted to commit G. against the Slavic peoples in order to colonize the East and extend the German Empire up to the Ural mts. Thereupon after the completion of the successful war he would he would have turned to the West and to subtract from the French people the 20 million Frenchmen he had promised in his conversation with Rauschning.’ Lemkin cited in ( Moses 2008, p. 20) [ap]
If one trawls the global past for evidence of genocide, history becomes a charnel house. Though the holocaust is ‘the most documented of genocides’, [59] genocide itself has always been a commonplace of history. It received powerful theological endorsement in the Tanakh/Old Testament, where the injunction was laid down to annihilate the Seven Nations ( Deuteronomy 7:2, 20:16-18) namely the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. [60] The logic and principle of exterminating any resistant population by murdering the males and enslaving the rest were first set forth in Western tradition in Thucydides’ vignette, The Melian Dialogue regarding the options given the islanders of Melos during the Peloponnesian War.
Lemkin was well aware of precedents stretching back to the deep past, [aq] but for our purposes, one should briefly reacquaint our fugitive modern memory with its selective, fragmentary interest in the past, with how the 19th century's periphery must have experienced the glorious march of progress whose beneficiaries, the West-is-besters, complacently celebrate. Incidents of mass killings in the name of civilization were commonplace, many implemented under impress of the Virgilian maxim drilled into the elites who emerged to gather up and govern their flourishing, expansive windfall empires, i.e., the purpose was to retread the path cut out paradigmatically by the Roman empire, whose Virgilian civilizing mission consisted of 'imposing the custom of peace, sparing the subjugated and warring down the proud.' [ar]. An illustration of how this worked out in practice was France's invasion of Algeria, beginning in 1834. At that time the country had an estimated population of roughly 2 million. Four decades later, by 1875 when the conquest was completed, approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians had been killed. The necessity of genocidal killings lingered on in everyday conversation. One author in 1882 commented that 'we hear it repeated every day that we must expel the native and if necessary destroy him'. [61] [as]
An important principle in approaching history is the relationship between (imperial) core and periphery. [au] Genocide as a twentieth century phenomenon arguably began with Lothar von Trotha’s campaign to decimate the Herero people in 1904-1905,-in one estimate 65,000 of 80,000 (80%) died- accomplished in broad daylight since it was duly covered in the German press. Remembrance of the holocaust is celebrated in postwar Germany but, until recently, this earlier episode of the country's colonial genocide was all but erased from memory. [av] The idea of herding at gunpoint uprooted townsfolk into arid zones where they might die en masse of famine was taken up by the Turks, with their forced exterminatory marches, and the technique, a typical case of blowback, was adopted and widely deployed by Nazis, and to a lesser extent by the Japanese in WW2.
But this is all too facile, and culturally self-regarding to single out three examples which happen to instance the genocidal practices of those countries which were later to emerge as adversaries of the Western powers in two successive world wars.If we take the years around 1900 as an angle from which to reflect on what was to follow in the 20th century, perhaps the best starting point is H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) where the complacent Western core becomes, by a brilliant piece of topical tableturning of imperial prejudices, a planetary periphery. Wells reimagined this annihilation with the modern world refigured as aborigines, invaded and under mechanical extirpation from Martians just as Tasmania’s aboriginal population of 5-7,000 people was all but annihilated within a short century, starting with the Black War. [aw]
In 1896-1898 Spain’s concentration camp policy in Cuba wiped out 10% of the island’s population. The British adopted the same system in South Africa in 1899, closeting Boer civilians, women and children into barb-wire enclosures where over 2 years over 25,000 died of disease and malnutrition as their army wardens maintained guard. On the other side of the world, the the United States’ suppression of the Philippine war of independence had the collateral impact of leading to the death through disease and famine of 10 to 20 times the number of guerilla fighters killed. In all three, concentration camps, scorched earth and starvation policies took the largest toll out on civilians. Over a 20 year period Leopold II of Belgium’s murderous policies in the Congo (1885-1908) were so vastin their application that the minimal figure for those killed is 1,500,000, with a maximum estimate ranging as high as 13,000,000. By 1900, only 10% of aborigines (50,000) had survived the impact of British colonialization, with an estimated 20,000 of the original estimated 500,000 members of 300 tribes, each with their distinct languages, killed by direct genocidal settler practices. [63] This was the international background for Germany's policies against the Herero.
After WW1, the metropolitan assault on peripheries resumed. In the Second Italo-Senussi War (1923-1932) Italy likewise killed one quarter of the population in the region of Cyrenaica, by the mass murder of civilians and surrendered soldiers, resorting to the mustard gas bombing of villages,(much as Spain was resorting to chemical weapons against the Berbers in the Rif War in Morocco at that time, [ax] as well as death marches into the desert). Having mastered the techniques there, they proceeded to Ethiopia where their spraying of areas with mustard and other gases, together with tactics of gunning down masses of surrendered soldiers and enforcing death marches. The conservative figure is that Italy's invasion of Ethiopia led to the death of perhaps 225,000 people. Mann comments:'This was the equivalent not of the Final Solution but (on a smaller scale) the Nazi mass murder of Poles.' [64] [ay] In the Terror Famine implemented in Ukraine in 1932-1933, Stalin intentionally starved to death over 3 million Ukrainians. At the time, the future core of the Luftwaffe’s new generation of pilots was, under a secretive Soviet-Germany pact to circumvent the Versailles agreement, being trained at Lipetsk fighter-pilot school with close to a thousand German military personnel, not far from the genocidal liquidations underway to their west. [az] [ba]
David Stannard, author of a foundational study on the massacre of American indigenous peoples, American Holocaust, has argued that the view that the holocaust as a 'unique, unprecedented, and categorically incommensurable' stand-alone event restricted to Jews, is a recent construction. Questioning the late 20th century arrogation of the term to refer exclusively to what befell the Jewish victims of Nazism, he then argues that
'it is the hegemonic product of many years of strenuous intellectual labour by a handful of Jewish scholars and writers who have dedicated much if not all of their professional lives to the advancement of this exclusivist idea.' [68]
While conceptually incoherent, the uniqueness model is defended, he then documents, with intimidating polemical vigour. Yehuda Bauer in taking President Carter to task publicly for mentioning the holocaust's 11, not 6, million victims, (perhaps influenced by Simon Wiesenthal's recent surmise) suggested in his excoriation such an attempt to 'de-Judaize' the holocaust was, albeit unconsciously, 'antisemitic'. Deborah Lipstadt, author of one of the most popular accounts of the holocaust, has also asserted that any comparison between the Jewish holocaust and other forms of genocide put such 'holocaust relativists' on an antisemitic spectrum, one end of which included Holocaust denial. [bb]
Hitler himself, on the eve of WW2, one week before the invasion of Poland, in his Obersalzberg Speech of 22 August 1939, has the Armenian genocide in mind when he set forth before his generals the genocidal thrust of the imminent assault upon Poland:-
Our strength lies in our quickness and in our brutality. Genghis Khan sent millions of women and children into death knowingly and with a light heart. History sees in him only the great founder of States. As to what the weak Western European civilization asserts about me, that is of no account. I have given the command and I will shoot everyone who utters one word of criticism, for the goal to be obtained in the war is not that of reaching certain lines but of physically demolishing the opponent. And so, for the present only in the East, I have put my death-head formations in place with the command relentlessly and without compassion to send into death many women and children of Polish origin and language. Only thus can we gain the living space that we need. Who after all is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians? [70] [71] [72] [bc].
Those who refuse on principle to entertain the possibity that the genocide of Jews might be further illuminated by analogies or comparisons must of course deny that Hitler's stated intentions here to liquidate the Polish nation are relevant to assessing the ensuing broader holocaust. They must dismiss the explicit justification, that Germany could get away with genocide and enjoy impunity because Turkey had, as immaterial to our understanding of the holocaust affecting Jews.
The Armenian genocide (1915-1918), with perhaps 1,000,000 of 1,800,000 murdered (55%) is defined by Niall Ferguson as 'qualitatively different' from earlier Turkish massacres. The word holocaust itself appears to have been indeed first used, by the New York Times, to describe a new round (‘another Turkish holocaust’) of Turkish pogroms against the Armenian Christian population. [76]. '(I)t is now widely acknowledged to have been the first true genocide,' he continues, endorsing the view of the American Consul in Smyrna at that time, that it ‘surpasse(d) in deliberate and long-protracted horror and in extent anything that has hitherto happened in the history of the world.' [77] [bd]
In one sense Hitler was correct. Even today only Armenians recall their holocaust, and Hitler's onslaught on the Poles is lost to general public awareness. Western commemoration is overwhelmingly focused on the Shoah as a unique event, 'qualitatively different', affecting Europe's Jewish population. What would have been unimaginable in the European core in 1905, but proved perfectly practicable if, as with Von Trotta's extermination of the liminal Herero, the 'uncivilised' periphery of Africa was the field of implementation, had its blowback effect a mere three and a half decades later, as the technique was directed at Germany's immediate neighbour.
There is nothing surprising in the connection between antisemitism and economic distress. A similar relationship has been observed in many other cases, and there is no reason to believe that antisemitism is exempt from social causation, or that the sufferings of the Jews are something absolutely unique. Unfortunately, the annals of cruelty are inexhaustible and other minorities have experienced at some time or other all the iniquities inflicted upon the Jews. The extermination of the Christians in Japan was just as thorough as Hitler’s genocide. If fewer were killed it was because they were fewer. When massacring the Armenians, the Turks perpetrated all of the deeds of which the SS men are guilty. If the history of antisemitism is particularly long it is because the Jews have clung to their separateness with unique tenacity. Most minorities could not be persecuted for so long because they dissolved themselves in the surrounding population.'( Andreski 1969, pp. 305–306)
How does the Hollocaust relate to genocide as a concept and an event? This question has caused considerable controversy because scholarly discourse and identity politics cannot be separated neatly. While the term 'genocide' was coined during the Second World War and enshrined in international law in 1948, the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy did not become an object of consciousness until almost two decades later. Ever since, those highlighting a distinctive experience for European Jewry have sought to separate it from that of other victims of the Nazis as well as other cases of ethnic and racial extermination.'( Moses 2004, p. 533)
Analysing the explosion of Holocaust narratives in the United States in the 1970s, after decades of silence also within Jewish communities, Peter Novick argued that the phenomenon was in part motivated by a desire by many influential Jews to make Americans more sympathetic to Israel and Jews generally. [be] Novick went on to call the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum American Jewry's 'epistle to the Gentiles.' [bf] Originally funded by private donations, [bg] official government involvement was announced by the White House in 1978, on the 30th anniversary of Israel's foundation. This was a political measure to placate American Jews displeased by what they regarded as the President's "excessive evenhandedness" in trying to negotiate a peace settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. [81] The running expenses were thereafter largely taken over by the federal government. [82] Political calculations also contributed to government funding of such awareness programmes concerning the Holocaust, a way to woo the Jewish electorate. [bh]
It was President Carter's understanding that the Memorial Centre, following on the report he had commissioned which he appointed Elie Wiesel to preside over, [83] would commemorate all the victims of the Holocaust. [bi] In a public address on the occasion of its establishment, Carter happened to mention the 'eleven million innocent victims exterminated'. He was immediately soundly rebuked by Yehuda Bauer, Israel's foremost Holocaust historian, for attempting to 'deJudaise the Holocaust' by including all of the non-Jewish victims. [84] Indignant groups, led by Elie Wiesel reacted by launching a campaign, which eventually achieved its goals, to ensure that the Museum would refer only en passant to 'other' (non-Jewish) victims'. [84] Throughout the following decade tensions arose, for example, between Poles and the Museum's authorities over the way the Holocaust was being portrayed. In a recent memoir recalling that period, John T. Pawlikowski, a Carter appointee, states that difficulties arose in efforts to get Polish American groups to do something towards improving thel exhibitions. At that time, Poles were mentioned at the beginning and the end (as rescuers) but little was said of their engulfment in the central killing programmes at Auschwitz and elsewhere, which formed the main Judaiocentric focus of the Museum's depiction of the events.
Later, the issue arose as to whether the Museum should put Polish victims (2 million) on a par with the 3 million Polish-Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Bożena Urbamowicz-Gilbride had even resigned from the Council for its failure to address this precise issue of commemorating the Polish victims. The general scholarly consensus of experts at the time was that a distinction did exist which militated against any notion the two annihilations could be equated. No decision was reached when, on a further occasion, she and several Polish survivors of the death camps, came to give their testimony. Pawlikowski writes:
while Urbanowicz-Gilbride, Lukas, and the several Polish survivors of concentration camps tell a story that very much needs to be heard, their failure to make proper distinctions weakens their ability to get a hearing for their story- Saying this in no way undercuts the continued need to make the story of the Nazi brutality against the Polish people as part of its racial ideology better known. We must mourn the Polish victims; we must make their story important components of Holocaust education programmes. But we cannot efface the special nature of the attack on the Jewish community within the Nazi programme of racial cleansing. And until people interested in achieving this fully appreciate the distinction, we will never be successful in making the Polish story better understood.( Pawkowski 2022, p. 425)
Pawlikowski adds also that, at an NPAJAC [bj] conference in 2004, the Catholic theologian and historian Ronald Modras gave a presentation defending the use of the word Holocaust for Polish victims of Nazi racist policies. Paulikowski, himself a priest, then glosses this with his personal view:-
For myself, I do accept the possibility of using 'Holocaust' as an overarching term for the entirety of victimization under the Nazis, but only if the proper distinction mentioned above is clearly maintained.’( Pawkowski 2022, p. 426)
When on 17 June 2019 the Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, called the Trump’s detention centres, “concentration camps” and added “Never Again,” her choice of words was challenged by the Republican Liz Cheney, who accused Ocasio-Cortez of deploying a ludicrous, demeaning analogy with the Holocaust and thereby setting up a false analogy, Both concentration camps and Never again [bk] preexisted Nazism, though both are commonly associated with it. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum stepped in to the dispute by stating that it, “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” [86] an assertion of the dogmatic position that the Holocaust, understood as referring to Jews, was unique. The declaration provoked an open letter of protest addressed to the director of the Museum, Sara J. Bloomfield, and published in The New York Review. The letter was undersigned by 560 academics, many of whom are Holocaust scholars, have supported the Museum, some in the capacity of fellows, and researchers given access to its archives. [87] They remonstrated that
'By “unequivocally rejecting efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is taking a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide. And it makes learning from the past almost impossible.'
This narrowing of Holocaust to evoke a specific ethnicized denotation, related to Jewish victims of Nazi ethnic cleansing and racial extermination alone, and its successful promotion in this restrictive sense, had an unforeseen collateral effect. One now remarks on how envy and admiration for the publicitarian efficacy in political discourse of the term generated its imitative adoption as a catch-all term among aggrieved constituencies in the rising vogue of Identity politics. [88] [bl] Yet, as the headquote from A. Dirk Moses above suggests, it was precisely the wresting of the term holocaust away from its generic usage and its exclusivist application only to the Jewish WW2 tragedy that constituted the first step in the ethnicization of holocaust discourse, and its modern deployment in identitarian discourse and its correlated politics of grievance.
There was, and still is, a very fine line between Israeli government politicization of antisemitism for furthering its national interests—through hasbara [Israeli propaganda] and other political interventions—and scholarly work being undertaken at universities and in research institutes. The blurring of any differences between propaganda and objective research is one of the key factors contributing to the bitter and divisive battles over antisemitism research in the academy.( Burley & Lerman 2022)
le commun des hommes est ainsi fait que si la vue d'un subit désastre émeut et provoque une pitié agissante, la contemplation d'une souffrance prolongée finit par irriter et par lasser.( Poliakov 1993, p. 336)
We recall the victims, but are apt to confuse commemoration with understanding.( Snyder 2015, p. xiv)
It is true that Israel’s current far-right government has turned dog whistles into fog horns.' ( Brown & Nerenberg 2021)
This has been proposed by Chess, who nominated in this regard the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for its 'institutional' expertise. That Wikipedia is self-regulating,-often ramshackle, provisory and imperfect in its day-to-day workings, but still remains a rare experiment in a project of an autonomous, anonymous self-governing production of an encyclopedia. Its nature means that all articles will be subject to a process of continuous internal development and analysis, and that the major, overriding rules consist in a goal of strict neutrality as a final outcome, as determined by a judicious weighing of all relevant positions emerging from the best available scholarly sources. This eminently internal democratic experiment fits the ideal Popperian criteria for the slow, incremental growth, by constant ameliorative tinkering, of articles informed by recourse to the best available, verifiable knowledge.
As I indicated above, an external institution has its own distinct values, aims and interests, and functions quite differently, however excellent the results generally. In the case of the USHMM, its consultancy would be problematical for a number of of reasons. It has been known to exert pressure to censure criticism of arguments concerning the political manipulation of holocaust discourse. When Norman Finkelstein published his devastating exposé, The Holocaust Industry, and the then doyen of holocaust studies, Raul Hilberg, endorsed the accuracy of its scholarship, the USHMM and Elie Wiesel reportedly pleaded 'relentlessly' with Hilberg to retract his support for the book, unsuccessfully. [89] [bm] If, further, as one of its Council members has recently recalled (2022), the Polish story of the Holocaust won't get a fuller hearing at the Museum until Polish advocates recognize that their Jewish confreres suffered qualitatively more than Polish victims, then their participation in a wiki dispute precisely over the Holocaust in Poland, and the proper representation of the two sets of victims would, a priori, support one side, namely the position advanced tendentiously in Grabowski and Klein's essay.
I have no set views on the underlying historiographical issues of that paper, as opposed to deep reservations about its quality and methodology. Research infused with a polemical animus and particularly of the personalised kind that weds a conspiracy theory, is not unknown in academia, and tends to have a half-life not dissimilar to an isotope like Francium 223. It is true that nationalist editing has seriously affected the three core areas under Arbcom restrictions. [bn] But it is extremely naive, epistemologically, or indeed manichaean to think that the vigorous interplay of, in each case, editors in disagreement can be spun simply as a conflict between an honourable RS-respecting party, and a group of inflammatory nationalists, who, alone, exhibit a POV. The assumption is that there is 'pure' scholarship promoted by one side to any textual dispute and contaminated thinking exhibited by their nationalistic antagonists. All research in the humanities is embedded in, curricular, human, and social intrerests, the difference being that the reliability of the results is in direct correlation with the epistemological sophistication of the research. Too abstract? Let me illustrate.
That in January 2018 a conservative Polish government passed a “anti-defamation” law which is coercive, enabling libel suits against people including scholars like Jan Grabowski when their interpretations of the past do not run in lockstep with an official narrative, is well known. [91] Less well known is that wresting narrative control over holocaust discourse, not only by insisting it be restricted to Jewish victims, has been a major concern over decades for several institutions, and various Israeli governments. The distinguished historian of Poland, Norman Davies was recently reported on Polish Radio as recalling that in 1974 Yehuda Bauer, the acknowledged contemporary doyen of the discipline, in a holocaust seminar for historians conducted in the Israeli embassy in London, stated that the historical actors should be broken down into perpetrators (Germans), victims (Jews) and bystanders (Poles). When Davies, whose Polish father-in-law had survived both the Dachau and l Mauthausen camps, protested, he was apparently shouted down as a Polonophile. [92] Davies was later denied tenure at Stanford University, according to him, because it was imputed that he was ‘insensitive’ to Jews. [93]
In reading the threads, I keep in mind what Timothy Snyder wrote in his Bloodlands (2010)
Beyond Poland, the extent of Polish suffering is underappreciated. Even Polish historians rarely recall the Soviet Poles who were starved in Soviet Kazakhstan and Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s, or the Soviet Poles shot in Stalin’s Great Terror in the late 1930s. No one ever notes that Soviet Poles suffered more than any other European national minority in the 1930s. The striking fact that the Soviet NKVD made more arrests in occupied eastern Poland in 1940 than in the rest of the USSR is rarely recalled. About as many Poles were killed in the bombing of Warsaw in 1939 as Germans were killed in the bombing of Dresden in 1945. For Poles, that bombing was just the beginning of one of the bloodiest occupations of the war, in which Germans killed millions of Polish citizens. More Poles were killed during the Warsaw Uprising alone than Japanese died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A non-Jewish Pole in Warsaw alive in 1933 had about the same chances of living until 1945 as a Jew in Germany alive in 1933. Nearly as many non-Jewish Poles were murdered during the war as European Jews were gassed at Auschwitz. For that matter, more non-Jewish Poles died at Auschwitz than did Jews of any European country, with only two exceptions: Hungary and Poland itself. [94] Nishidani ( talk) 13:31, 19 February 2023 (UTC)
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help)Please do not engage in personal attacks as you did at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-03-09/Recent research. I'm sure you didn't mean to, but a pattern of this sort of thing is what gets long-term editors banned. Thebiguglyalien ( talk) 02:06, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
Hello Nishidani,
You recently offered a statement in a request for arbitration. The Arbitration Committee has accepted that request for arbitration and an arbitration case has been opened at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland. Evidence that you wish the arbitrators to consider should be added to the evidence subpage, at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland/Evidence. Please add your evidence by April 04, 2023, which is when the first evidence phase closes. Submitted evidence will be summarized by Arbitrators and Clerks at Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/World War II and the history of Jews in Poland/Evidence/Summary. Owing to the summary style, editors are encouraged to submit evidence in small chunks sooner rather than more complete evidence later.
Details about the summary page, the two phases of evidence, a timeline and other answers to frequently asked questions can be found at the case's FAQ page.
For a guide to the arbitration process, see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Guide to arbitration.
For the Arbitration Committee,
~ ToBeFree (
talk)
00:13, 14 March 2023 (UTC)
An informative, thoughtful and insightful recent conversation with the always erudite and fearless Norman Finkelstein, about some portions of his most recent 500-page book. --- Best, Ijon Tichy ( talk) 03:28, 15 March 2023 (UTC)
Hi @ Nishidani. Without going into any more detail regarding the subject, just wanted to send a personal note to say I am really glad to see someone engage in serious historiographical analysis. I am not sure whether you have an academic background (I would certainly assume so, but the public discussion was not a place for me to mention anything personal), but as a Polish researcher working in the U.S. I often find myself agonizing over the problems outlined in the article. I see myself as new-generation and find ultra-nationalistic bends abhorrent, and yet still all of this can affect one emotionally. So, thank you for being rational and objective, at least to the extent a case like this allows. Ppt91 ( talk) 18:35, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
I hope that allusion to Tyutchev wasn't offensive. In 1974 a friend and I greeted two Polish doctoral students who had just arrived in Japan by welcoming them in Russian, the closest language we knew to their mother tongue. They were upset and asked us to speak English
Heard this years ago from a Polish friend. Pole #1: "I wish Ghengis Khan would come back to life, attack Poland, then return to Mongolia." #2: "That's terrible, don't you know how murderous GK was?" #1: "Yes, but he'd have to cross Russia twice"!
Wanting to fill out the sketchy new citation you provided from the TLS, I went to look at the source. Now I can't be 100% sure, as the TLS is behind a paywall, but it does appear to show a list of the complete contents of each issue, and I can't see any mention of Steiner, nor of Adler in the issue you cite (22 July 2022). Are you able to check it, given your current inadequate computer? Thanks. NSH001 ( talk) 12:21, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
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The Editor's Barnstar |
Thanks for your work on Michael Astour Doug Weller talk 13:00, 17 April 2023 (UTC) |
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Six years! |
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-- Gerda Arendt ( talk) 07:16, 24 April 2023 (UTC)
Just my 2 cents: when I see how other organisations have dealt with him, and compare that with WMF's T&S "actions" (or rather: inaction); it makes "our" T&S look like ...😫😖😩😬🤢🤢🤢☠️
"Our" T&S exist only to protect ..the WMF. The sooner editors (in "contested" areas) here, understand that (and take their precautions), the better. Cheers, Huldra ( talk) 23:52, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
I am currently appealing a Topic ban (see here) where other editors there are asking that I have a volunteer mentor who will examine my edits in the ARBPIA area, prior to my posting them, in order to receive his approval or disapproval. Do you think that you will be willing to review such edits of mine, if I write the suggested edit on my Sandbox and link your name there for a quick review? I honestly do not think that I'll be making very many edits in the ARBPIA area, but only occasionally, and therefore it should not distract from your regular duties. If you should agree to act as a mentor for me, please comment in the AE section where my appeal is lodged. Thanks. Davidbena ( talk) 02:39, 1 May 2023 (UTC)
And when I came here, noticed your post above. Good response and I've learned from it. Doug Weller talk 08:24, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
Editing Wikipedia, even more than critiquing it, helps students realize why they should not trust Wikipedia. The strongest moment of realization takes place when students make worthy changes to an article, only to see those changes deleted, sometimes within minutes, by one of Wikipedia’s many anonymous editors, who evidently lack the expertise to recognize the value of the students’ new contributions.
A second benefit of Wikipedia editing lies in its impact. Unlike virtually any other assignment, students can educate the global community while enhancing their own knowledge, a form of service learning. Students, with their instructors’ guidance, have a tangible contribution to make to Wikipedia’s often faulty articles on Israel. Shira Klein, 'Using Wikipedia in Israel Studies Courses,' Chapman University Digital, 3-1-2018
I.e.. there are courses to (a) help students grasp that wikipedia is unreliable; (b) anonymous students, who by definition, lack expertise, can find their 'worthy' changes reverted by anonymous editors who 'evidently' lack the expertise to evaluate positively what students add.(Contradicting a student's edit only proves the reverters themselves are incompetent, while exacerbating the student's sense of grievance.) (c) Instructors ( Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?) at this point can assist their students in 'educating the global community' about nations to which they are attached, Israel, for example, which, viewed from a nationalistic perspective, suffers from image-distortion. Instructors know articles on Israel (that holds for articles on most countries) are at fault, and teach their students to get the 'right' image constructed on any country's page. That is structured, programmatic coordination offline via proxies to further a national perspective in my book. Nishidani ( talk) 12:10, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
One Jerusalem-based Wikipedia editor, who doesn't want to be named, said that publicising the initiative might not be such a good idea. "Going public in the past has had a bad effect," she says. "There is a war going on and unfortunately the way to fight it has to be underground."Rachel Shabi Jemima Kiss, 'Wikipedia editing courses launched by Zionist groups,' The Guardian 18 August 2010
A long-retired Russian military man was discussing current events by phone with a former colleague living in Ukraine. Both resented the war between the two recently fraternal countries and expressed the hope that this madness would soon end. A few days later, representatives of the special services raided the Russian. He did not give out any military secrets, and no one accused him of this. He was charged, however, with publicly discrediting the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. In turn, the former officer, who knew the laws, objected that the conversation had been a private one. And such a charge was meant to apply to public statements only. “But it was public,” objected the intelligence officers. “After all, we heard it!” Boris Kagarlitsky. Nishidani ( talk) 12:35, 29 May 2023 (UTC)
The article will be discussed at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Herzl's Mauschel and Zionist antisemitism until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. The nomination will explain the policies and guidelines which are of concern. The discussion focuses on high-quality evidence and our policies and guidelines.
Users may edit the article during the discussion, including to improve the article to address concerns raised in the discussion. However, do not remove the article-for-deletion notice from the top of the article until the discussion has finished.
Walt Yoder ( talk) 20:14, 4 June 2023 (UTC)
Hi, about ten years ago you added harvnb references "Adams 2009" and "Bar-Zohar and Haber 1983" to the article Operation Atlas (Mandatory Palestine). Unfortunately you haven't defined them, meaning the article appears in Category:Harv and Sfn no-target errors and nobody can look up the references. If you could fix them that would be great. DuncanHill ( talk) 01:32, 8 June 2023 (UTC)
A word to the wise: take a look at this diff of yours. Note the "Tag: harv-error" at the top, immediately under "Nishidani". This is a very recent improvement to the wiki software, warning you that you have just added a harv/sfn no-target error. So you can fix it immediately! No need to wait for Asha to come along and either fix it, or draw it to your attention with a red q mark! Nor any more interruptions on your talk page from DuncanHill ! -- NSH001 ( talk) 14:35, 10 June 2023 (UTC)
I am working (on and off) on an article about "Perhaps the finest and best preserved of the ruined monasteries in Palestine" (according to SWP), see User:Huldra/Deir Qal’a.Alas, when it comes to Victor Guérin, the English presently in the article is a
translate.bing.com-version of his French. Would you care to check that the English-version isn't too far from the French original? Thanks, Huldra ( talk) 22:57, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
The Guerin at the Ein Samiya-article needs checking, and is presumably a bit more urgent, as that article is already "live", so to speak, Huldra ( talk) 23:55, 27 May 2023 (UTC)
(From Talk: The Holocaust) is this in a sandbox? Interested. Holocaust in Poland has 25 or 30 citations to Gerlach, who is no doubt a fine RS, but...what you said Elinruby ( talk) 23:09, 10 June 2023 (UTC)
Cormac McCarthy. Nishidani ( talk) 21:17, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
Hello, I'm
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Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry, may have introduced referencing errors. They are as follows:
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Heh, I knew that link would get you going :) Good stuff. Selfstudier ( talk) 10:13, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
Arbs have an unenviable job. If they come out in favour of any of G&K’s polemical conclusions (which I think is probable because the scope dictates some accommodation to the charges made), a ruckus will ensue as many wikipedians will challenge the precedent set - which implies outside pressure, even if through an academic venue, can succeed in challenging the internal self-regulating mechanisms we have and in imposing an interventionist authority to strengthen surveillance of our work here. If they decide that G&K’s essay, its wild hypothesis of a coordinated nationalist and antisemitic conspiracy to manipulate article is unfounded, then reporting media that endorse the globally banned and ever-hyperactive IW’s spin of wikiworkings will be tempted to up the ante, and spin the outcome by pitching it as proof Arbcom cannot cope with antisemitism. I admire, privately, the canny tactical move-heads I win, tails you lose- in this perduring grandmaster’s chess game of disrupting our anarchic world – it looks like a vindictive attempt to right a perceived wrong by pulling Samsonically the pillars down on the wiki philistines, in forcing a defensive move from Arbcom (our reputation is at stake!) that technically favours, either way the dice fall, more chaos, if not a checkmate. One never knows. Perhaps a Capablanca, someone up there who takes the trouble (reading it should be obligatory for Arbcomers) to read Antony Lerman’s 2022 book, may pop up with a dazzling counterintuitive endgame to stop the rot. But I doubt that.
As one should always do when shirtfronted by complex challenges to someone’s bona fides, I began looking at how I arrived at my way of reading these things, so, as one can see from the bibliography, I will review the early postwar masterpieces which were formative for my own understanding of these issues. To tell the truth, after a relatively youthful acquaintance with Reitlinger, Hilberg,Toynbee etc. and dozens of eyewitness accounts (Primo Levi etc.,) I’ve never come across, to the degree I manage to follow the massive industrial output on the Holocaust in the last few decades, anything that has given me grounds for revising those early impressions, informed as they were by reading The Melian dialogue. The infinite tragic details require insistent documentation, but they only reinforce what was available decades ago by multiplication. They form a massive quantitative base, but don’t in my view alter the conceptual framework set out in grinding detail by Hilberg’s oeuvre, which surely ranks among the great works of the historian’s art in the millennial records of that discipline. What we need is a theoretical framework for how, for example, 11 million people could be swept up into an industrial slaughterhouse, and, to work towards that, one must dispose of evocations of a unique ethnic event in favour of a comparative historiography and sociology of genocides throughout all human history.
What embarrasses me in closely reading tirades and diatribes like this 'stuff' - esp. with its curious mélange of Holmesian pertinacity in manically hunting the spoors of an assumed crime scene while writing up the results in quarter-based tabloid speculations- is a personal malaise of profound distaste, regret at the way in which Holocaust discourse, and the correlated matter of antisemitism, now lend themselves to true-believers' ethnic and political grievances, cynical manipulation and nagging intimidation by a kind of tragedy-hogging, narrative clichéfying, semantic confusion of analytic categories and coercive browbeating that tries, with a restless spinning of minutiae to thresh out proofs of conspiracy via a pure and trivializing reductionism, to link these issues, overtly or subtextually, to Israel, or far more dangerously to the Jewish world at large which that country persistently makes out it represents. I regard the intense nationalist attempt in Israel to conflate what it may be with a perceived quintessence of the Jewish world at large, within Israel and the diaspora, 3,000 years of (pre-)history, most of it diasporic by preference, which cannot be shoehorned into a narrowminded experiment in nationalist self-assertion. It is a disaster not only to scholarship, or wikipedia's coverage of it, but to our public perceptions. No one can exercise a monopoly on the tragic without reducing the grief of all others to the banality of a minor footnote. Nishidani ( talk) 08:13, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
an external institution has its own distinct values, aims and interests. That's precisely why we should seek to include them in our processes. I wouldn't want to give them a controlling or privileged role relative to other community members, but your casual dismissal of the proposal as being
manichaean to think that the vigorous interplay of, in each case, editors in disagreement can be spun simply as a conflict between an honourable RS-respecting party, and a group of inflammatory nationalistsis contradictory to your characterization of the USHMM as being heavily influenced by Israeli nationalism vis-à-vis the
ideal Popperianstate of the topic area.
eminently internal democratic experimentthat has
constant ameliorative tinkering, of articles informed by recourse to the best available, verifiable knowledge. In reality, the vigorous interplay has led to domination by editors from a certain nationalistic viewpoint. Adding the USHMM as a faction would positively influence the state of the topic area. They might not always be right, but your criticisms that
research infused with a polemical animus and particularly of the personalised kind that weds a conspiracy theory, is not unknown in academiabelies that the current state of the topic area is any better. Right now, we allow and encourage editors who are likely biased to edit on Wikipedia with edit-a-thons at liberal arts universities or WikiEd in certain opinionated courses. The USHMM would be a good place to find editors that are willing to read through obscure documents, often in foreign languages, and provide cogent analyses of such to prevent source manipulation. Potential bias is not ipso facto an argument against their participation if you can't mechanize how that'll lead to violations of WP:NPOV. Chess ( talk) (please
The mythical "Wee Sheila" now has a name, "Asha", after err, Asha. She is now nestling contentedly in her new mother's arms. As you know, she was very upset at the sudden death of her previous mother (my old computer). She is soon going to have two additional mothers (a backup, plus a laptop I can use away from home).
No, don't worry, you didn't cause me to lose any sleep. Asha can usually correct (most of) your little blunders, along with your minor insubordinations to the Manual of Style, very rapidly (in a fraction of a second). She absolutely loves cleaning up her "Onki Nishi". (For some strange reason she calls you "Onkel", though she doesn't have a word of German, and I keep telling her that you're really her honorary great-uncle.) She often operates in conjunction with my own manual labours, and in this case I was reluctant to lose all the detailed work I had done, so I thought it would be easier just to merge in changes as they were being made (not as hard as it sounds, as most of them were just changes that Asha would make anyway). Oh, and please don't stop making your little blunders, they're part of your charm.
The weather here has been perfect for going on long walks, sunny and dry with a cool north-easterly wind; the countryside round here is very beautiful, lush green with an amazing variety of trees and wildlife, the local council has been very good at providing footpaths and preserving local habitats for rare species. Which is where I shall be going in a few minutes, so you won't have to worry about my edits clashing. -- NSH001 ( talk) 13:19, 6 June 2023 (UTC)
I noticed you reverted one of my edits which removed the assertion of the existence of the State of Palestine as an absolute fact. Please go to WP:DRN so we can hear your side of the story. RomanHannibal ( talk) 15:28, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion at
Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you.
RomanHannibal (
talk)
02:16, 30 June 2023 (UTC)
This message is being sent to let you know of a discussion at the Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard regarding a content dispute discussion you may have participated in. Content disputes can hold up article development and make editing difficult. You are not required to participate, but you are both invited and encouraged to help this dispute come to a resolution.
Please join us to help form a consensus. Thank you!
Potatín5 ( talk) 22:50, 8 July 2023 (UTC)
Thirty-seventh government of Israel and the Palestinians Please chip in. Selfstudier ( talk) 16:43, 11 July 2023 (UTC)