Wed 25 Apr 2007
Alex writes on WSO:
Of all the horrible things that happened during ww2, the mass murder of Jews in Germany stands out because it is one of the few examples where in a society much like ours, people much like us were complicit in the killing of millions of their neighbors and friends — that is truly frightening…
Instead of approaching the issue from this angle, however, the WCJA decided to put up posters with descriptions of the violent deaths of individuals. This IS offensive, because it sends the implicit message that what distinguished the crimes against Jews from others was the age of the victims and the gruesome death method. This is not true. The ~25 million that died in Russia and the hundreds of thousands that were brutally killed in 6 weeks in China are only two examples of other groups that suffered similar, if not worse, fates in terms of the parameters on the posters. In those terms, the holocaust was accompanied in both time, location, and planning by other massacres. There is no day dedicated to remembering them, although these groups are well represented on campus.
As I said, remembering the holocaust is for many of us the only link to ww2: if you are trying to raise awareness of the brutality of the Nazis by exposing the barbarity of their actions, I find it difficult to rationalize “remembering” only their Jewish victims– never mind that many historians view the gays , Soviet POWs, and other groups the Germans murdered en masse in concentration camps to be part of the death toll of the holocaust. Members of half of my family died in ww2 as Russians, members of the other half died because they were Jews — why do I have to ignore half?
…
The whole point of remembering the holocaust is that everyday citizens of civilized countries, like all of us, can become complicit in a crime of this scale and horror. It is to understand WHY it happened, not to feed yourself lies about why it can’t happen again.
We still need to gather more facts about the WCJA’s Holocaust Remembrance Day posters. Questions:
1) Who put up the posters? If the WCJA was the driving force (as I have heard elsewhere), then was it a group project or just a few dedicated individuals? If so, what are their names? Or do they want to remain anonymous? I have no opinion on what answers to these questions might be considered “right” or “wrong.” I just want to know the facts.
2) Can we please see a copy of one (or more) of the posters? Why is this so hard to accomplish?
3) There is some dispute about whether or not the posters included pictures of “dead babies.” Can someone clarify? My best guess is that some posters included pictures of living children (and infants?) who were later killed by the Nazis but that there were no pictures of corpses.
4) Alex implies that all the posters featured Jews. True?
5) Where did the pictures and individual details come from? I assume that the WCJA (if they were behind the project) did not individually research 2,000 individual cases. They must have gotten the pictures/stories from somewhere else. Where?
6) Were College staff/funds used in creating the posters? Not that there would be anything wrong with that.
7) Are their rules against putting up posters on student doors? Rahul argues that there are.
Security is not going through WSO taking down your posts. (Cowardly? She did, as Ronit pointed out, identify herself). Security did, however, go about removing the Hitler posters. People were offended by them, yes. As were people offended by the Holocaust Remembrance Days posters. Security didn’t go about removing those posters. Were they unaware of those being put up? Because the only college rules that were violated were violated by both the HRD posters and the Hitler posters - unsolicited posters posted in prohibited places. I wonder if I complain about say, a poster put up which says (no offence to anyone, just the first thing that popped into my mind) “The Best a Capella show in the world, tonight at 8 in Currier Ball room”, would security remove it? I suspect not. Thus by removing the Hitler posters security and the school administration has taken a stance on what is acceptable free speech and what isn’t. If they showed respect for the rules equally, I wouldn’t care. Otherwise, they are putting themselves in a difficult position morally and legally in trying to decide what can and can’t go up.
It would be nice to get confirmation on the actual rules. And on the claim that security took down all the Mary Jane Hitler posters and none of the Holocaust Remembrance Day posters. And who ordered security to do so?
Again, I don’t have a strong feeling on what the answers to these questions “should” be. I just want to know the facts.
UPDATE: This post was edited for context and better clarity, so some of the comments no longer directly apply.
April 25th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
I agree with Alexei that there should be a memorial day to the tens of millions of victims of International Socialism and Communism, wholly separate from a memorial for the victims of National Socialism.
Hitler certainly did target other populations besides Jews, and nobody disputes that. However, Holocaust Remembrance day is a(n ethnic) Jewish holiday, not a generic “victims of Hitler”. It’s called Yom HaShoah (the day of the Shoah), and was specifically created to commemorate the JEWS who were exterminated. There’s a reason that it runs off of the Jewish Lunar calendar (on the 27th day of Nisan), rather than a date or calculation in the secular solar calendar.
A little information can do wonders for outrage. If Alexei wishes to start a generic “Hitler’s Victims” memorial day, I daresay he’d have quite a bit of support, but uninformed whining about wholly accurate and representative commemorations of Yom HaShoah is not the way to achieve that goal.
April 25th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
I love these detailed ‘my genocide/mass killing is better than yours’ derivations. I genuinely do: it means maybe we’re still learning, even if it’s pedantic as all heck.
April 25th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Loweeel:
Precisely my sentiments. If Alexi wishes to bring awareness to any other aspect of Hitler’s brutality (or to any other genecide), he is perfectly welcome to do so. In fact, I suspect that the College would welcome his activism and that the majority of bright young minds at Williams College would be open to broadening their understanding.
Were Alexi to put forth the effort to highlight the atrocity of his choosing, it would an excellent example of peer learning. Honestly, those kinds of passionate efforts add signficantly to the college learning experience.
I do not want to believe that the rationalizations against the Holocaust Rememberance have, at their roots, darker motivations.
April 25th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
[flamebait poster Gestapo (69.213.216.109)'s unsigned post deleted]
April 25th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
I’m deleting flame-bait wholly anonymous comments. God, I hate Farkers.
April 25th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Lowell: I’m not sure deleting their crap is productive.
I think Williams students could do with some education about the fact that vile anti-Semitic sentiments are still around outside the Purple Bubble, and that not all people who support actions like those taken by Ms. Julia are merely ironic postmodernist pranksters.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
Yeah, the Fark link must be an EphBlog first. Here come the trolls!
First, addressing Rahul’s point:
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Security wasn’t taking them down because they conveyed a message Admin didn’t like, they took them down because a lot of Jewish students might find them potentially threatening. If you’re walking home and you see the picture of the man responsible for a large chunk of your extended family not existing posted on your door, you may not pause to figure out if it’s just harmless-but-offensive satire. You may be scared. And the College has a legitimate interest in preventing people from being scared that way. Period.
Next, on David’s question:
1) Members of the WCJA were responsible for the Yom HaShoah posters. My friends tell me any lack of attribution on the Yom HaShoah posters was due to an oversight and not intentional.
2) Julia linked a website (see previous ephblog post) with images of the actual posters uploaded and available.
3) The dead babies thing was WSO sarcasm or, in Jonaya’s case, hyperbole. There were no pictures of corpses, just normal-looking pictures of people who died subsequently.
4 and 5) They all seemed to have Jewish names, but they were central and eastern Europeans, so a lot of them had names that might “sound Jewish” to us Americans. It may have been easier to get names and faces for Jews through Jewish organizations and programs relating to the Shoah.
6) They were definitely laser-printed, so if I had to guess I’d say they were printed on a campus printer, probably in an out-of-the-way computer lab at an odd hour. But your guess is as good as mine…Julia’s off-campus friend could have done it on a personal machine for all I know.
7) I’ll try to find out when I get a minute.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Ronit — the one comment I deleted was by Gestapo/Manatee/whatever else 69.123.216.109 is calling him/herself that they didn’t sign and was just total flame bait. I figured that I’d just remove the bait.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:23 pm
Thanks to Andrew for taking the time to answer my questions. Just to clarify, all the above questions are about the Holocaust Remembrance Day posters, not about Julia’s. Follow-ups:
1) Which members of the WCJA? I am no looking to out anyone who wants to remain anonymous, but it would be useful if just one individual would come forward to answer questions.
2) Julia’s website just has her posters. I am looking for copies of (a sample of) the HRD posters.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
It probably wouldn’t hurt for some education on many issues. For example, I doubt many current Ephs know that there were “Jew quotas” at Williams (and other very prestigious colleges) as recently as 40 years ago. Or that an excellent school like Davidson College just repealed, within the last three years, a provision in its by-laws that effectively barred Jewish alumni from serving on its Board of Directors — and causing its largest benefactor John Belk and another board member to resign in protest of the change.
April 25th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
David- I think it was an official WCJA board project–not just a Jewish student on campus or a Jewish board member’s individual project.
April 25th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
5. There were not 2,000 different posters with 2,000 different victims and stories; there were maybe 10 different ones total and 200 copies of each.
April 25th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Most people consider the holocaust to be somehow different from the other atrocities of WWII — this is why we have a rememberance day for it and not other events.
However, this difference is not due to the fact that some girl was shot, drowned and then shot again. Nor is it due to the fact that 6 million people were killed. Likewise, Slavs and Africans were considered for extermination based on genetic inferiority alongside the Jews.
The difference, along with the lessons to be learned from the tragedy, lies in the betrayal of its citizens by a country. Like I said in my wso post, this is where I believe one should look for ideas to think about.
Now, we do have a Holocaust rememberance day, and well we should. It is the responsibility of those in charge of communications for the JRC or whatever organization decides to engage the campus about this to procide an environment where we are in a position to learn from the Holocaust, ESPECIALLY if you insist that this day is an ‘ethnic jew’ only deal, a statement I, as an “ethnic Jew” according to my Mother’s old Soviet Passport find quite disturbing. I dont see why it has to be us and them, and I CERTAINLY don’t see why millions of women and children killed for the same reason and by the same men during the same time as the Jews have to be ignored because of their race. Again, I think privately you can do whatever you want, but it is utterly inapropriate to bring a debate before the campus community about one instance of a genocide without mentioning another on that was caused by the same things at the same time and claimed a similar number of people.
Finally to bring the point from the beginning of last paragraph to a close, the JRC (or whatever organization ran the posters) not only did not provide a conducive environment for discussion, but went to one of the lowest forms of communication — shock value. As I said before, noone is going to “critically think” after reading the description of some gory killing of a child. They are going to get pissed off (because thats what humans do) and distance themselves mentally from the perpetrator by labeling them ‘evil’ or whatever. This is not beneficial to anyone, and it will get us no closer to understanding or preventing another tragedy.
April 25th, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Alex, there are several differences that I think you are just missing.
1. Holocaust Remembrance Day is the English translation of the Hebrew “Yom HaShoah”, or the day of the Shoah. It is celebrated on the same day worldwide that it is celebrated in Israel.
2. This date is determined, as I said, according to the Hebrew lunar calendar, unlike any non-Jewish holidays.
3. It began in 1959, in Israel, as a legally-enacted holiday dedicated to remembering the victims and heroes of Hitler’s extermination plan.
4. The word “Shoah” in Hebrew specifically refers to the JEWISH victims of Hitler.
5. Again, nobody is denying or minimizing that other groups were also horribly brutalized, persecuted, and decimated by Hitler. Yet there is no evidence that Hitler and his higher-ups planned a “Final Solution to the ZZZ Problem” for any values of ZZZ other than “Jewish”.
There was no “Final Solution to the Homosexual Problem”. There was no “Final Solution to the Gypsy Problem” nor was there a “Final Solution to the Trade Unionist Problem”. There was neither a “Final Solution to the African Problem” nor a “Final Solution to the Slav problem”. There was no “Final solution to the Soviet Problem,” as Hitler didn’t round up Soviet citizens when he invaded, but “restrained” his atrocities to combatants, what we’d call POWs today, just as the Japanese did with American (and to a lesser extent, Australian) POWs.
6. More Jews perished as non-combatants due to Hitler’s extermination efforts than EVERY OTHER CLASSIFICATION OF NON-COMBATANT COMBINED plus Soviet POWs. 6 Million Jews died; best estimates of every other group COMBINED range from 3-5 Million. The number of people is NOT similar, unless you want to explode the parameters and include deaths of allied combatants in battle and British Blitz victims as Holocaust victims as well.
7. It’s absurd to expect a Jewish campus group, commemorating a Jewish ritual of memoralizing Jews who died, based on a Jewish calendar, to focus more than a footnote on the other groups who were victims. As I said, if you feel so strongly about it, start another memorial day. But Yom HaShoah is not for you to expand and change until it loses its distinctiveness as a “generic Hitler victims” day. We don’t expect Armenians or Turkish Kurds commemorating their decimations during Turkicization to commemorate the Greek victims of the Ottomans, and it’s similarly ridiculous to demand that Yom HaShoah become a generic day for all of Hitler’s victims.
April 25th, 2007 at 5:28 pm
just going to throw this out there: again, this will be a point on which Rory and Lowell will agree.
somebody buy a lotto ticket!
April 25th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Re:
“Hitler certainly did target other populations besides Jews, and nobody disputes that. However, Holocaust Remembrance day is a(n ethnic) Jewish holiday, not a generic “victims of Hitler”. It’s called Yom HaShoah (the day of the Shoah), and was specifically created to commemorate the JEWS who were exterminated. There’s a reason that it runs off of the Jewish Lunar calendar (on the 27th day of Nisan), rather than a date or calculation in the secular solar calendar.”
Like I said, I am by NO means saying that you should pray for the Chinese or Russians at the ceremony. BUT if you bring the conversation to the campus table, you must be ready to consider it from all angles and sides. You can’t expect to take something as complex as WW2 and have everyone abstract from the specifics to the point of only considering one part of the horrific picture: the murder of the Jews. I dont see how the Holocaust can even be viewed and discussed without reference to the other crimes that the third reich was responsible of.
The bottom line is that this should have been presented in the cotnext of historical background and the right questions, not tasteless posters and insane statements like that the holiday is
“not a generic “victims of Hitler”.”
As I said, do whatever you need in private — but if you are as you said unwilling to
“focus more than a footnote on the other groups who were victims”
Then DONT BRING IT to the college community, because
1. it is full of those victims
2. that statement is absolutely ridiculous, I would expect any group to focus on all the others.
3. no reasonable debating or critical thinking can occur if you demand to ignore history.
April 25th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
I see your statistics are almost as on point as your comments, given that your estimate ALL non combatant deaths of 3-5 million is dwarfed by the RUSIAN civilian casualties alone at 11.5 million, of which the VAST majority were women and children. This is not even a ‘high’ figure.
Furthermore, Auschwitz was used exclusively for Soviet POWs and Poles during the first 21 months of its existence.
Hitler is known as saying to his generals “Kill all people of the Polish decent and language” for the “living space” Uhhm… sounds a little like a final solution.
Saying that Hitler did not round up Soviets and kill them makes about as much sense as saying that he was best friends with a Rabbi.
Of the 5.5 Million Soviet POW’s, 3.5 Million died before they were released.
Seriously, I’m the wrong person to be a dumbass with statistics around. The irony is of course that the only reason that Hitler didn’t finish his final solution was BECAUSE the Soviets sent wave after wave of soldiers at the Germans until they beat them. But you probably wouldn’t want to relegate more than a footnote to that.
April 25th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
Alex, you just don’t get it — it is not a day ABOUT anything else but the planned extermination of Jews. It’s not a day of “critical thinking” It’s a day of REMEMBRANCE.
The point of it is not to remember that “genocide can happen”, which is the point if you focus on the other groups. The point of it is to REMEMBER that if people don’t say anything, a determined State can plan, and largely succeed in implementing their plan, to DELIBERATELY WIPE A SPECIFIC ETHNO-RELIGIOUS GROUP OFF OF THE EARTH. Genocide still happens, but there hasn’t been another Shoah.
The experiences of other victim groups in the Holocaust are simply NOT relevant to that point. What comes closer are other targeted genocide victims — Black Christians in Sudan, Armenians in Turkey, Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, but they differ in impact and effectiveness by substantial amounts. Even the other groups that Hitler persecuted, or the Chinese and Koreans under Japanese occupation, were not the primary targets of systematic plan to wipe them off of the entire planet.
The difference between the Jews and the other victims is that there was a specific plan to wipe out the Jews, and Hitler was so devoted to this plan that he sabotaged the war effort to do so. Nothing similar happened for other groups. Moreover, this effort was largely successful — Hitler largely destroyed European Jewry. Somewhere between 1/3 and 45% of the Jews on Earth were wiped off the face of the earth as a result of the Final Solution.
The point of the REMEMBERING the Shoah is that it is unique not just in terms of the Third Reich’s crimes, but nearly unique in recorded history. The point of REMEMBERING the Shoah is that when Mein Kampf sells well and people talk about killing the Jews and making land Judenrein again, they damn well mean it, and you can’t just brush off the words as hyperbole.
There are still large Gypsy, Slav, Homosexual, Trade Unionist, and Communist populations in Europe. African populations are, if anything, substantially higher than before the Holocaust.
Should Christians on campus also note the hidden Imam during their public Easter commemorations? Should Jews focus on the similarities with the persecuted Zoroastrians during Passover when they bring their matzah-eating to the campus as a whole, and shouldn’t they focus on those poor Egyptian first-born who were slaughtered by the Angel of Death and the Egyptians who drowned in the Red Sea?
And no, there are no victims at Williams College of any group persecuted by Hitler, as far as I know, because most of them are dead. What there are on campus are fewer members of the other persecuted groups, all of which were much less impacted by the Third Reich.
All you’re doing Alexei, you and the other people who just don’t get it, is reinforcing the impression that there is still a need for more Holocaust education.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Haha oh now I need holocaust education. I guess you’ve realized that you can’t beat me on facts, so you’re just going to repeat the same inane statements over and over again and patronizingly tell me that I don’t get it. You should join debate.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Alexei, since you’ve dropped the pretense of civility and resorted to ad hominem, I’ll just rebut your contentions and move on.
your estimate ALL non combatant deaths of 3-5 million is dwarfed by the RUSIAN civilian casualties alone at 11.5 million, of which the VAST majority were women and children. This is not even a ‘high’ figure.
What’s a “Rusian”? Is it somebody who can’t even spell a group to which he belongs?
My course for the total figure is Wikipedia’s figure of 9-11 Million victims of the Holocaust. Russian Civilians who died in WWII != victims of the Holocaust, just as British Civilians who died in the Blitz are not victims of the Holocaust.
Furthermore, Auschwitz was used exclusively for Soviet POWs and Poles during the first 21 months of its existence.
That’s not really disputed. But how many of them were deliberately exterminated there?
Hitler is known as saying to his generals “Kill all people of the Polish decent [sic.] and language” for the “living space” Uhhm… sounds a little like a final solution.
Wow, you said that he “is known as saying”!!! What a great source! And they implemented that directive so well!!! This stands, of course, in start contrast to the warehouses of documents and written directives on the Final Solution. And no, it sounds NOTHING like the Final Solution, because there is no evidence that Hitler either intended to or tried to wipe every Pole off the face of the earth. Even a casual student of European history knows the wildly varying borders of Poland (in even the years when it existed); “Pole” was at most a linguistic and cultural identity, not a national or even ethnic one. It makes no sense to speak of “The Polish race”.
Saying that Hitler did not round up Soviets and kill them makes about as much sense as saying that he was best friends with a Rabbi.
Straw man and a non sequitur! Hitler’s goal was not the elimination of Soviets. I don’t recall Hitler making a non-aggression pact with Mandatory Palestine or the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto. Hitler did not move into Soviet Russia FOR THE PURPOSE of putting Soviet citizens in death camps or for exterminating every Soviet from the earth. In contrast, there is an enormous amount of documentation that Hitler’s goal was to kill the Jews. I’m sure he wasn’t adverse to killing Soviets, but that was not his goal.
Of the 5.5 Million Soviet POW’s, 3.5 Million died before they were released.
I guess you’re unfamiliar with a life before antibiotics, particularly with squalid conditions and not a particularly great amount of food. This figure is actually dwarfed, percentage-wise, by American POWs in Japanese camps. I wonder what the survival rate was of non-Soviet Allied POWs in Nazi POW camps? It was lower than the Soviet rate, but not by a lot; much of the difference is attributable to the more moderate weather conditions in Western Europe and the times of year in which fighting took place.
As a self-proclaimed non-dumbass with statistics, you sure seem to be sampling wholly unrepresentative universes in making your claims. You fail to produce even a single instance in which you compare apples to apples. Every single “statistical” claim you make ranges from comparing apples to pears to comparing apples to pairs of shoes.
Seriously, I’m the wrong person to be a dumbass with statistics around.
I think this stands for itself. I am, to mimic your awkward grammar, the wrong person to be a dumbass with War around.
The irony is of course that the only reason that Hitler didn’t finish his final solution was BECAUSE the Soviets sent wave after wave of soldiers at the Germans until they beat them.
This is a straw man. It’s not the “only reason”, but it certainly played a large part, perhaps even greater than 50%. It also has nothing to do with Normandy, Calais, the Battle of the Bulge, or any of the other things that the Soviet army was completely uninvolved with.
But you probably wouldn’t want to relegate more than a footnote to that.
Nope, and you know why? Because combatant deaths ARE NOT PART OF THE HOLOCAUST, whether American, British, or Soviet. So no, it’s almost entirely irrelevant, if not wholly so, to remembering the Shoah.
Do you get it, yet? It’s NOT ABOUT THE DAMAGE HITLER CAUSED. It’s not about the people whose deaths are in some sense attributable to the Reich. It’s about the Jews whose extermination was a, if not the, primary goal of the Third Reich.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Not to object to the other points you are making, however, the Generalbebaungsplan for Eastern Europe envisioned that the Slavic populations would either serve as slave labour (with notoriously high death rates) or be removed as the Slavic lands were colonized and terraformed by the German people.
“Nothing” that I’ve seen in the NSDAP archives and other documents would lead me to conclude that Speer’s SS-Reichsstelle fuer Raumordnung had any goal other than the ultimate extermination of the hundreds of millions of Slavic and other peoples, and the total erasure of any trace of their existence from the face of the Earth.
Which meant, in the Czech Protectorate, the destruction of any hill whose curves, or whose bioculture, might serve as remnant or memory of the existence of the Czech people. (I am not as familiar with the plans for the disposal of the Polach.)
Lidice, just east of Prague, is the one place where this vision of physical modernity was carried out, its population, Jew and Czech, exterminated, its buildings and forms raised to the ground. “In a generation,” the art historians and planners proclaimed triumphantly, no one will remember the name of Lidice, [and] they will have been wiped from the earth and history itself.”
Lidice’s small library, with the Gestapo files of each the dead, and with their identity cards and faces, documents which they once touched and carried and held until the last minutes of their lives, has to me long been perhaps the most haunting place on Earth.
If you will allow me a little bit of Slavic grammar there.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
aidan–you’re right! we still agree!
alex- Perhaps a different manner will help you (and, fyi: Lowell’s a graduate, so there’s no joining debate for him) understand. Yom HaShoah, as a Jewish holiday, is designed to focus on the final solution. the 11.5 million civilian casualities of Russians was a terrible evil injustice, but it was not designed as an act of genocide.
Jews who celebrate Yom HaShoah are not denigrating or denying the genocides and plights of others. It is not an attempt to say “our Holocaust was worse than yours!” but a way for Jews to continue to hold onto our collective memory of a tragedy that struck us and use that to push for a more just society more generally around the world.
Like the story of Passover in Jewih tradition, we believe that remembering and commemorating our people’s history of exploitation and tragedy helps us empathize with those currently and previously going through similar tragedies. It creates in Judaism, a sense of social justice that I believe is behind much of our historic activism against segregation in the US and genocides around the world. But the focus of the day is of rememberance and mourning and celebration of the heroes of the Holocaust.
As such, I believe the WCJA board thought it would be good to create discussion on campus about the tragedy in a way that might force people who otherwise do not consider political issues in the purple bubble to think about them. In many respects, it seems to have backfired. I think the complaint about things being on doors is a little exaggerated, but the end result does not seem to have been what they wanted. But that in no way should be used to criticize Jews and Yom HaShoah more generally.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
I was wondering, by the way, which part exactly I dont get? The part where I say things should be taken in their historical context? Or that a debate on the holocaust is incomplete without mention of Hitler’s other, no less abhorrent, attempts at genocide? The critical thinking comment, as well as most of your last post, do not apply to the situation AT ALL. THE WHOLE POINT wasnt that I want you to do these things for you, but IF YOU BRING THE CONVERSATION TO CAMPUS, there is a right way and wrong way.
OF COURSE we should remember the Holocaust. My FAMILY was decimated by it. I think this is one of the most important things we can do. But to understand it and avoid another one, we cant be ignorant of the events around it. Seeing the statistics you put up shows me that you have not yet concerned yourself with this. I mean I really dont mean to be hateful at this point, but to estimate the non combatant deaths of ww2 at 3-5 million is the same thing as saying the holocaust killed under 2 million Jews. This is simply a direct proportion.
what the hell does this mean? YOU were the one that started talking about the POWS. Look in quote #2 from you. I simply found the real statistics for the fake numbers you put up.
1:
My course for the total figure is Wikipedia’s figure of 9-11 Million victims of the Holocaust. Russian Civilians who died in WWII != victims of the Holocaust, just as British Civilians who died in the Blitz are not victims of the Holocaust.
2:
More Jews perished as non-combatants due to Hitler’s extermination efforts than EVERY OTHER CLASSIFICATION OF NON-COMBATANT COMBINED plus Soviet POWs. 6 Million Jews died; best estimates of every other group COMBINED range from 3-5 Million.
OK REAL SLOW NOW
CIVILIANS = NON COMBATANTS
SOVIET NON COMBATANTS DEATHS = 11.5 MILL
+ SOVIET POW DEATHS = 3 MIL
=15 Million
Total Jews died = 6-7 Mill
15>7
Normandy? 50%? You’re again ignorant. 90+ per cent of the Germans killed in WW2 were killed by Soviet Soldiers.
I am out.
Google these things… if you cant find them ill be glad to give you sources
April 25th, 2007 at 6:48 pm
Ok guys, I somewhat feel like we’re arguing different things. If you feel this holiday is for rememberance and personal reflection, I have nothing to argue with you about. If, however, you feel that you should bring the debate to campus, i stand by my opinion that it should be done in the terms I described.
If you think that the point of this is not to foster debate, then we really have nothing to argue about since that was my going assumption.
Im sorry if I offended any of you.
April 25th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
@[anon@williams]:
Quick tech note: since you post without any alias or pseudonym, it’s fairly difficult to be sure of which posts are yours and which may be someone else. This confusion and ambiguity would seem to contribute to “arguing different things” and “around one another.”
April 25th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Alexei, here’s the point you don’t get — civilian deaths DUE TO THE HOLOCAUST (3-5 million non-Jews, less the Russian POWs) are not the same as NON-COMBATANT DEATHS due to MILITARY ACTIONS. Russian civilians who died as part of the WAR are not victims of the HOLOCAUST. Once again, Yom HaShoah is not a generic “Victims of Hitler” day; by the Western military tradition, there is nothing morally unusual about the deaths of the victims of the Blitz, the citizens killed in the Nazi military invasions of various parts of Europe or the civilians starved by Stalin so the Soviet army could eat, as opposed to the Jews rounded up and systematically exterminated. They are two separate lists. Не сравнивай хрен с апельсином.
The latter are WAR DEATHS, the former are HOLOCAUST DEATHS. I don’t see how you’re not grasping this simple point — civilian deaths due to military action (e.g., the Blitz deaths in London that I keep bringing up) are not included in the HOLOCAUST tally. For example, the Jews who were beaten to death on Kristallnacht may be properly included in the Holocaust tally; but this was well before the onset of the War.
Not all Soviet civilian deaths due to World War II (and in fact, a very small minority) are attributable to the HOLOCAUST. In fact, not all Soviet civilian deaths in WWII are even attributable to Hitler or the Reich; even being as generous as possible to a Hitler-scale democidal madman, Stalin was blithely unconcerned with the lives of his own citizens even during peacetime. He was obviously even less concerned with their well-being during the war. The civilians who starved to death in the siege of Leningrad, or were bombed (or turncoats killed by the Red Army) during Stalingrad are not part of the Holocaust.
I hope that at some point in the future, you are able to grasp this obvious and fairly basic distinction.
April 25th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Alexei, the number of German soldiers killed by the weather and the starvation during the Russian offensive does not equate to the Soviet soldiers having stopped the Final Solution before it was wholly complete. This is called a nonsequitur.
If you’re actually interested in educating yourself about any of this, I’d recommend Prof. Wood’s WWII tutorial and his warfare in european history classes, but I think that those classes are no longer offered since he left. At the very least, pick up Lucy Dawidowicz’s “The War Against the Jews”.
Ken, I think there is a big difference between an ultimate, hazy, largely if not almost wholly unrealized end result for the Slavic populations of Eastern Europe on one hand and a well-in-progress, relentlessly detailed, largely competed plan to exterminate the Jews. I was actually thinking about this earlier, and it relates to the Niemoller “First they came for…” quote.
The Jews could be (and were) almost wholly confined and largely exterminated without more than token and/or sporadic resistance from the majority populations of their countries. The majority of European Jews (particularly those outside of France, Germany, and parts of Central Europe, {though I am unsure as to the pre-war status of the Romaniyot in Greece and the surrounding region} often lived in walled-off Ghettos or isolated shtetls. To get the Jews, the Germans did not have to militarily dominate the entire city, or the whole countryside. They could, did, and were largely successful at controlling the Ghettos, and shtetls were not particularly defensible, even if Jews (who were legally disarmed in most countries) had more than trivial defense capabilities. In contrast, to enslave and kill the majority populations would invoke if not majority resistance, then resistance of a non-trivial majority. To put it another way, most of the majority populations had small reason to fight for the Jews; they’d have a hell of a lot more incentive to fight for themselves.
April 25th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
prof. wood’s classes are still offered, though they alternate year to year; this year it’s war in euro history, and next year will be his WWII tutorial.
April 25th, 2007 at 11:31 pm
During the WW2, Russia was in the war for of survival. If the Germans had won the war, there would be no Russians (or other Slavs) around today.
Loweel, as the response to Alexei’s claim that “irony is of course that the only reason that Hitler didn’t finish his final solution was BECAUSE the Soviets sent wave after wave of soldiers at the Germans until they beat them,” you wrote:
This is a straw man. It’s not the “only reason”, but it certainly played a large part, perhaps even greater than 50%. It also has nothing to do with Normandy, Calais, the Battle of the Bulge, or any of the other things that the Soviet army was completely uninvolved with.
This is ignorant to the point of being insulting. There were 57,200 dead Allied solders in the Normandy battle (that’s American, British, Canadian et al. solders combined). In the battle of Stalingrad alone, there were 750,000 dead Soviet solders. The war was decided in Stalingrad, not western France. That’s the only reason a German customs official does not greet you today when you land to Charles de Gaulle international airport.
April 26th, 2007 at 12:31 am
Someone from the crowd, as somebody who’s taken more than my fair share of military history at Williams, the number of dead is far from dispositive of anything. In every war after the Civil war, the US’s casualties have been dwarfed by its opponents’. The casual level tells you nothing about the level of effort or the effectiveness of the fight.
The way that the US wins war is by spending intellectual, technological and financial capital, coupled with one hell of a supply chain. Stalin’s Russia had very little of that, but it sure had a hell of a lot of bodies to throw into the meatgrinder, WWI or Zapp Brannigan-style. The level of Soviet casualties reflects Stalin’s and his subordinates utter lack of concern over the individual human life in the face of the ultimate victory. This, of course, is exactly what one expects out of the Communist inversion of morality and duty.
In contrast, American soldiers were generally quite well-equipped and well-outfitted. This disparity is only all the more evident in the recent wars we’ve fought — we’ve always spent more per soldier than the other armies because we think it’s worth 10 million dollars on an aerial drone to save a single soldier’s life. Stalin, on the other hand, directed his generals to kill their own troops on multiple occasions (not including the 50,000 soviet “turncoats” counted in the casualties who were killed by the Soviet troops at Stalingrad). Soviet tanks were top notch, but their infantry were mostly cannonfodder conscripts who won through sheer force of numbers, much like the North in the Civil War.
You also ignore the counterfactual — would Hitler have lost Russia if not for the need to divide his forces to prepare fight a two-front war? Probably not.
Incidentally, Russia would be speaking Japanese today if not for the US — they were beaten handily in 1905, and did their utmost to avoid a rematch or any significant actions against the Japanese until the very end of the War.
April 26th, 2007 at 1:58 am
Part of today’s rant from Ms. Julia’s boyfriend:
“With the recent WSO posts indicating that the deaths of 15-20 million Russians, and millions of Native Americans, gays, Jehovah’s witnesses, and assorted criminals and deviants are somehow less important than the number of jews that died, discussion could soon devolve to discussions of semitism that will make Williams look like a radical middle eastern religious school.”
http://www.anonhost.org/williams/
April 26th, 2007 at 2:03 am
Loweel,
In the 1930s, Russia was a poor country. It fought with what it had. If it had received more material support from the allies, it human losses would have been less severe.
You are the one forgetting a counterfactual: if the Allies had invaded the Normandy in 1943 rather than in 1944, the war would have certainly lasted shorter. However, they did not. They left the Russians bleed one extra year on the Eastern front, and thus they left the Auschwitz furnaces operate one year longer. Of course, every American, Brit, Canadian, ect. who fought in Normandy or Pacific is a hero. But, the Russians endured the brunt of the struggle.
The point that you are missing is that the colossal human loss was not a consequence of Stalin’s lunacy; it was the consequence of the fact that Russia was fighting a war for biological survival with what it had. Instead of giving up 750,000 lives at Stalingrad, the Russia could have capitulated; that would mean a death sentence for every Slav from Baltic to Adriatic to Urals. It was an all-or-nothing gamble.
This is not to say that Stalin did not have lack of concern over the individual human life, and I am certainly not trying to exonerate him. My grandmother is Russian. She had members of her family “disappeared” by him in the 1930s purges. She also had members of her family die during the war. If you went to Russia or Ukraine 10 or 20 years ago, you will be surprised to find a relative scarcity of men in their 60s and 70s.
You describe Russian troupes as “cannon fodder conscripts who won through sheer force of numbers, much like the North in the Civil War.” I am grateful for their sacrifices without which I would certainly not be here today.
April 26th, 2007 at 2:41 am
Bong Hits 4 Hitler’s loser boyfriend isn’t doing her any favors with his middle-school revolutionary rhetoric.
I don’t think that Julia has any clue that a significant percentage of Americans (including future employers) would view papering a campus with Hitler posters in response to the Holocaust Rememberance as a hideously anti-semitic act. I do.
She, and her loser boyfriend can proclaim otherwise and scribe all the manifestos they want, but where does that get her? Her loser boyfriend is now blaming it on rich, presumably Jewish, alumni pressuring the school. He writes that Julia shouldn’t apologize because that would be “giving in to terrorists”.
If any of her friends are reading this, is there someway that somebody can reach out to her? The more she tries to rationalize this thing, the worse it gets.
April 26th, 2007 at 2:59 am
hwc: It seems the only thing she regrets is that she owned up to postering the campus:
(from the “Mary Jane” thread)
“What can people learn from all this? … it is prudent to employ anonymity … “
April 26th, 2007 at 3:06 am
I feel so bad for her. This loser boyfriend is obviously an impediment to the girl taking steps to dig herself out of a hole.
Somebody who knows her — a friend, a theater prof, a parent, a counselor — needs to reach out and try to get her to snap out of it. She can fix it with some empathy and contrition.
April 26th, 2007 at 3:11 am
Yes, she’s making it a lot harder on herself than it needs to be. And the longer it goes, the worse it’ll get.
April 26th, 2007 at 6:00 am
I have resisted chiming in to this point out of sheer horror and disgust at the stupidity of the people defending this girl and her boyfriend’s actions and words, not to mention the original perpetrators. This is perhaps the first occasion I can recall that I’ve been embarassed to be affiliated with Williams College. Needless to say, I agree with basically everything Ephmom, HWC, and Lowell have said — and I think the four of us agreeing on anything is a first. It’s not about free speech — I certainly respect the right of anyone to say anything they want. And I hate the PC police and speech codes, generally … I don’t think this girl should face any sort of official sanction, in fact I prefer when this kind of evil rises to the surface rather than boils inside someone where it can remaind unchallenged and unaddressed. But I and everyone else also have the right to call someone out and condemn crass, insensitive, racist / anti-semitic, stupid, uninformed and/or heartless commentary in the strongest possible terms. I can’t believe some of the debates that have been posted on this site and at WSO. People acting like putting a flier intended to commemorate a tragedy on a college door (who gives a shit? you don’t own the door, and even if you did, again, who cares?) is somehow the equivalent (or even worse!!!) than actions and words celebrating history’s worst mass murderer and one who, but for the stupid decision to invade Russia in the winter, would likely have succeeded in destroying the entire Jewish population of the world as well as eventually the rest of the minorities in Europe, with zero provocation (not that there could be any). We can aruge about which atrocities are the worst, and I would say the Holocaust is unmatched in human history for a number of reasons, but that is irrelevant. The stupidest of the many stupid arguments made on this issue are those who have tried to assert, like this Alexei character, that commemorating the Holocaust somehow negates other human tragedies. We commemorate all sorts of much smaller human tragedies, in a variety of ways. Did folks having a moment of silence for Virginia Tech victims, or creating a memorial for September 11th victims, somehow equate to an afront to Russians killed by Stalin? Of course not, the sheer idiocy of the argument is astounding. It’s only when the Jews want to commemorate their tragedy that they are held to some higher standard of scrutiny by much of the world and, apparently, now Williams as well (which is itself evidence of the importance of remembering what can happen without continued vigilance and a reminder that even in, apparently, the safest of haves, the unimaginable can happen). If you are so concerned about tragedies that befell other populations, instead of attacking Jews why not just, I don’t know, CREATE YOUR OWN COMMEMORATION OR YOUR OWN EDUCATION CAMPAIGN. I don’t think any Jew ever has, or ever would, object. No Jew I’ve ever known has ever claimed a monopoly on suffering or commemoration … on the contrary, Jews are disproportionaly active (by an enormous factor) in charity and civil rights initiatives with no effect on or relation to Jews whatsoever. The Holocaust has special significance for Jews as I don’t know of any other large religious group that still exists in large numbers that came to the brink of complete extermination solely because of its religious beliefs / ethnic identification. If you don’t give a damn, fine, that’s your right. Take the 10 frigging seconds to take the poster down from your door and shut the hell up (or at most, express in a mature fashion that you found the poster to be ineffective in its methodology), and invite a speaker to campus to discuss whatever issues yo ufeel are also important, rather than plastering a celebration of Hitler all over the Williams campus. At the very least, be a little sensitive to Jewish students on campus — the Hlocaust remebrance posters, even if you disagreed with them, did not celebrate anyone who targetted any particular group for mass slaughter. You are acting like the Jews put up a poster of Stalin or some other mass killer all over campus, which of course they would and did not. I am so disgusted right now I don’t know what to think. I was always skeptical about Amherst’s Tony Marx’s new emphasis on moral education, but in light of some of what has happened on campus of late, culminating in this event, I am growing more and more empathetic to his views.
April 26th, 2007 at 6:23 am
Julia, I see you have commented on one thread. Do you think the appropriate reaction, everytime someone on campus is displeased with actions of a minority organization, is to distribute a message celebrating the death of members of that minority? When I was at Williams the BSU brought Conrad Muhammamad to campus (a virulently anti-semitic, anti-asian, and anti-homosexual speaker), should I have plastered the campus with photos of confederate flags and nooses? If the Muslim association sponsors a pro-palestinian speaker, should my response be to create an all muslims are terrorists cartoon? I could go on but you get the point. Your sheer lack of empathy is astounding and disturbing, and only forgivable because you are still learning about live. Take HWC’s advice in this and other threads and try to put your shoe on the other foot and really think about the consequences of your actions. Actually, first do your self a bigger favor and dump your idiot, creepy boyfriend. What the hell is a guy my age doing dating college students in the first instance? Probably because chicks his age see through his ignorant b.s.
April 26th, 2007 at 6:36 am
By the way, I did not mean to equate Conrad Muhammad w/ a pro-palestinian speaker. The point is, people do and have exercised far more restraint and judgment, in the face of far greater provocation — even racist speakers sponsored by a campus organization — than you did (I consider the Holocaust poster, clearly good-intentioned but something some people might disagree with, to be the equivalent of bringing a speaker to campus with a Palestinian perspective who is harshly critical of Israel — you wouldn’t see anyone plastering the campus with anti-Arab hate mail in response).
April 26th, 2007 at 11:51 pm
“Come to Williams College - a friendly place where we will be unconditionally tolerant of you unless, of course, we don’t like your attitude, in which case we will do everything we can to damage you.”