BS: The U.S. and the Holocaust

Subject: RE: BS: The U.S. and the Holocaust
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 25 Sep 22 - 12:48 PM

Dictionaries don't dictate, John, neither do they judge (and they seldom all agree).   They reflect. My posts on this are my opinions and my readings of the current sense of how the word is used and how I see its nuances. I should be able to state those things without being insulted, thanks.

Subject: RE: BS: The U.S. and the Holocaust
From: Donuel
Date: 25 Sep 22 - 12:58 PM

Beyond hair-splitting, word usage are the highly controversial topics of the Catholic Church and the Holocaust and the actions of various Caribean and Latin American nations.

Subject: RE: BS: The U.S. and the Holocaust
From: Backwoodsman
Date: 25 Sep 22 - 01:34 PM

No insult intended, Steve, simply a statement of fact.

Subject: RE: BS: The U.S. and the Holocaust
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 25 Sep 22 - 01:46 PM

Well you didn't sleep well last night,John, so I'll let your professorial uncalled-for insult go if you like.

This:

"Beyond hair-splitting, word usage are the highly controversial topics of the Catholic Church and the Holocaust and the actions of various Caribean and Latin American nations."

...makes no sense. As it's presumably about how we use words, that's quite ironic.

Subject: RE: BS: The U.S. and the Holocaust
From: robomatic
Date: 25 Sep 22 - 02:55 PM

"For Arthur McBride, it all happened again
And again
And again
And again
And again..."


There is a bit of devolution occurring in this thread. Rather than get into the nitty gritty with various comments that will spread more light than heat:

Words in any language not yet under command control, and I don't know of any, evolve like birds flocking, they can come to a word meaning that is specific, and then they can wander again.

'Holocaust' for the time being tends to refer to the Nazi genocides 1933-1945, and typically concentrates on the Jews, which were a prominent part of explicit Nazi policy. It is or should be well understood that millions of other groups of people were targeted and liquidated along with Jews.

The Hebrew word Shoah is not a preference, it is the word in Hebrew , originally meaning 'catastrophe' that is understood to mean the same thing as the English word 'Holocaust'. It seems to have evolved in a similar manner.

The uncapitalized word 'holocaust' has not lost its definition. But its use might be less common in comparison to the capital'H' version.

Using holocaust as reference to the nuclear bombings of Japanese cities sounds like a personal preference. I have not heard it used unambiguously in this sense, although it is justifiable not as a genocide reference, but as a physical description of what happened to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945.

I believe the word 'genocide' originated in a description of what happened to millions of Armenian civilians as a policy decision of the Turkish government during and after WWI. The book "A Problem From Hell" by Samantha Power refers to it. At the end of WWII the United Nations gave a criminal definition to it. Beyond Samantha Power's book there is enough material for a whole encyclopedia on the subject.

Other cultures typically are not interested in horning in on 'Holocaust'. They have their own references. The Irish have long had their own references to the potato blight that starved, impoverished and exiled a high proportion of their population in the mid 1800s. The Ukrainians have their own word, Holodomor, for what the Soviet government did to them in the 1930s. For Cambodians there is the mass killing of a vast proportion of their own population at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. The racial/ religious cutting down of hundreds of thousands often by neighbors in Rwanda in the 1990s. And then there are the sad cases which actually exist in North Korea, present day Russia, and present day China, that simply cannot be referred to because the government that created the starvation of millions of their own citizens are still in power and are still employing the policy that the sufferers are required to praise the government that preys on them.

What King Leopold did to the indigenous inhabitants of the Congo probably has a bunch of names still in use in those lands. I can't recommend the book "The Ghost of King Leopold" enough.


"For Arthur McBride, it all happened again
And again
And again
And again
And again..."

Subject: RE: BS: The U.S. and the Holocaust
From: Joe Offer
Date: 25 Sep 22 - 09:40 PM

This thread was closed, but I'm gonna squeeze in one more post and close it again.

When I was a Theology student in the 1960s, "holocaust" was a specific term used to denote the most solemn of the sacrifices in the Temple of Jerusalem, in which the victim was completely burned. It was a Greek translation of the Hebrew word " 'ola." The Greek word, holocaust, was used in many places in the Greek Septuagint version of the Hebrew Scriptures in 150 B.C.E. The connection to the extermination and incineration of Jews during World War II is obvious and powerful.

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No one was disputing that, Joe. We simply were discussing when it took on the meaning it has today. The McBride quote was a really good post to end this thread on. ---mudelf

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Whatever. But the fact remains that the thread was closed before anybody had time to mention that the term had a specific and important use and meaning at least as far back as 150 BCE. I was gone over the weekend and unable to participate except for a brief comment on my phone. I hate to see Mudcat become a place where loudly-stated "opinion" has more value than documented fact. But maybe I'm old-fashioned about that. -Joe Offer-