"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..."