From: thf2@ellis.uchicago.edu (Ted Frank)
Subject: Re: "Feminazis" and the "abortion holocaust"
Reply-To: thf2@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1992 06:08:39 GMT

In article <1992Nov19.054325.9354@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu> dschenke@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Dennis L Schenkel) writes:
>This is not to trivialize the genocide perptrated by Hitler and his followers.
>However, it would be unjust for any group to claim control over a piece of 
>language and insist that no one else be aloud to use it for purposes of analogy
>or poetry or argrument.  To seize control of language smacks of Orwelian 
>fascism, and no less.

It's funny that you should mention Orwell (and in the same sentence as
fascism, no less).  You should read George Orwell's "Politics and the
English Language," where he specifically speaks against people throwing
around words like "fascism" and "holocaust" to things that don't merit it,
for fear of trivializing the real meanings of the real words.  If I
call everyone who disagrees with me a "fascist", how will I know who the
real fascists are when they appear?  The word loses its meaning.  The
same is true for "holocaust."

Under Hitler, abortion was illegal for Aryans, and forced on some Jews.
In Hitler's Final Solution, each and every Jew, no matter how religious,
no matter how patriotic, was to be killed.  Even if their family had
assimilated two generations ago.  Even if they only had one Jewish
grandparent, and had never thought of themselves as Jewish.  The desire
to kill Jews was so great that, even in the midst of a war that the Germans
were losing, even as Hitler's generals on the Eastern Front cried out for
more supplies, resources for the mass slaughter of Jews were *diverted*
from the war effort to speed the pace of the killing.  I have a friend
who was moved from orphanage to orphanage in Belgium, one step ahead of
Nazi inspectors searching for Jews -- any Jews, be they innocent babies
who didn't even know what a Jew was.  The Holocaust was unique in world 
history.  Ethnic wars had been fought in the past, but often over land, 
over religion, over money, over some ideology.  Never before,
and never since, was the sole purpose of a war on an ethnic people to
eradicate them from the planet.  Even in the horrific slaughter of
the "ethnic cleansing" in today's Yugoslavia, the Serbs have no intention
of hunting down Croats and Bosnians who flee Serb-desired lands. 

You can't tell me that the even the most strident of pro-choice advocates
supports the killing of every single fetus or wishes to search out pregnant
women to abort their embryos.  Regardless of how you feel about abortion,
the use of the word "Holocaust" to describe it is (1) inaccurate, 
(2) trivializes the event in history that has come to be known by the
name of "holocaust", and (3) is insulting to Jewish people.  Whether you
mean it to be or not.  The simple fact is, as bad (or not) that legalized
abortion is, it does not compare to the evil of the Holocaust.

You say that the word "holocaust" was around well before World War II.
This cannot be denied.  But, as I'm sure you're all aware, words change
their meaning over time.  You would be upset at someone who called the
Pope "gay", even if he meant it in the nineteenth-century sense of a
jovial person.  The word "holocaust" is now associated with the intentional 
planned genocide of an entire people, a genocide that irrevocably destroyed 
a whole swath of culture.  If this word, "holocaust," is used to refer to 
things of lesser magnitude, it trivializes what happened in Europe these 
fifty years ago.  
-- 
ted frank                     | thf2@ellis.uchicago.edu 
standard disclaimers          | void where prohibited
the university of chicago law school, chicago, illinois 60637
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish