Redefinition in High Definition
Sam Aurelius Milam III
According
to WWII in HD, fourteen million people were killed in the Nazi concentration
camps. That number caught my attention. For most of my life,
I've heard that other infamous number, the total proclaimed by the Jews,
6 million of them killed by the Nazis. I'd never heard that there
were any victims of the concentration camps other than the Jews, and certainly
not that there were so many other victims. If the number reported
by WWII in HD is accurate, then there are 8 million other victims
of the Nazis whose murders have been marginalized. The Jews accounted
for less than half of the total, yet we hear only of the Jews. How
can that happen? I have an idea.
Maybe
there's a principle at work here. Maybe the victims who make the
most noise aren't necessarily the most numerous or even the most victimized.
Maybe they're just the ones who have the best publicity. Here's another
worrisome thought. A narrow concern for their own woes, within any
group of victims, might suggest a self-centered lack of concern for other,
similarly situated victims. Is it possible that the most clamorous
victims might also be the most racist or, at least, the most self-centered?
Maybe not, but it's worth considering, especially since the Jews have been
transformed into Israelis, who appear to be a different breed entirely.
They even seem to have acquired some of the behaviors and attitudes of
their former persecutors, the Nazis.
I
hasten to add that this idea isn't necessarily limited to only Jews.
So far as I can tell, most victim advocacy groups, maybe all of them, show
the same ignominious lack of concern for other, similarly situated victims.
I've mentioned this before, for example, with regard to black people who
complain only when the cops kill other black people. See my article
High
Hopes, on page 3 of the June 2015 issue. Any legitimate victim
advocacy group would be concerned with all similarly situated victims,
not just with those of its own ilk.
Here's
another thought that's at least tangentially related to this topic.
The treatment of the Jews (and others) in Nazi Germany wasn't genocide,
which is the complete extermination of a group of people. If some
of the members of a group survive, then it isn't genocide. It's attempted
genocide. Such exaggeration for effect is an unfortunate misuse of
our language, especially if it's for the purpose of manipulation or deception.
Let's at least try to learn how to understand our own language, and not
be hoodwinked by activists with an agenda. Atrocity and genocide
are not synonyms except, possibly, in the minds of political publicity
agents.
Actually,
I thought that the previous paragraph was going to be the end of this article
but then I decided to look for genocide in my collection of old
dictionaries. To my surprise, I discovered that, even though the
word is of Greek origin, it doesn't appear to have been a part of the English
language prior to 1961. That seems unlikely, but the oldest dictionary
in which I found the word listed was Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary,
© 1961. The word wasn't included in any of the earlier dictionaries
that I checked.
The
meanings of words, fascism and money being good examples,
are susceptible to manipulation when it serves a political purpose.
Such manipulation is usually instigated by some special interest group,
for the benefit of it's own agenda. Surprisingly, the more recent
definition of genocide is nearly the same as the 1961 definition.
More surprisingly, the recent definition is more precise than is the earlier
one. That isn't usually the case with politically motivated changes
in the meanings of words. As the Vulcan used to say, "Fascinating."
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