Free Republic
Browse · Search
Religion
Topics · Post Article

To: annalex
Has he denied the moral dimension of the Holocaust?

Some of them, yes he has.

We not should say "even one killing is evil," though certainly it is.

What we must say is "each killing is evil."

The actual Holocaust is twenty times more evil than he claims, and that is just judging evil by body count, only one measure of the evil involved.

But they had no gas chambers. I have a feeling someone digging dirt in the permafrost for 25 years eating rotted herring would not mind a gas chamber.

I will not participate in this kind of comparison. I will not degrade the evil of the Holocaust by granting it some kind of merit of efficiency or quickness.

Making the gas chamber, -- and not mass murder by the godless state -- the centerpiece also denies something.

It denies nothing. That is a false dichotomy. It was systematic industrialized annihilation by a godless state. Both aspects are evil and both aspects apply.

It denies, or at least pulls the attention away from the victims of Communism, another "purely exterminationist, annihilationist" crime against humanity.

I recommend to you Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism. The GULAG system was not purely exterminationist or annihilationist. They were worked to death, slowly, being fed enough to keep them alive for the further extraction of work. That is not systematic exterminationism. It is different, in the totality of the act and not merely from the point of view of each individual.

The victims of the Holocaust--Jewish or not--were killed smoothly and efficiently, as fast as the rolling stock could be misdirected to carry them.

51 posted on 02/11/2009 11:50:36 AM PST by Petronski (For the next few years, Gethsemane will not be marginal. We will know that garden. -- Cdl. Stafford)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 49 | View Replies ]


To: Petronski

So you are willing to grade muss murder by numbers but you are not willing to compare methods of execution. That is my point: it is the killing that is grossly immoral, not the method.


52 posted on 02/11/2009 11:56:49 AM PST by annalex (http://www.catecheticsonline.com/CatenaAurea.php)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 51 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
Religion
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson