Hi Max,
It doesn't feel argumentative and thanks for the kind words. I sometimes feel I dig myself a hole then ask for a bigger shovel with the way I think, so it's appreciated. Asking me to teach you something is a tall order, because I'm not an expert on anything, rather I'm a mess of half remembered facts and instinctive opinion. Perhaps not being Jewish makes me reluctant to question the way Jews remember the Holocaust. I have no great theories as to why the six million is the number that has stuck in the public imagination, rather than the full 11 million total. But here goes.
Many different groups were persecuted and killed by the Nazis, but I think anti-semitism was the sickness that fueled the Third Reich. This isn't to diminish the suffering of those other groups that the Nazis hated and murdered: homosexuals, even 'pure' German ones, were seen as effeminate and weak, and useless to the master race as they wouldn't reproduce, the disabled were imperfect and a burden, communists and Russian prisoners of war were just political enemies. But the Jews (and the Slavs) were the truly sub-human. Two thirds of Europe's Jews were murdered; the Final Solution was to be the annihilation of every last one.
I don't even know if the dominance of that 6 million figure is something that is aggressively or deliberately propagated by Jews themselves, or if it has just naturally stuck in the collective psyche of Jews and non-Jews alike because it feels important somehow (maybe Jews were at the forefront of Identity Politics
). Anyway, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum seems to be pretty clear and inclusive in honouring non-Jewish victims too, and
calling them Holocaust victims
https://www.ushmm.org/remember/resou...d-victim-names
Some rambling thoughts:
Christians make up around 32% of the world's population and Muslims around 24%. Together they number more than 4 billion people. There are approx 15 million Jews in the world. That's 0.2% of the world's population and less than double the population of London. I know the Holocaust was perpetrated on racial rather than religious 'justifications', and also that as an atheist who basically thinks the world would be a better place if everyone gave up on their magic books these figures shouldn't mean much to me. But they're striking. Even today, in the insane carnival of religious and political polarisation, Jews seem to get it from all sides: I can't think of another group that, for different reasons, unites the far right, the far left and the more extreme wing of both of the world's dominant religions in varying levels of hatred. I don't blame them their protectiveness and bunker mentality, or their tendency, if such it is, in wanting to somehow 'own' the suffering of the Holocaust.
Personally, as a bright Catholic teenager, out of step with the 80s, growing up in working class Northern England – and before I even knew all these things/people were Jewish – they were among the things that helped shape me. They gave me Bob Dylan, old Hollywood, Allen Ginsberg, The Marx Brothers, Mike Leigh, Leonard Cohen, Stephen Fry, Woody Allen, every good secular Christmas song ever. All this and more they did shortly after (or sometimes during) a period when two thirds of them were wiped out in conditions the human mind can barely contemplate. I have nothing but respect.
I doubt I've convinced you of very much with these personal ramblings and I've probably managed to incense at least one person (no I'm not making the false equivalence between far right and left in their level of anti-semitism..). But anyway. Them's my unschooled thoughts.
Not sure how I got from calling Roger Kimball a dick to here.