Truth, Fiction, And Holocausts
What exactly is a holocaust? Here are three definitions from dictionary.com:- Great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of life, especially by fire.
- The genocide of European Jews and others by the Nazis during World War II
- A massive slaughter
If we speak of The Holocaust (capital 'T', capital 'H'), we are generally referring to what happened in Europe to the Jews, during the Nazi reign of terror. But there are other human tragedies which have ranked up there in destruction and slaughter to merit the title "Holocaust".
Every summer Camp Good News in Livermore, Maine has a week when a large group of refugee children from Cambodia come up from Massachussetts to go to camp. Their families escaped what is referred to as the "Cambodian Holocaust", or the "Khmer Rouge Holocaust".
And I have spent quite a bit of time working with Sudanese refugees, and am familiar with what they refer to as the "Sudan Holocaust" or "The Hidden Holocaust", in which uncountable numbers of families have been killed, enslaved, or exiled from their homeland.
Great tragedies of human suffering, brought about by the tragedies of the human heart.
These tragedies trouble me. But there's something else that troubles me. It's the fact that if you run searches on any of these tragic, wanton destructions, you can find websites created by people here in the US, from the safety of their middle class suburban lives, explaining to us all "that holocaust never really happened".
It boggles my mind. Because it only takes a wee bit of research to find out the truth. Believe it or not, most people in the US live within driving distance of a city or town where refugees and survivors of one or the other of these holocausts lives. You can talk to them yourself. You can ask them questions, and get their answers. You can even drive to another city and ask another refugee the same questions, and verify that their stories match.
So what about these people who post these sites without even taking the time to check out the information they are posting? What can we conclude about them? Perhaps that their lives are so comfortable that they can't bear the thought that the world might be full of unspeakable tragedy, that they might bear some moral responsibility to speak out, or care for the plight of these refugees who live in their back yard.
So they invent lies to keep themselves comfortable, and try to foist those lies on the rest of the world.
And perhaps that, in itself, is another form of holocaust. It is the Holocaust of Truth.
Posted On Apr 24, 2005 at 4:15 AM
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