GENOCIDE: MYTHS AND REALITIES
Mark Elf Dagenham, Essex
The Independent
etters/letters-nhs-and-privacy-1921853.html
March 16 2010
UK
John Mortl (letter, 10 March) dismisses the Armenian genocide as an
"emotive label". Would he also regard the Holocaust as an emotive
label, and an inconvenient obstruction to better relations with
Germany?
It is not, as he implies, an "emotive" irrelevance to distinguish
between casualties of war consequent upon disputes between nations,
and wholesale programmes of racial and religious extermination
conducted under cover of attendant domestic and national dislocation.
It is a question of historical and moral accuracy.
Armenia, the Kulaks, Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur: the list
goes on. It is emotive because we are emotional beings, but ones gifted
with reason. It is in balancing these twin poles that we achieve our
humanity. Deny this, and we surrender to the bleak moral bankruptcy of
realpolitik and a world of meaningless persecution, pogrom and death.
Genocide as a label has meaning, and now more than ever it requires
our recognition, however and whenever it occurs.
Christopher Dawes London W11
It shows a lack of understanding of international politics and of
history to suggest that Israel is "the gem that was born out of the
ashes of the Holocaust" (letter, 9 March).
With the exception of Stalin’s Soviet Union, all the major powers that
supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine after the
Second World War already supported it by the end of the First World
War, and neither the Zionists themselves nor their allies in western
governments predicted the Holocaust. Stalin’s Soviet Union was the
only power to invoke the Holocaust as grounds for supporting the
establishment of the State of Israel. Does anyone seriously entertain
the idea that Stalin felt sorry for Jews?
The tragedy of the Holocaust has been used as an effective propaganda
tool by Israel and its apologists for several decades now.