Why the insistence on linking abortion with the Holocaust?

[quiet52]

The use of the word “holocaust” outside of its original biblical reference (see Catholic Encyclopedia: Holocaust - newadvent.org/cathen/07396b.htm) pre-dates the Nazi slaughter of Jews and others by a few centuries.

As emotionally meaningful as the word “holocaust” might be to the Jewish survivors of the Nazi’s Holocaust, nobody has a right to demand that a word only be used within a certain context, no matter what a majority opinion might be at any point in history.

There is absolutely no disrespect directed toward anyone when we discuss the Holocaust of the Unborn. With a capital “H”. In no way does it demean anyone victimized by the Shoah. That abortion in modern times IS a holocaust is a reality which should not be minimized by anyone.

From Wikipedia:

…According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word holocaust has been used in English since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people, but the earliest attested such usage dates from 1671. In 1833 the journalist Leitch Ritchie, describing the wars of the medieval French monarch Louis VII, wrote that he “once made a holocaust of thirteen hundred persons in a church”, a massacre by fire of the inhabitants of Vitry-le-François in 1142.

In the early twentieth century, Winston Churchill and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide of World War I.[7] The Armenian Genocide is referenced in the title of a 1922 poem “The Holocaust” (published as a booklet) and the 1923 book “The Smyrna Holocaust” deals with arson and massacre of Armenians.[8] Before the Second World War, the possibility of another war was referred to as “another holocaust” (that is, a repeat of the First World War). With reference to the events of the war, writers in English from 1945 used the term in relation to events such as the fire-bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima, or the effects of a nuclear war, although from the 1950s onwards, it was increasingly used in English to refer to the Nazi genocide of the European Jews (or Judeocide).

By the late 1950s, documents translated from Hebrew sometimes used the word “Holocaust” to translate “Shoah”, as the Judeocide. This use can be found as early as May 23, 1943, in The New York Times, on page E6, in an article by Julian Meltzer, referring to feelings in Palestine about Jewish immigration of refugees from “the Nazi holocaust.” By the late 1960s, the term was starting to be used in this sense without qualification. Nora Levin’s 1968 book The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1933-1945 explains the meaning in its subtitle, but uses the unmoderated phrase “The Holocaust”. An article called “Moral Trauma and the Holocaust” was published in the New York Times on February 12, 1968. However, it was not until the late 1970s that the Nazi genocide became the generally accepted conventional meaning of the word, when used unqualified and with a capital letter, a usage that also spread to other languages for the same period. The 1978 television miniseries titled “Holocaust” and starring Meryl Streep is often cited as the principal contributor to establishing the current usage in the wider culture.

The Hebrew word Shoah is preferred by some people due to the supposed theologically and historically unacceptable nature of the word “holocaust”. The American historian Walter Laqueur (whose parents died in the Shoah) has argued that the term Holocaust is a “singularly inappropriate” term for the genocide of the Jews as it implies a “burnt offering” to God. Laqueur wrote, “It was not the intention of the Nazis to make a sacrifice of this kind and the position of the Jews was not that of a ritual victim”. The British historian Geoff Eley wrote in a 1982 essay entitled “Holocaust History” that he thought the term Holocaust implies “a certain mystification, an insistence on the uniquely Jewish character of the experience”.

The term became increasingly widespread as a synonym for “genocide” in the last decades of the 20th century to refer to mass murders in the form “X holocaust” (e.g. “Rwandan holocaust”)…

[read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Holocaust]

 

[quiet52]

(And here’s something interesting in terms of the Church’s view of the word: israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/142241#.UfM58W0pj0M)

And of course, as I’ve mentioned before, the Vatican no longer uses the term “holocaust” to refer to anything other than, well, the Holocaust. And I generally think the Vatican is a good source.

gracepoole, the link you posted does NOT represent the Catholic Church’s “view” of the word “holocaust.” The article in the link is written by a journalist for the Israeli media, who claims she knows why the recently-revised translation of the New American Bible changed the word “holocaust” to “burnt offerings.”

She is wrong about the opinion of one person, the opinion of which she, the journalist, states as fact.

And she, the journalist, does not speak for the Vatican, and neither have you.

 

[gracepoole]

The use of the word “holocaust” outside of its original biblical reference (see Catholic Encyclopedia: Holocaust - newadvent.org/cathen/07396b.htm) pre-dates the Nazi slaughter of Jews and others by a few centuries.

As emotionally meaningful as the word “holocaust” might be to the Jewish survivors of the Nazi’s Holocaust, nobody has a right to demand that a word only be used within a certain context, no matter what a majority opinion might be at any point in history.

AGAIN, this definition hasn’t been determined by a “majority opinion.” It’s been determined because this is what the historical record bears out. I can’t suggest enough that people seriously re-investigate (or investigate) the “final solution” – by searching for that specific term.

There is absolutely no disrespect directed toward anyone when we discuss the Holocaust of the Unborn. With a capital “H”. In no way does it demean anyone victimized by the Shoah. That abortion in modern times IS a holocaust is a reality which should not be minimized by anyone.

I am familiar with the history of this term, as I think I indicated previously. It’s sort of strange, though, to say with impunity that “there is absolutely no disrespect directed toward anyone” and that linking abortion with the Holocaust doesn’t “demean anyone victimized by the Shoah.” Whether intentional or not, this conflation is disrespectful. Moreover, many survivors describe the misuses of the term “Holocaust” as demeaning and insulting. I don’t mean to be snarky, but how on Earth might we (who did not experience the horrors of the Shoah firsthand) have the audacity to claim they’re wrong?

Again, I really – REALLY – don’t understand why people aren’t satisfied with calling abortion a genocide and why it’s so necessary (or even helpful) to call it a “holocaust.”

 

[gracepoole]

Chosen People merely stated historical facts. Your reaction to them is your own business.

 

[gracepoole]

gracepoole, the link you posted does NOT represent the Catholic Church’s “view” of the word “holocaust.” The article in the link is written by a journalist for the Israeli media, who claims she knows why the recently-revised translation of the New American Bible changed the word “holocaust” to “burnt offerings.”

She is wrong about the opinion of one person, the opinion of which she, the journalist, states as fact.

And she, the journalist, does not speak for the Vatican, and neither have you.

Please explain why this source should not be viewed as trustworthy and credible. Or just consider this article from Reuters that essentially says the same thing (with comments from the USCCB’s representative).

 

[Trader]

Murdering children by the millions IS worse than the Holocaust, and the law will not accept them as persons–same like in Nazi Germany to its victims. I’m surprised that so many people are unaware of some satanists offering abortions to Satan.

I have read though all the posts here and you seem to be closest to my position. Abortion is worse than what the Nazis did, not because of the crime committed, or because of the number of murders.

Abortion is worse because a mother has a greater positive duty to her child than the state has to its citizens. A mother is charged not only to do no harm, but with the positive duty to protect and nurture her child. It is the highest of duties that any human being has to any other. We will not know of a closer relationship until we reach heaven and fully understand the love God has for us.

The reason so many people compare the Holocaust with the pandemic of abortion is because the Holocaust has reached almost universal recognition as spectacular evil. Sadly, the evil of abortion has not reached that level of agreement yet. While only a small number of people at the fringe of world culture try to justify the Holocaust, a very large number of people, and even influential people, attempt to justify abortion.

 

[josh987654321]

I have read though all the posts here and you seem to be closest to my position. Abortion is worse than what the Nazis did, not because of the crime committed, or because of the number of murders.

Abortion is worse because a mother has a greater positive duty to her child than the state has to its citizens. A mother is charged not only to do no harm, but with the positive duty to protect and nurture her child. It is the highest of duties that any human being has to any other. We will not know of a closer relationship until we reach heaven and fully understand the love God has for us.

The reason so many people compare the Holocaust with the pandemic of abortion is because the Holocaust has reached almost universal recognition as spectacular evil. Sadly, the evil of abortion has not reached that level of agreement yet. While only a small number of people at the fringe of world culture try to justify the Holocaust, a very large number of people, and even influential people, attempt to justify abortion.

Exactly

Martin luther King -
Remember, everything Hitler did was legal.

 

[Avdima]

The compulsion and the necessity to link the Catholic stand on abortion to the murder of one in every two Jews in Europe is more than unclear. This incongruity is further enhanced given that certain Catholic positions on abortion are antithetical to Judaism. . The Holocaust analogy to abortion encourages the further erosion and belittlement of the unique horror of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the culmination of two thousand years of religious, cultural and racial anti-Semitism. The Nazis were not the originators of the idea that the Jews were subhuman, that they were like animals fit only for slaughter. The Nazis did not invent making Jews wear a yellow badge identifying them as Jews, they did not invent the concept of Jew free areas, or mass expulsion of Jews, or mass murder of Jews or mass theft of their property, or the placement of Jews in ghettos, or blood purity rules, or book burnings of Jewish books, or the total ostracizing of Jews from society, from places of work, of learning, of social interaction, or the boycott of Jews and Jewish businesses, or the denial to Jews of basic civil and legal rights. They did not invent the “big lie”'such as the blood libel, the desecration of the Eucharist, the Jews poisoning of wells, the Jews causing the plague. They did not invent the idea of the Jew as a malignant and detrimental force to society. Others did that for them.

So we should not be surprised to discover that the Holocaust wasn’t the first time that one half of the Jewish population of Europe was massacred. That occurred during the Crusades and was carried out by people who had joined the Crusades. Admittedly, the connection of butchering Jewish men, women and children for the crime of being Jewish and abortion is still unclear. However given the passage of time this similar analogy does not come to diminish the horror of the Holocaust. So instead of talking about abortion and the Holocaust I suggest something along the lines that abortion is “like being a Jew in Europe at the time of the Crusades”.

Amen!

 

[epan]

The term “Holocaust” literally refers to a sacrificial death by fire. And according to scholars and survivors like Elie Wiesel, there is only one Holocaust – it’s written with a capital “H” to indicate that it’s a proper noun and it refers to Nazi Germany’s genocide. Why, then, do people like Pat Robertson find it necessary to compare it to abortion? The claim that abortion is a genocide is different – it may or may not be. But it most definitely is not the Holocaust. This comparison strikes me as doing a disservice to the Holocaust’s victims as well as the millions murdered through abortion. Abortion is hideous enough that it need not be compared to another tragedy. And Robertson’s claim that abortion is “worse” than what happened in Nazi Germany is sick. They’re both immoral affronts to God – giving one atrocity a gold medal while giving another a silver, as though they’re competing in some sort of bizarre Olympics of Suffering, is really shameful.

“Robertson: US Abortion ‘Holocaust’ Worse than Nazi Germany, Will Lead to ‘Wrath of the Lord’”
rightwingwatch.org/content/robertson-us-abortion-holocaust-worse-nazi-germany-will-lead-wrath-lord

When I think of the Holocaust, the numbers come to mind. Those numbers are dwarfed by abortion statistics.

The closest that I have come to imagining the suffering of Holocaust victims has been while visiting several Holocaust museums and visiting former camps in Europe, and by reading personal accounts. But I can’t imagine it, truly.

I think Robertson’s point is the large numbers. He doesn’t strike me as the type who can empathize with others, and who can realize how is insults Holocaust survivors with his analogy.

 

[lynnvinc]

I’m thinking that The Holocaust might be kept separate to reference what happened in Nazi Germany.

But stepping back to what the word (small case) means – a Jewish sacrificial offering that is burned completely on an altar – might be useful for other issues.

In ancient times and in many religions there were animal (even human) sacrifices to the deity to bring some good welfare to people.

Now for Catholics, the only holocaust we believe in that has any efficacy at all it the crucifixion of Jesus.

I guess in line with Marcel Mauss’s idea in The Gift, there is a need for people to give upon receiving and expect some counter-gift upon giving. It seems to be universal, a human thing, the way God made us.

So sometimes people wanting things will sacrifice others to that purpose. It’s almost as if many believe that the only way to get ahead is to sacrifice and harm others, step on others while climbing the corporate ladder, etc. In a sense, these are modern day wrong-headed and evil holocausts, just as most people today would agree that the human sacrifices of ancient times were not only ineffective but evil.

So the Nazis felt they were accomplishing some great good by The Holocaust. And people who have abortions also feel it is for some greater good. And people who willy nilly emit greenhouse gases, without any thought or effort to mitigate global warming, feel they are doing so for their greater good. And people who neglect and even cheat and harm the poor, think they are doing so for their greater good, etc.

It seems to me that there are parallels to some extent, even if some issues involve more harm and death to people than others.

So perhaps, if we want to keep the word, it might be good to refer to these other sacrifices as “a holocaust” (without caps) – it would still have the ring to it of an evil sacrifice of human lives for someone’s misguided idea of the greater good because of The Holocaust, but it would allow The Holocaust to remain discrete and a special case which we should never forget or lump together with other issues, thereby diffusing it, reducing its importance.

Now having said that, as a Carmelite I often hear in daily prayers (the breviary) “holocaust” brought up in the Bible, so I’m into that thinking as much as I am into the common usage today as referring to the Nazi Germany Holocaust.

Psalm 51: Miserere

Have mercy on me, God, in your kindness.
In your compassion blot out my offense.
O wash me more and more from my guilt and cleanse me from my sin.
My offenses truly I know them; my sin is always before me.
Against you, you alone, have I sinned; what is evil in your sight I have done.
That you may be justified when you give sentence and be without reproach when you judge.
O see, in guilt was I born, a sinner was I conceived.
Indeed you love truth in the heart; then in the secret of my heart teach me wisdom.
O purify me, then I shall be clean;
O wash me, I shall be whiter than snow.
Make me hear rejoicing and gladness, that the bones you have crushed may revive.
From my sins turn away your face and blot out all my guilt.
A pure heart create for me, O God, put a steadfast spirit within me.
Do not cast me away from your presence, nor deprive me of your holy spirit.
Give me again the joy of your help;
with a spirit of fervor sustain me, that I may teach transgressors your ways and sinners may return to you.
O rescue me, God, my helper, and my tongue shall ring out your goodness.
O Lord, open my lips and my mouth shall declare your praise.
For in sacrifice you take no delight, burnt offering from me you would refuse;
my sacrifice, a contrite spirit. A humbled, contrite heart you will not spurn.
In your goodness, show favor to Zion: rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.
Then you will be pleased with lawful sacrifice, holocausts offered on your altar.