[Dean's World] Dean: New Blog Button

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Dean:
New Blog Button
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1141884506.shtml


   Here's a cool button you can add to your weblog. I've added it to
   Dean's World:

   [1]the holocaust history project 

   Be sure to make it [2]link here.

   You know, the holocaust is interesting to me in more than one way. I
   have made genocide--or what is probably better termed [3]democide--a
   subject of personal study for many years now. It started because as a
   child on the south side of Chicago, I knew a number of skinheads and
   neo-nazi sympathizers growing up. Illinois' Nazi party headquarters
   was literally a few blocks from my house, I walked past it many times
   as a kid. It was a very racist part of town, and I heard people talk
   about the "massive exaggeration" of the holocaust even back then. It
   was the '70s, and most Americans still hadn't been confronted full
   bore on with what happened. A few times, up into my early teens, I
   probably mouthed off the notion that the holocaust was a big
   exaggeration. Until I got into my later teens and got confronted full
   force with the evidence, the appalling and sickening evidence, of just
   how bad and horrible it was.

   Since then I've learned a great deal about many other mass murders. It
   often astonishes me what people are willing to dismiss or shrug off.
   The Armenian genocide. The horror that Lenin unleashed on the
   Cossacks. The multiple horrors Stalin unleashed on first the
   Ukranians, then on others. The appalling, incalculable brutality of
   Mao. The insane, utterly insane actions of Pol Pot. The barbarity of
   Mengistu. And these are names, I'm sad to say, some people have never
   heard of, or worse, they have heard of them but think they can't
   possibly be as bad as they're made out to be. (Yes they were that
   bad.)

   But the holocaust was and is a touchstone in so many ways. Partly
   because it was the first mass murder on a mind-boggling scale that the
   world was confronted with as a whole. It was also the single
   best-documented democide, with an extraordinary amount of
   documentation and so many thousands of corroborating eyewitness
   accounts, it was impossible for anyone to deny. Human beings really
   could, really would, really had done this.

   If we forget this one great mass murder, we might as well forget them
   all.

   As I say, you might want to think about putting the button on your own
   blog.

   (Via [4]Orac, who has more.)

References

   1. http://www.holocaust-history.org/
   2. http://www.holocaust-history.org/
   3. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/
   4. http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/03/the_holocaust_history_project_1.php