| Mike Murray 2005-04-11, 3:59 am |
| On 10 Apr 2005 19:15:36 -0700, "Nick" <nickbourbaki3@yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
quote:
>As far as I can recall, I have read that Europe's Jews
>and Europe's Gypsies were killed by the Nazis in more
>or less equal proportion of their prewar populations.
>Yet the genocide of European Jews has received far
>more attention than the genocide of European Gypsies.
Two factors may have contributed to this: (1) the *absolute* number
of Jewish victims was greater, and (2) the overall educational level
of European Jews was much higher than that of the Romani, so there
would have been many more published articles, memoirs, etc., by the
Jewish survivors and their friends and relatives. These same factors
may account for the relative lack of publicity accorded the
handicapped victims.
However, few Holocaust accounts fail to mention these (and other)
groups of victims -- I see no evidence of, say, Jewish historians
glossing over this facet of the atrocity.
quote:
>When the 1994 genocide began in Rwanda, the US government
>soon was able to find out enough of what was happening.
>But the US government had made a political decision
>*not* to intervene in Rwanda, and so the US government
>did what it could, with the apparent complicity of the
>'mainstream' US media, to minimise and cover up the extent
>of the genocide at first. Years later, Bill Clinton
>(who had been the US President in 1994) made a kind
>of 'apology' for what the US government had done and
>failed to do in response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
One need not go back that far to find cases where Western inaction
allowed genocide to go unabated -- for example, in contemporary Sudan.
quote:
>I happen to know someone (who *has* lived and worked in
>the United States) from Rwanda whose entire family there
>was murdered in 1994. Like every other black African
>of my acquaintance, he believes that *if* the victims
>of the 1994 genocide had been white Europeans rather
>than black Africans, then the US government would have
>responded quite differently.
On the other hand, the US had much more in common with the Christian
Serbs than with their Muslim opposition, and yet we intervened on the
side of the latter.
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