Thirty-six

The latest issue of the LRB arrived today. It contained an article by Thomas Laquer on the Nazi camps, in which several members of his family died. I thought of Justin while reading it.

Yesterday he and I came closer to arguing. Justin can’t seem to understand that the suffering the Jews experienced doesn’t justify their inflicting suffering on the Palestinians. On the contrary, it makes their behavior more reprehensible.

Equally reprehensible is the fact that Zionists haven’t let the historical record of Jewish suffering speak for itself, but altered it to further their political agenda.

As Laquer says, the Jews were neither the first nor the only victims of the Holocaust. Soviet POWs were the first to experience the Nazi mass murder assembly line, and Slavs remained the largest in number during Germany's Drang noch Osten. Zionists have exploited their dead by claiming the Holocaust was a uniquely Jewish tragedy.

The Jews were the only untermenchen whom the Nazis marked for extermination, but even that doesn’t make them unique. The Armenian genocide came first. As Laquer shows, genocide was endemic to the 20^th century.

But the Nazis' primary goal, he says, was not the extermination of untermenchen. It was their exploitation as slave labor. 

At first it was only when slaves became too exhausted to work that they were killed. Laquer therefore compares Nazi slaves to black slaves in the American south. Even after the Civil War, when blacks were supposedly free, black convicts in work gangs died at a rate similar to that of Nazi slave labor.

Whether or not the first slaves were prisoners of war, as the Greeks believed, slavery and war have always been the twin pillars of society. Each makes the other not only possible but necessary.