Some anecdotes from a timely broadcast about the Holocaust as relates to the health care debate

[rockymountaindem]

A couple of times today I have engaged in friendly debate with other posters on this board regarding my feeling that Rep. Grayson, while "saying what everybody else was thinking", did err in describing the current health care situation in this country as a "holocaust". Now, Rep. Grayson has evidently said that this was hyperbole to draw attention to the claim he is trying to make, and that is his prerogative. Some posters on this board have expressed their opinion that hyperbole or no, the use of the word "holocaust" is still an accurate description of what is happening in this country today due to the lack of health care insurance. I realize we can have a civil disagreement on this matter, and I am not here to try and call anybody out or put anybody down.

I am of the opinion personally that the word "holocaust", regardless of its lexicographical definition, has come to be associated with the German program of extermination carried out during World War Two. Even if you disagree with such a strict interpretation of the word, and prefer to apply a broader definition of any event of mass murder, such as the Rwandan genocide, I can see what you mean. However, I still cannot personally get with a broader definition such as the one some people are applying to the unacceptable status of health care in this country. Interestingly, tonight the Indieplex channel is running a marathon of documentaries about the Holocaust, and two pieces from the film "LIberation" by the Simon Wiesenthal Center clarify why, I think, the application of the word "holocaust" cheapens either of the first two definitions of the word I have heard here today.

The first one I will not have to relate myself, as I found a written version on the internet by googling the relevant Yiddish phrase spoken by the child:

"At Stolpce, Poland, on September 23, 1942, the ghetto was surrounded by German soldiers. Pits had been prepared outside a nearby village where the Jews would be led and then shot. The Germans entered the ghetto, searching for the Jews. A survivor by the name of Eliezer Melamed later recalled how he and his girlfriend found a room where they hid behind sacks of flour. A mother and her three children had followed them into the house. The mother hid in one corner of the room, the three children in another.

The Germans entered the room and discovered the children. One of children, a young boy, began to scream, "Mama! Mama!" as the Germans dragged the three of them away.

But another of them, only four years old, shouted to his brother in Yiddish, "Zog nit 'Mameh.' Men vet ir oich zunemen." ("Don't say 'Mama.' They'll take her, too.")

The boy stopped screaming. The mother remained silent. Her children were dragged away. The mother was saved.

"I will always hear that," Melamed recalled, "especially at night. 'Zog nit Mameh' ­ 'Don't say Mama.' And I will always remember the sight of the mother. Her children were dragged away by the Germans. She was hitting her head against the wall, as if to punish herself for remaining silent, for wanting to live."2 (posted on http://www.askmoses.com/en/article/243,176564/Would-the-Holocaust-Have-Occurred-If-Israel-Were-Around.html#articlepage )

The second I will have to type myself since I can't figure how I would look it up on the internet. To paraphrase: One of the other jobs of the death camp inmates whose job it was to dispose of the bodies from the gas chambers was to help undress the young children who were about to be gassed. One who survived told the following story - He approached a girl, about five, who was undressing her infant brother. As he reached for the boy to take his clothes, the girl screamed, "Don't you touch him with your hands covered in blood! I'm his good mommy and we will die together with him in my arms!"

Not to be condescending, but I hope I don't need to explain to you the differences between these two incidents and the health care crisis in America. If you believe, as I do, that intent and method matter, I think it will be clear. While the cold corporate indifference that costs so many lives in America is deplorable, I believe the qualitative (and for that matter quantitative) difference between that and the deliberate Nazi extermination of so many is not irrelevant. These differences merit their own kind of description, and for that we have the word "holocaust", whether you prefer to apply it to the events of 1941-1945 or in general to similar events throughout history. So, while I believe that Rep. Grayson, who like me is Jewish, had decent intentions in the use of the word holocaust, I think he was in error to use it in this particular case.

So, I've said my piece. Now back to work grading tests and studying for next week's exams :)

[Tansy_Gold]

1. Imagine the parents who watch their children die because they cannot afford

health care.

Imagine the chidren who watch their parents die because they cannot afford health care.

The nazis motive was racial purity.

The insurance companies' motive is greed.

Tell me which is more evil?




Tansy Gold, who is also ethnically Jewish

[CTyankee]

5. Please, Tansy, tell the story of those children watching their mother die because of lack of health

care. THERE is your story, not in the retelling of the Holocaust. People will respond to it because they relate to it, just as they do not so readily relate to the story of the Jewish children during WW2. This is the crux of the issue. We need to tell the personal, immediate and compelling stories of victims of our cruel "health care system" in this country. Dragging in the Holocaust simply gives the Republicans a bludgeoning weapon against us, distracts us from our task at hand and does not accomplish what we want to do: convince ALL Americans of the need for a public option for health care reform.

[Tansy_Gold]

9. There is a spot on the whitehouse.gov website

where people are uploading their stories. I don't have the link at the moment.

Nataline Sarkasyan, of course, is one of the most well-known recent examples of parents watching a child die, not so much because they couldn't AFFORD health care but because Cigna, their insurance company, refused to cover her liver transplant.

My point is not that the individual stories are important, although of course they are. But rather we need to look at how and why the term "holocaust" evinces sympathy for one set of victims but seems "inappropriate" for another. Maybe that's the discussion we need to have FIRST.

If fascism, or even "national socialism," is essentially a melding of the corporations and the state, then isn't that sort of what we have with the insurance companies? And isn't the difference there one of motive rather than just result?

I understand that there are differences: The "final solution" actively killed those it considered unworthy of life and it included many who would otherwise have gone on to live long and healthy lives. The insurance companies only target the sick and the unhealthy, those who "would have died anyway" in a sense.

But when a family member dies, the rest of the family is affected, so it is unfair to say that "only" 45,000 lives are destroyed by death-due-to-uninsurance. Families are devastated by the death of a child no matter what the cause; how much more intense must that devastation be when the child could have been saved but for the greed of total strangers? Families are devastated when a mother dies, leaving behind small children. Families are devastated when a father dies, especially if his is the primary income. (Been there, doing that.)

The individuals of The Holocaust -- Ann Frank, Primo Levi, Oskar Schindler, Elie Wiesel, so many more -- have much in common with Nataline Sarkasyan and Dawn Smith. And so maybe Rep. Grayson's "hyperbole" should be used effectively to highlight not the special nature of "The Holocaust" but rather the holocausts that far too many families are enduring, have endured.

Does it really matter if there are 6,000,000 dead on one hand and "only" 45,000/year on the other? Are we fighting over who gets to claim the title as "most victimized"?

I thought we were better than that.




Tansy Gold

[CTyankee]

11. I do not argue that there is a commonality between victims here. I totally get it and I understand

the connective cords that you are pointing out.

My point is, however, that you are making an intellectual argument, which I happen to believe, but that is not how you sell the American people on your (our) position on the morality of denying people health care. I don't think anyone argues that one victim is more worthy than another. It just misses the point. In driving home our message, we need to use connective images and stories that ordinary Americans can relate to. We need our own "iconography" as it were. At present many Americans don't see the immorality of our system and our job is to show it to them in its stark reality and saying "People are suffering and dying from our system and that is cruel and unjust. We need to change it!" If they can make that connection, the rest will follow and history will judge our society accordingly, just like it did with The Holocaust.

[Tansy_Gold]

12. The thing is ---

Most Americans get the point. I'd say between 60 and, oh, 73% of them, depending on which survey stats you want to cite at any given time.

The ones who don't get it are the couple dozen in Congress and the Senate who are holding things up.

That's why Grayson's use of the word "holocaust" was important. THEY understand the word. THEY don't want to be compared to the Nazis. THEY don't want anything like "a holocaust" to happen on American soil (even though, of course, it's been going on for years). Grayson laid out the truth of what THEY have done, and THEY are squealing like stuck pigs about it.

We don't have to sell the American public on a public option. We have to sell a couple senators.



Tansy Gold

[CTyankee]

13. I see your strategy and I hope it overcomes the big barrier we have with these senators.

That is, that they are cynically collecting big money from the insurance companies and doing their bidding. Money talks as we all know.

The other concern I have is with the fact that so many of the senators in control of this legislation are from states with very few people in them, relative to the rest of the country. The folks they represent have a little fantasy about themselves being some kind of pioneers, self sufficient, loners, not like the big city guys who are "bad." The few are dictating to the many about what kind of health care we will all get. It's a real problem, IMO.

We SHOULD shame these guys, you are right. We just have to figure out how we can defeat them...

[philly_bob]

17. My comment on Holocaust dispute & link to White House stories site

http://www.healthreform.gov/communityreports/comments.html

On the issue of whether the comparison between WWII Holocaust and current Health Care is apt, I am silent.

I do know that I just found out I will need a heart valve replacement, and it looks like my health insurance company is going to cancel my policy because of "misstatements on my application."

The tragedy of American health insurance profiteering stands on its own, thousands upon thousands of injustices, deaths, and family crises. Straining for analogies can diminish the evil.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

2. I'm a Jew and I agree with Grayson, it is a holocaust!

45,000 people die a year from lack of health care. Now take that exponentially to all of their loved ones and friends and what these deaths have done to them.

We Jews don't own the copyright on the word.

[vadawg]

4. yeah you jews as you put it dont, my wife calls it the shoah i believe

but to a lot of other people its the holocaust and they get offended when it gets used for political cover on an issue which in no way looks like, smells like or sounds like the systematic hunting and killing of entire ethnic groups to suit some racial purity shit.

[Fresh_Start]

3. I find the cold calculation of the policians and insurance

companies to be brutal. From the point of view of the victims and the their families, I doubt that the pain is any less.

My parents and grandparents were concentration camp survivors although many of their family members perished in the camps.
I am not offended by the use of the word holocaust.

[cali]

6. Thank you. The stories you related are terrifying in a

way that lacking adequate healthcare, is not. Yes, 44,000 people a year dying for lack of healthcare is terrible and tragic. people dying in automobile accidents is too. It's not the same. I can't stand the wingnuts using the holocaust label about fetuses, though I suppose that many of them passionately believe their rhetoric.

That said, the only problem I have with Grayson using it as admitted hyperbole, is that it's a distraction.

[MadMaddie]

7. No matter what word is used

The Insurance companies have people that sit in a room to go through Americans medical histories to find one item that will disqualify them for lifesaving treatment. Or they delay a decision long enough so that the victim dies and they don't have to pay a dime.

In essence the insurance companies have two lines of people
1. One line for the healthy who have insurance and will never use it but they still pay their premiums. (Cash cows for the Insurance companies.

2. In the other line those that have become sick and need coverage and the Insurance companies literally worry these people to their graves, denying them care, bankrupting them and destroying families. (While the Ceo's rake in record breaking profits).

It really doesn't matter what word you use it is deliberate and calculating denial of coverage from paying customers.

Well I will see your responses later. I am starting my graduate classes tonight.

[Tansy_Gold]

14. Enjoy your classes!

I went back to college for my BA at age 50, and had so much fun I hung around to pick up an MA in sociology (sort of) at 54. Now I'm an armchair (or couch, or pillows-propped-up-in-bed) student, still reading everything I can get my hands on -- and have time for.

Peace!


Tansy Gold

[izquierdista]

8. Tragic stories notwithstanding

The Nazis used typhus and typhoid to kill far more than did bullets, bombs, or gas. They crowded people into ghettos, cut the food rations, let the water get fetid, and let disease take its course. If anyone got sick in a concentration camp or a ghetto, there was no health care for them, just death. And what is there for people with no health insurance in America to look forward to?

[nadinbrzezinski]

10. The correct term for what happened in WW II is SHOAH

this is from the kid of a survivor.

Holocaust definitely applies to Rwanda, and even well before WW II... like the Armenian Holocaust...

Or for that matter the killing fields that followed the fall of Saigon...

And to allow a word to be used specifically for one event, when we have these events happen regularly in human history is a disservice to the millions who have died. Just in the 20th century, it was more than six million... just in WW II it was more than six million... (Sorry, I tend to also acknowledge the other seven, mostly silent, million)

Oh and if you wanted to argue that this was not a holocaust since it missed some markers, like oh certain minorities, you'd have a case.

[supernova]

16. This is my view also

If you just want to say that only WWII was THE "holocaust" then you risk relegating to word to one time usage, when, in fact, many times humans will systemically kill each other.

I think we risk missing the point of learning the lasting lessons of the holocaust, by taking a narrow definition of the word. That lesson is: any of us can be the victim at any time. Also, any of us can be the perpetrator. That is the true lasting horror we have to live with and consciously work to mitigate. Last time it was Jews, next time it could just as easily be someone like me with blue eyes or short stature. Also, we have to say that we could just as easily get taken in to support these murderous systems. Therefore, it behooves us to keep our critical thinking skills.

I would certainly call the Khmer Rouge massacres of the 60s and 70s a holocaust. And the Rwandan genocide.

The insurance companies are engaging in their own brand of human cleansing: the old, the sick, the otherwise feeble, have no place in our society. Go away and die. How is that different than any other time one group in power marks another group for destruction?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

15. I think the ones attacking Grayson over this are exploiting the Holocaust.

Big H.

[question everything]

18. I shudder to read these descriptions

The terms Nazi and Holocaust should be reserved to the events and groups that took place in Europe in the early 40s.

Unless there are people who are part of the Nazi party, with the swastika and the Hitler admiration with similar racist goals.