- Re: ..but isn't he right? (though unwise to say so?) Archived Message
Posted by John Monro
on November 20, 2019, 6:48 pm, in reply to "Extinction Rebellion founder’s Holocaust remarks spark fury"
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The fury is a result of Roger Hallam's remark being taken out of context. Here's a man acutely and deeply concerned about the human impact of climate change, which will dwarf all previous plagues and slaughters in the history of humanity on this planet, and he plays a rhetorical trick by referring to the Holocaust as "just another ####ery in human history". It sounds to me like he's a man at the end of his tether with what he understands as the human predicament on this planet. There are quite a few people, my wife numbers among them, who consider the human species beyond redemption. Roger and my wife have got a lot of history to refer to just in the last couple of hundred years - here's a list from the top of my head, with figures taken from Wiki WW1 8.5 million dead combatants Stalin's purges about a million dead Stalin's Holodomor in Ukraine - about ten million deaths from starvation Rape of Nankin - about 300,000 dead WW2 about 80 million dead Irish famine - 1 million dead, 1 million emigrants (refugees we call them now) Armenian genocide - up to 1.5 million deaths. Congo under King Leopold - around 5 million deaths Pol Pot regime - around 1.5 million deaths. The Indian Mutiny - one estimate puts the death toll at 10 million. But of course, that's just the start The slaughter of the natives in the Americas, around all but one third of one percent of the original population of around 76 million survived this genocide etc. etc. But read this page from wiki for further information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history So yes, he's entitled to say the Holocaust was "just another ####ery in human history" but whether he was wise to do so in exactly this way is open to debate. |