Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By simmons on July 19, 2015

An analysis of the causes of the Jewish-Slavic Holocaust is essential to an understanding of the reasons why war and violence continue to plague our world.

Human civilization as we understand it -- cities, government, religion, writing -- originated about 6,000 years ago. By the year A.D. 1939 this civilization, especially its Western branch, had developed great scientific and technological accomplishments, art and literature, philosophies and religions. That fateful year also marked the beginning of the Jewish-Slavic Holocaust, the attempt to extirpate millions of human beings because they belonged to communities deemed to be inferior or harmful. The Holocaust largely succeeded because its implementers were able to employ the latest technological developments in weapons, transportation, communications, medical technology, and the active or passive cooperation of governments and organized religion. As a survivor and student of this manifestation of human behavior, I believe I have the credentials to explore its causes and potential consequences.

Why the Holocaust?

The vivid images of recent human suffering in Bosnia and Somalia on the television screen caused me to remember again the unforgettable. An inmate of a Nazi concentration camp who was reduced by malnutrition to a human skeleton was called a Muselmann -- a Muslim. Half a century later the Serbian concentration camps imprisoned real-life Muslims who were on the verge of becoming human skeletons. The unfortunate starving women and children of Somalia were Muslims in the same double sense. The piles of massacred bodies in Rwanda were reminiscent of the horrors encountered by the liberators of the German concentration camps. Is it just a coincidence that similar events are repeated after a lapse of fifty years?

Struggling for survival in 1944 at Auschwitz, as Prisoner A-9867, I and my fellow victims had scant time to puzzle over the reason for our plight. Everything seemed incomprehensible -- in fact, a living nightmare. Between 1941 and 1944 I was part of a Jewish community in a small town in Hungary. Rumors of persecutions and massacres by Nazi Germany came to our attention. But they were simply unbelievable. The nation renowned for its culture and civilization, which produced some of the world's greatest philosophers, scientists and artists simply could not do such horrible things! Our illusion was shattered, when suddenly in 1944 the German army occupied Hungary. The entire Jewish community was rounded up and transported to the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The plumes of smoke emanating from the crematoria and the odor of burning bodies testified to the murder of the hundreds of thousands of innocent victims of genocide. Those able to work were consigned to slow starvation at forced labor. Only about one in twenty survived this culmination of Western "civilization." I still recall the title of the lead article in the newspaper published by the survivors after our liberation: "Why?" The Holocaust appeared so mysterious after our ordeal that the article's author could only supply vague references to historical Jewish martyrdom and our need to endure.

Over the decades I spent considerable time researching and studying the events leading to the Holocaust. My conclusions are obvious, yet complex. The Holocaust was a gigantic, unprecedented, irrational catastrophe, which will never be fully comprehended in its entirety. Unfortunately, the causes or reasons for the Holocaust are only too clearly and readily understandable. A preexisting infrastructure for genocide and a series of "triggering" events, resulted in the Holocaust -- the annihilation of most of Europe's Jewish population. Political mismanagement and the war institution combined to inflict this tragedy on the 6 million Jews and the 11 million Slavs, Gypsies and other victims.

The Occurrence of Catastrophes

The Holocaust is well defined by the word "catastrophe" -- a momentous, tragic, sudden event marked by extreme misfortune and utter overthrow or ruin. Since the 1970s a mathematical "catastrophe theory" has emerged to predict discontinuous, frequently damaging changes of any kind. Its advocates claim that not only physical changes (e.g., the collapse of a dam), but social events, such as the outbreak of wars, are both explainable and predictable. Preexisting conditions become intensified or overburdened by continuing events until the overload condition occurs, and the sudden abrupt change takes place. A probability factor can be applied to the conditions and events, so that predicting or forecasting catastrophes becomes feasible.The contributing factors of a specific catastrophe can be explained and understood. The analysis of the causes of catastrophes also makes it possible to allocate the share of the responsibility, if any, to institutions or persons. Blame for negligence or willful actions can be assigned as well.

The disastrous brush-fires of 1993 in the Los Angeles area provide a good illustration of a catastrophe facilitated by human actions. On the surface the blame should be assigned to the vagrant or the arsonists who started the fires. More realistically, these were the major contributing factors, with estimated responsibility shares (Newsweek, Nov. 8, 1993; percentages by author):

Excerpt from:
Chapter 1. The Causes of the Holocaust - HPN

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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