Today 27th is Holocaust Remembrance Day

UltimateMale

Surely one of the most disturbing events in human history. I've have barely heard anything about it. Is it only in America and UK as they have a big Jewish population that they commerate it. But surely Ireland recognises it in some way ?

Morlar

Considering how Famine memorial day is handled what are you recommending ? Every workplace hold a minutes silence ? We don't even do that for WW1 which has a significant Irish connection. Nor do we do that for WW2 itself, there is no 'sympathy day' for all civilian victims of ww2 that I am aware of.

hinault

My preference is for Armistice Day (11th November) : the rememberance of all victims, in all wars.

Morlar

hinault wrote: »

My preference is for Armistice Day (11th November) : the rememberance of all victims, in all wars.

I agree there should be a minutes silence for that. There is in england and considering the Irish representation in WWI & also that we were significantly represented in WW2 so this seems prefectly reasonable to me. I would also like to see the profile of Famine memorial day increased too, surprising considering it's an event that cut the population of Ireland by approx 50%.

hinault

Morlar wrote: »

I agree there should be a minutes silence for that. There is in england and considering the Irish representation in WWI & also that we were significantly represented in WW2 so this seems prefectly reasonable to me. I would also like to see the profile of Famine memorial day increased too, surprising considering it's an event that cut the population of Ireland by approx 50%.

I agree.

The Famine should be commemorated at a national level, more prominently.

Morlar

hinault wrote: »

I agree.

The Famine should be commemorated at a national level, more prominently.

Just been looking at some sites about this online and the figures have apparently changed from when I learned them in school.

I always remember this as 8.5 million population, approx 2 million died and approx 2 million emigrated.

Aparrently the revised numbers are (summed up by the bbc)

Altogether, about a million people in Ireland are reliably estimated to have died of starvation and epidemic disease between 1846 and 1851, and some two million emigrated in a period of a little more than a decade (1845-55).

So it reduced the population by about 40 %.

Fuinseog

UltimateMale wrote: »

Surely one of the most disturbing events in human history. I've have barely heard anything about it. Is it only in America and UK as they have a big Jewish population that they commerate it. But surely Ireland recognises it in some way ?

we don't even commemerate the genoicde our closest neighbours committed against us in 1847.
one Irish Jew died in the holocaust, so it does not really concern us.

What about a Rwanda Day instead?

Fuinseog

hinault wrote: »

My preference is for Armistice Day (11th November) : the rememberance of all victims, in all wars.

isn't the 11 November really just a glorification of war?

Fuinseog

hinault wrote: »

My preference is for Armistice Day (11th November) : the rememberance of all victims, in all wars.

yees indeed, we remmber all those who died in the war, so long as those victims fought for the Empire. i don't believe the Germans commemerate anything on the 11 November. great place to be for carneval though.

ejmaztec

They should hand out free chips.

Dr Strange

Fuinseog wrote: »

i don't believe the Germans commemerate anything on the 11 November. great place to be for carneval though.

Although it is correct that Karneval starts in Germany on the 11th of November at 11.11am the actual festivities with parades and floats don't start until the following February.

November is however the month of the German National Day of Mourning. It is not on November 11th though but is observed two Sundays before the first of Advent.

During the 1930s and 1940s it was known as the Day of Commemoration of Heroes (Heldengedenktag).

Here's a bit in English:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkstrauertag

This is one of the most-played commemorative songs during ceremonies:

Ich hatt' einen Kameraden

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lhxf6ygz0c

UltimateMale

hinault wrote: »

My preference is for Armistice Day (11th November) : the rememberance of all victims, in all wars.

Fuinseog wrote: »

isn't the 11 November really just a glorification of war?

Ok, points taken. But nothing happened on such an oragised industrial scale as in WW2. Would it be more fitting if today was for all non combatants of wars ?

Manic Moran

ejmaztec wrote: »

They should hand out free chips.

?!

If this is a pun, I'm not getting it, and apparently from the PMs I'm getting, neither are others. This isn't After Hours, and larking about has its specific place around here.

NTM

Riamfada

ejmaztec wrote: »

They should hand out free chips.

This isnt AH and its a very sensitive topic. Lets keep jokes out of it. Cheers

ejmaztec

Manic Moran wrote: »

?!

If this is a pun, I'm not getting it, and apparently from the PMs I'm getting, neither are others. This isn't After Hours, and larking about has its specific place around here.

NTM

Grimes wrote: »

This isnt AH and its a very sensitive topic. Lets keep jokes out of it. Cheers

I was referring to the chips on the shoulders of the various individuals who attempt to hijack threads just to have a go at whatever Britain got up to in Ireland's past. It poisons reasonable discussion.

I don't joke about the holocaust.

Mahatma coat

Fuinseog wrote: »

isn't the 11 November really just a glorification of war?

dunno, I always considered it the polar opposite

And I also vividly remember that the Minutes silence was observed when I was a child in School.


AANYWAY, I wont say any more on this topic.

Fuinseog

Mahatma coat wrote: »

dunno, I always considered it the polar opposite

And I also vividly remember that the Minutes silence was observed when I was a child in School.


AANYWAY, I wont say any more on this topic.

if anything holocuast day is more noble than 11 November. the former tries to remember wrong done to civilians while the latter celebrates military might. the Armed Forces is hardly what one would call a peaceful organsiation.

i don't believe a minutes silence was held in irish schools, not even in protestant ones.

Fuinseog

Grimes wrote: »

This isnt AH and its a very sensitive topic. Lets keep jokes out of it. Cheers

AH?

Dr Strange

Fuinseog wrote: »

AH?

He means After Hours

A forum where trolling is common and less weighty matters are discussed

arnhem44

Fuinseog wrote: »

if anything holocuast day is more noble than 11 November. the former tries to remember wrong done to civilians while the latter celebrates military might. the Armed Forces is hardly what one would call a peaceful organsiation.

i don't believe a minutes silence was held in irish schools, not even in protestant ones.

I know this works both ways but surely only for armed forces a lot of countries would never see peace

citizen_p

arnhem44 wrote: »

I know this works both ways but surely only for armed forces a lot of countries would never see peace

yep....like the nuclear club. countrys will try to stop others entering and might threating war....but as soon as they are in, they do feck all

:P

Arnold Layne

What about the Armenian holocaust of 1915 - 1917, should this not be remembered as well as part of the remembrance day?

Morlar

Arnold Layne wrote: »

What about the Armenian holocaust of 1915 - 1917, should this not be remembered as well as part of the remembrance day?

I think so too. It's also a sad fact that the 6 to 8 million ukranians killed in Stalin's Holdomor - organised centralisation famine practically never get a look in either. Or the 20 million russians who died in WW2 - they are almost never mentioned in the media.

I thought this article may interest some people on this thread, it's from Haaretz an israeli daily newspaper. I would tend to agree with most of the main points.


Holocaust remembrance is a boon for Israeli propaganda

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1145670.html

Israel's bigwigs attacked at dawn on a wide front. The president in Germany, the prime minister with a giant entourage in Poland, the foreign minister in Hungary, his deputy in Slovakia, the culture minister in France, the information minister at the United Nations, and even the Likud party's Druze Knesset member, Ayoob Kara, in Italy. They were all out there to make florid speeches about the Holocaust.

Wednesday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and an Israeli public relations drive like this hasn't been seen for ages. The timing of the unusual effort - never have so many ministers deployed across the globe - is not coincidental: When the world is talking Goldstone, we talk Holocaust, as if out to blur the impression. When the world talks occupation, we'll talk Iran as if we wanted them to forget.

It won't help much. International Holocaust Remembrance Day has passed, the speeches will soon be forgotten, and the depressing everyday reality will remain. Israel will not come out looking good, even after the PR campaign.

On the eve of his departure, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at Yad Vashem. "There is evil in the world," he said. "Evil must be stamped out at the beginning." Some people are "trying to deny the truth." Lofty words, said by the same person who only the day before, not quite in the same breath, uttered very different words, words of true evil, evil that should be extinguished at the start, evil that Israel is trying to hide.

Netanyahu spoke of a new "migration policy," one that is evil through and through. He malevolently lumped together migrant workers and wretched refugees - warning that they all endanger Israel, lower our wages, harm our security, make us into a third-world country and bring in drugs. He zealously supported our racist interior minister, Eli Yishai, who has spoken of the migrants as the spreaders of diseases such as hepatitis, tuberculosis, AIDS and God knows what else.

No Holocaust speech will erase these words of incitement and slander against migrants. No remembrance speech will obliterate the xenophobia that has reared its head in Israel, not only on the extreme right, as in Europe, but throughout government.

We have a prime minister who speaks about evil but is building a fence to prevent war refugees from knocking at Israel's door. A prime minister who speaks about evil but shares the crime of the Gaza blockade, now in its fourth year, leaving 1.5 million people in disgraceful conditions. A prime minister in whose country settlers perpetrate pogroms against innocent Palestinians under the slogan "price tag," which also has horrific historical connotations, but against whom the state does virtually nothing.

This is the prime minister of a state that arrests hundreds of left-wing protesters against the injustices of the occupation and the war in Gaza, while time grants mass pardons to the right-wingers who demonstrated against the disengagement. In his speech yesterday, Netanyahu's equating Nazi Germany with fundamentalist Iran was no more than cheap propaganda. Talk about "degrading the Holocaust." Iran isn't Germany, Ahmedinejad isn't Hitler and equating them is no less spurious than equating Israeli soldiers with Nazis.

The Holocaust must not be forgotten, and there is no need to compare it with anything. Israel must take part in the efforts to keep its memory alive, but in doing so it must show up with clean hands, clean of evil of their own doing. And it must not arouse suspicion that it is cynically using the memory of the Holocaust to obliterate and blur other things. Regrettably, this is not the case.

How beautiful it would have been if on this international day of remembrance Israel had taken the time to examine itself, look inward and ask, for example, how it is that anti-Semitism has reared its head in the world precisely in the past year, the year after we dropped white-phosphorous bombs on Gaza. How beautiful it would have been if on this International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu had declared a new policy for integrating refugees instead of expulsion, or lifted the Gaza blockade.

A thousand speeches against anti-Semitism will not extinguish the flames ignited by Operation Cast Lead, flames that threaten not only Israel but the entire Jewish world. As long as Gaza is under blockade and Israel sinks into its institutionalized xenophobia, Holocaust speeches will remain hollow. As long as evil is rampant here at home, neither the world nor we will be able to accept our preaching to others, even if they deserve it.

gizmo555

The Holocaust must not be forgotten, and there is no need to compare it with anything. Israel must take part in the efforts to keep its memory alive, but in doing so it must show up with clean hands, clean of evil of their own doing. And it must not arouse suspicion that it is cynically using the memory of the Holocaust to obliterate and blur other things. Regrettably, this is not the case.

Amen to that.

gizmo555

Arnold Layne wrote: »

What about the Armenian holocaust of 1915 - 1917, should this not be remembered as well as part of the remembrance day?

While Israelis commemorated the second Holocaust of the 20th century this week, I was in the Gulbenkian library in Jerusalem, holding the printed and handwritten records of the victims of the century's first Holocaust. It was a strange sensation.

The Armenians were not participating in Israel's official ceremonies to remember the six million Jewish dead, murdered by the Germans between 1939 and 1945, perhaps because Israel officially refuses to acknowledge that Armenia's million and a half dead of 1915-1923 were victims of a Turkish Holocaust. Israeli-Turkish diplomatic and military relations are more important than genocide. Or were.

George Hintlian, historian and prominent member of Jerusalem's 2,000-strong Armenian community in Jerusalem, pointed out the posters a few metres from the 1,500-year old Armenian monastery. They advertised Armenia's 24 April commemorations. All but one had been defaced, torn from the ancient walls or, in at least one case, spraypainted with graffiti in Hebrew. "Maybe they don't like it that there was another genocide," George told me. "These are things we can't explain." More than 70 members of George's family were murdered in the butchery and death marches of 1915 – when German officers witnessed the system of executions, rail-car deportations to cholera camps and asphyxiation by smoke in caves – the world's first "gas" chambers. One witness, the German vice-consul in Erzurum, Max von Scheubner-Richter, ended up as one of Hitler's closest friends and advisers. It's not as if there's no connection between the first and second Holocausts.

But the times, they are a-changing. For ever since Turkey began shouting about Israel's slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza a year ago, prominent Israeli figures have suddenly rediscovered the Armenian genocide. Who are the Turks to talk about mass murder? Has anyone forgotten 1915? For George and his compatriots – there are in all 10,000 Armenians in Israel and the occupied West Bank, 4,000 of them holding Israeli passports – they had indeed been forgotten until the Gaza war. "In 1982, the Armenians were left out of a Holocaust conference in Jerusalem," he said. "For three decades, no documentary on the Armenian genocide could be shown on Israeli television because it would offend the Turks. Then suddenly last year, important Israelis demanded that a documentary be shown. Thirty Knesset members supported us. We always had Yossi Sarid of Peace Now but now we've got right-wing Israelis."

Maariv and Yediot Ahronot began to mention the Armenian genocide and George Hintlian turned up on Israeli television with Danny Ayalon – the foreign office minister who humiliated the Turkish ambassador by forcing him to sit on a sofa below him – and Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin who said that Israel should commemorate the Armenian genocide "every year". The Israeli press now calls the Armenian genocide a "Shoah" – the same word all Israelis use for the Jewish Holocaust. As George put it with withering accuracy: "We have been upgraded!!!"

More here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-israel-can-no-longer-ignore-the-existence-of-the-first-holocaust-1883686.html

BullyBeef

Five Million Often Forgotten
The Holocaust is usually taught as the mass genocide of almost six million Jews in Europe during World War II. But, more than five million others were also persecuted, tortured, tattooed and killed. These five million included innocent citizens - men women and children. The survivors and the families of these five million often feel left out -- overshadowed by the Jewish casualties. Nonetheless, these people need to be recognized and memorialized. Many of these died for their race or their beliefs. Many of these died while helping their Jewish neighbors. They too deserve their place in history.
http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/romgypsies.htm

The proportion of Gypsies killed during the Holocaust parallels with the proportion of Jews killed during the Holocaust being for both races about 75%. However there is no parallel in how the world had commemorated the memory of the victims from these two respective races as the Gypsies victims, at best, appear as a footnote to the Holocaust. And this, with concern, we submit that is not quite right. The world's moral compass, we believe must point to the suffering of the Gypsy race during the Holocaust and, it is this memory that the United Nations must embrace for the world to remember. A United Nations Gypsy Memorial for the victims of the Holocaust would be indeed a fitting tribute worth implementing.

http://isurvived.org/2MemorialDrives/4_GypsyVictims.html

http://genocide.change.org/blog/view/respect_for_holocaust_victims_long_overdue

Only Jews and Roma were subject to the Final Solution, and both peoples lost the same percentage of their total number. However, since the end of the war in 1945, nothing has been done to acknowledge the Romani survivors."
source Bill Templar http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/templer170109.html

Thats
Holocaust Remembrance Day
not Armistice Day/Remembrance Day also known as Poppy Day
It is observed on 11 November to recall the end of World War I on that date in 1918 (major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 with the German signing of Armistice.

That’s basically where it started but now is a commemoration , [Not Celibration] of the sacrifice members of the armed forces & civilians gave unselfishly during times of conflict.
In Flanders Fields
John McCrae
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders Fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.

---

I do not know your name, but I know you died
I do not know from where you came, but I know you died
Your uniform, branch of service, it matters not to me
Whether Volunteer or Conscript, or how it came to be
That politicians failures, or some power-mad ambition
Brought you too soon to your death, in the name of any nation
You saw, you felt, you knew full well, as friend and foe were taken
By bloody death, that your life too, was forfeit and forsaken
Yet on you went and fought and died, in your close and private hell
For Mate or Pal or Regiment and memories never to tell
It was for each other, through shot and shell, the madness you endured
Side by side, through wound and pain, and comradeship assured
No family ties, or bloodline link, could match that bond of friend
Who shared the horror and kept on going, at last until the end
We cannot know, we were not there, it's beyond our comprehension
To know the toll that battle brings, of resolute intention
To carry on, day by day, for all you loved and hoped for
To live in peace a happy life, away from bloody war
For far too many, no long life ahead, free of struggle and pain and the gun
And we must remember the price that was paid, by each and every one
Regardless of views, opinions aside, no matter how each of us sees it
They were there and I cannot forget, even though I did not live it
I do not know your name, but I know you died
I do not know from where you came, but I know you died.
Kenny Martin [03]

UltimateMale

for the God knows how many Palestinains ethnically cleansed off their lands, murdered, maimed, imprisoned and tortured by Isreal in the last 60 or 70 years ?

Manic Moran

Easiest answer is a sort of 'genocide memorial day', for all victims be they Jewish, Armenian, Rwandan/Bosnian or whoever. No need for a separate day (though Israel/Armenia/Rwanda/Bosnia/whoever can have one domestically if they want).

NTM