I went to lunch with a composer friend whose Jewish grandparents had survived and fled from the pogroms endemic to Eastern Europe in the 19th an early 20th Centuries. Before we got to the car, the discussion began: "Hitler's and German's real war was against the Jews…. "

"But what about the homosexuals and the disabled and the Jehovah's Witnesses…."

"Ah, but that isn't about race."

"Okay, then, what about the Gypsies?"

"That wasn't about race either. You have to remember that the principle behind being a Gypsy is that you have to lie and steal…."

I thought, "___, do you hear what you are saying? Do you hear?"

Forget the blatant, if unnoticed racism from one otherwise wonderful, intelligent, even righteous person who, now deceased, cannot defend himself.. There is, I think, a strain of exclusivism, of a certain kind of privilege, in all of us, the ugliness of which can get triggered too easily and thoughtlessly. At one event I worked, the numbers were in the program notes: The famous Six Million Jews, and…maybe 200,000 Gypsies….

The figure cited for the Gypsy Holocaust deaths comes apparently comes from Lucy Dawidowicz (The war Against the Jews) or her sources. But most historians I have read are of the opinion that, for a variety of reasons, this is most surely wrong, both in specificity and in its range. In the first place it is difficult to say definitively either how many Roma and Sinti lived in pre-Holocaust Europe (because of the lack of a thorough census), or how many died during the Porrajmos--the “devouring”, the Roma equivalent of Sho’ah. In the latter regard, the much of the documentation was never brought into the light (the Roma peoples had no representation at the Nuremberg Trials) and, indeed, is still for the most part unreported or even suppressed. Also, there are difficulties with how to count Roma and Sinti deaths, since a large number were (quite legally!) killed, or castrated or sterilized long before the camps opened. But according to the majority of historians, the total deaths of that ethnic group (and, contrary to some “exclusivist” commentary, they were set for extermination as an overt “racial” policy) lie in the range of 500,000-1,500,000--which would mean that upwards of 75 percent of those in German-held territories perished. Yet, no reparations of any meaningful kind have ever been issued to the survivors, and massive discrimination and persecution persists against those peoples even now (and seems to be growing, with the advent of the neo-Nazi movement).

That some writers, who should know better, suggest that The Roma and Sinti were put into camps for the same reasons, in the same proportions, and survived at the same rates, as “Asocials” (criminals, etc.) is ludicrous and shameful, not to mention historically insupportable. (Indeed, some accompany their analyses with ugly racial slurs, reminiscent of the official pre-war terms like Zigeunergeschmeiss--“Gypsy scum”.)

But even this parochial posturing obscures what is really important, and universal. The fact is that, however one defines “race” or other category of undesirables, the Holocaust cannot legitimately be thought of as “six million” dead. Rather, it is a larger story of more like twenty-six million murdered, including a large part of the civilian populations of Slavic countries. Even more universal: Genocide (and ethnic cleansing, and, more generally, hate-borne cruelty of all kinds that far exceed any needs of “competition for resources’) has been widely practiced, or at least accepted, by all ethnic (or cultural) majorities throughout history; though there is righteousness among some individuals, no group--no government, no religion, no race, no tribe--can legitimately claim such a virtue. I very much like the words of Israel Charny:

“I object very strongly to the efforts to name the genocide of any one people as the single, ultimate event, or as the most important event against which all other tragedies of genocidal mass-death are to be tested and found wanting. For me, the passion to exclude this or that mass killing from the universe of genocide, as well as the intense competition to establish the exclusive ‘superiority’ or unique form of any one genocide, ends up creating a fetishistic atmosphere in which the masses of bodies that are not to be qualified for the definition of genocide are dumped into a conceptual black hole, where they are forgotten.” [http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/wais/cgi-bin/index.php?p=364]

The other problem with treating the "exclusivist" way of thinking is that the holocaust is tied no only to a specific people, but also to a specific time. This obscures the fact that abominations are much more frequent that we should think: Ding-dong, the witch is dead, and we're all safe now, right…?

Ward Churchill thus concludes:

“In restoring the Gypsies and Slavic peoples to the Holocaust itself, where they've always belonged, we not only exhume them from the black hole into which they’ve been dumped in their millions by Jewish exclusivism and neo-Nazism alike, we establish ourselves both methodologically and psychologically to remember other things as well. Not only was the Armenian holocaust a ‘true’ genocide, the marked lack of response to it by the Western democracies was used by Adolf Hitler to reassure his cabinet that there would be no undue consequences if Germany were to perpetrate its own genocide(s). Not only were Stalin’s policies in the Ukrainians a genuine holocaust, the methods by which it was carried out were surely incorporated into Germany’s General Plan just a few years later. Not only was the Spanish policy of conscripting entire native populations into forced labor throughout the Caribbean as well as much of South and Central America holocaustal, it served as a prototype for Nazi policies in eastern Europe. Not only were U.S. ‘clearing’ operations directed against the indigenous peoples of North America genocidal in every sense, they unquestionably served as a conceptual/practical mooring to which the whole Hitlerian rendering of lebensraumpolitik was tied.

“In every instance, the particularities of these prior genocides - each of them unique unto themselves - serves to inform our understanding of the Holocaust. Reciprocally, the actualities of the Holocaust serve to illuminate the nature of these earlier holocausts. No less does the procedure apply to the manner in which we approach genocides occurring since 1945, those in Katanga, Biafra, Bangladesh, Indochina, Paraguay, Guatemala, Indonesia, Rwanda, Bosnia and on and on. Our task is - must be - to fit all the various pieces together in such a way as to obtain at last a comprehension of the whole. There is no other means available to us. We must truly ‘think of the unthinkable,’ seriously and without proprietary interest, if ever we are to put an end to the ‘human cancer’ which has spread increasingly throughout our collective organism over the past five centuries [I personally think this is giving history a shorter view than it needs!]. To this end, denial in any form is anathema.” [http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/feb97church.htm; see also A Little Matter of Genocide.]