You are right about the billions, and thanks for the correction. I've been looking at the capitalization of Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, etc; so long that I hardly notice the 10 to sixth figures any more. Just put it down to ignorance, I don't smoke anything anymore.
Of course, the total number killed in the Shoah and the rest of the war is disputed. There is now a trial in London where an American Professor of Religion at Emory University is being sued by an English revisionist historian for libel. No one in his right mind would assert any particular figure to represent the deaths from the Holocaust or from War and the Soviet horrors. I recommend against the web if you have any kind of life at all to live. I don't hold with many of the Jewish experts that Holocaust was a unique event in history. I can find stories in the Bible that are just about as horrible and are tales Jews tell about other Jews wiping entire nations. I can find stories in the Casa de los Indies , or in Helen Hunt, or Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, or Andersonville. There is no shortage of horror, and I don't think the exact number of victims is knowable. Everyone should agree that it is too many, and that we should try to find a way to number and identify them, honor them, and never, never forget them.
I sometimes get enough courage to walk the wall in Washington under the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial in the late shadows of a summer afternoon. My fingers seek out the same old names and caress them. Then I walk across to see the doggies walking up through the mists of Korea. Lousy statues. (The nurses in Vietnam are great!). Then I walk up and look Lincoln's effigy in the face and read those walls. "With malice toward none!" Someday I'll have the guts to visit the Holocaust museums. I'll probably die before the Slavery Memorial is completed. I don't think I'd ever have the courage to go through that one. |
