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The meaning of holocaust: Mind your language

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  • The meaning of holocaust: Mind your language

    The Guardian (London) - Final Edition
    January 25, 2005

    G2: Shortcuts: The meaning of holocaust: Mind your language

    by John Mullan

    In the week that sees the 60th anniversary of the liberation of
    Auschwitz, an argument about some of the most terrible events in
    human history turns on a preference for the definite or indefinite
    article. The Muslim Council of Britain is to boycott this week's
    public commemoration of the Holocaust because, in effect, our usual
    word for the Nazi's mass extermination of Europe's Jews implies its
    singularity. Iqbal Sacranie, the council's secretary general, says it
    will not attend because the event does not acknowledge "genocide" in
    the occupied territories of Palestine.

    In effect, he is proposing that we return Holocaust to the range of
    meaning that it had up until the 1940s. Contrary to what is often
    supposed, the word had long referred to what the OED calls drily "the
    complete destruction of a large number of persons". In the 19th
    century it was readily used for mass slaughter, especially of
    innocent or unarmed victims. Churchill, like others, used it just
    after the first world war to refer to the killing of Armenians by
    Turks. He called this "a holocaust": appalling, but not
    unprecedented.

    The horrors of mass murder during the second world war pressured the
    English language into a new, now sickeningly familiar word: genocide.
    It was only retrospectively, during the 1950s, that "the Holocaust"
    came to acquire its definite article and capital letter. This was
    much influenced by historians, trying to account for what was now
    seen as a singular chapter of human history. It was to be the
    equivalent for non-Jews of "the Shoah". By the 1960s, the usage was
    generally accepted in Britain, in particular by broadcasters and
    journalists. Now there was something called "Holocaust studies": the
    examination not of mass murder in general, but of one particular
    project for exterminating a race.

    We have other words, notably the Nazi's own impeccably bland
    euphemism, Endlosung ("the final solution"). Their term certainly
    presumes the appalling uniqueness of what they were doing. Holocaust,
    however, has a power that comes from its older roots. From the 13th
    century it was used to mean a sacrifice that was wholly consumed by
    fire (from the Greek words for whole and burned). It awakens
    recollections of the burnt offerings of the Old Testament (holocaust
    was used in some of the earliest English translations) and then of
    another burning: the industrialised cremations organised by the
    Nazis. No contestation is likely to unroot these associations, or the
    word's terrible singleness of meaning.
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