German-Canadian group assails Holocaust exhibit

Oh German-Canadian Congress... me thinks a little more thought into your protest might have been a good idea.

I like the use of the word "assails" in the title of the article.

Journalistic sensationalism... they complained.

Bang on. I've been saying this for years. We can have all these countless 'Holocaust' memorials/exhibits, but nothing for other 'holocausts' like Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Katyn, Saddam gassing his own people, etc, etc.

C'mon.

-J.

Not to undervalue the other events, but the Holcaust does tend to stand out for a number of reasons - numbers being one and the fact that it was a planned and well orchastrated national policy vice an emotional or political act.

Stalin killed more people in his purges and forced famines than the Jewish Holocaust did. This isn't about who killed more people, it's about the fact that genocide happened a lot in the 20th century, and to some degree still happens now. There is no good reason to give sole preference to the Jewish Holocaust while so many other genocides have happened that not as many people know about.

True. That being said, Stalin's political purges weren't motivated by an ancient racial hatred like Hitler's. Stalin was mostly motivated by maintaining power. Hitler's was a calculated extermination motivated by an ancient hatred.

Initially this was going to be funded by Izzy Asper. He should have kept it that way, and then he could do anything he or his heirs wanted. But with a govt taking it over, it will always be political. Wait till they want to do the Armenian holocaust and what Turkish Canadians will have to say about that. Or how about a Tibet exhibit - do we have the balls for that when we want more trade with China? Will the holocaust exhibit be all about the Jews or give equal prominence to all the others that died? If not the gay groups my be mighty pissed off, as will non-Jewish Poles etc.

What I read, despite what this article says, is that the museum will have only two permanent exhibits, the shoah and how we treated First Nations - essentially our history is being put on par with the holocaust. Everybody else will get lesser victim status. Will there be an exhibit of Israeli human rights abuses at all?

I guess this is the reasoning why a guy hitting a gay man once gets 6 years but if he'd done the same thing to a straight guy he might have got 6 months to a year, possibly no jail at all since he has no record. Is maintaining power somehow a better reason to kill people than an ancient hatred, which was exploited to also maintain power?

This might have played out a lot better if it hadn't been a German group doing the criticizing. Yeah, the forced expulsion of all ethnic Germans from an area ranging from Poland/East Prussia to the Volga River was a tragedy (killed about one to two million people depending on whose stats you believe), but it was also a tragedy that never would have happened if Germans hadn't started the fucking war in the first place.

I have nothing against Germans at all. And I certainly don't harbour any of the lingering animosity that far too many people, the vast majority of whom were never even around during WW2, still unfairly do. Fact remains though that Germans are the last ones entitled to complain about any injustices that occurred during, or resulted from, that war. The day they handed their nation over to Adolf Hitler is the day they lost any right as a group to claim any sort of victim status. I sympathize with anyone anywhere, including Germans, who suffered from all that needless death and devastation, but they set the precedents for what happened to themselves later with all their horrible activities in other peoples' lands. Too bad for them but they should politely STFU.

Germany has it's Jewish museum and holocaust memorial. If that's what Izzy wanted he should have funded it himself, or got the govt to pay for it. But I guess the Canadian govt didn't want to fund a holocaust museum (the US has one, why not us?) so it became a human rights museum - in that case there shouldn't be a some victims are more equal than others mindset to it.

These aren't Germans complaining, these are German Canadians. Most would have been born after the war, many or most were probably born here since we don't import many Germans anymore. As such they should have the same right to speak as any other Canadian.

Yeah, but the GCC's beef is over an issue that didn't happen in Canada but one that happened in Eastern Europe and Russia after the war ended. That makes it more that the GCC is doing some goofy tantrum over a moment in history that was the direct result of the bad actions of homeland Germans. I wouldn't have said a thing if the RCN had done a Wilhelm Gustlof incident and sunk a liner full of German refugees off the coast of Nova Scotia. The GCC's just trolling for pity without bothering to include the context that what happened to Germans at the end of the war was a direct consequence of the behaviour of Germans before and during the war.

If we aren't going to maintain the context of these issues, or even acknowledge the dual role of precendent and consequence in history, then what's even the point of having any of these museums at all?

Can't argue with what you said here. The GCC is definitely trying for some victim status itself - everybody join the club.

But I think the core issue they raised is a good one, and one that's been discussed for a while now by people who did not have any identifiable German background. I think things got confused because Izzy wanted a holocaust museum (which I think is a good idea) and it turned into a human rights museum. This is Canada after all, and every group is going to fight like Tigers (as in Williams) to get them some of that victim status. You get money, stiffer sentences if you're assaulted, etc. It's all good.

True enough. I want a big Scots/Irish/Welsh atrocity exhibit set up in the museum too. That way I can add my name to the list of those trying to extort some moolah out of the English. They really hurt my feelings, sob, when they chased my family out of the Highlands 250 years ago.

The main reason genocides are even elevated to the level of human depravity is because of the Holocaust. Genocides aren't historically equal - they're different, complex and operate on a myriad of different levels - and the actions of the Nazis and their collaborators opened the door to recognizing and categorizing these acts(not that any loss of life should be based solely on "numbers" - another act of the uniformed).

It's unfortuante that this has to become a "pissing match" about genocide.