Voices of the Holocaust

Abstract

Because of the violence and trauma of the Shoah or Holocaust during the Second World War, the calamity and the reduction to ashes of millions of human beings in an organized and systematic killing or genocide is a wound for the victims, a wound for us all, and a wound for history. Earlier the book discussed the trauma of the mass deaths of the aboriginal peoples of the New World after the time of Colum-bus’s landfall. The frame of the study, then, is partly about mass death in the expansion of Europe and then in the conflicts arising from the competition of the great powers. At the heart of this book is the rise and fall of Europe as the central force in world affairs. It begins with death and ends with death. The death of people, the death of empires, and the wound of difference and otherness is construed in terms of inferiority, slavery, xenophobia, and racism. Here we turn from the Natives of the Americas to another group caught in ideology, domination, and cruelty. The religious triumph of Christ’s empire at the expense of aboriginal peoples and the triumph of the Nazi will for a thousand-year Reich are a perversion of holiness, a turning away from the spirit, a parody of the seriousness of religious and political ideas, a crushing of the human, and an erasure of human rights and international law in the period in which they were emerging.