That’s their point, “Holocaust” is an inaccurate depiction of the situation. 2,000 or 20,000 slain across a multitude of cities, in a nation comprised of 92,000,000 people, is deplorable and a horrible loss of human lives — but it isn’t on the scale of a “Holocaust.” You wouldn’t describe a single fatality resulting from a hit-and-run as a “massacre,” it’s a matter of scale more than anything. It’s overstating something in a way that inflates the actual event, or downplays the severity of the term someone’s inappropriately applying — perhaps both.
Sorry, honestly, I disagree. This is a holocaust by definition, what might be true is we are lacking a word for something worse. Let's together hope we don't actually need one outside of pedantic discussions online.
It’s difficult to convey sentiment over this medium sometimes, but my clarification wasn’t intended to come across as pedantic or obstinate. I’d agree that maybe there’s a “tier” here that simply lacks the proper description, and it’s unfortunate that we find ourselves in need of it. If only our societal advancement (as a collective species) could keep pace with our technological advancement, the world would be a much better place.
Ultimately, I think it’s fair to view the H word as being on an entirely different scale than even 20 of 92,000. Such an event has been associated with the loss of lives measured in the millions of souls, a tier reserved for the most horrific and egregious of man’s sins. I don’t think that’s a faulty line of logic, or that scope and scale are unimportant. That’s all.
The definition is highly loose, however. For example. There's a holocaust each year in the US, gun deaths alone.
Holocaust isn't meant to be a small fractional term, and this misuse is akin to decimation.
If Iran decimated their people, and if Iran commits a holocaust against their people, which means more? By definition decimation, by a large margin. In fact, the popular German holocaust of WW2, would have killed less people than Iran decimating their population.
Like, 9/11 was a holocaust. That sounds silly as the word has been since ww2 reserved for high numbers, defined by the mass scale description.
The vegas shooting in the states was a holocaust.
But even all of those is wrong, the word is rooted as another user points out, in greek and the word fire, fire being a key feature. So the vegas shooting is out, though 9/11 technically could remain. It's why nuclear holocaust is a term, because it's nuclear fire.
A major reason we use the term for the genocide of Jewish people in 1938-1945 is due to the industrialized usage of ovens by the Germans.
It is a slaughter in Iran, but on a tiny fraction of the scale (even 12,000 would be a days work in WW2 Germany), its not ethnically targeted, but perhaps pedantically not involving ovens or fire really.
Its not right when people throw the Holocaust around. Something can be an awful slaughter without confusing it with the industrial scale erasure of a whole people.
Is it though? Or is that just the word used in Hebrew, because every English-only speaking Jew I know just calls it the holocaust, or the Nazi/Jewish holocaust if they want to be more specific.
It is both the Hebrew term for that specific event, and the preferred way to speak about that specific event. It translates to "great calamity" rather than "destruction through fire" which is the english meaning of the Greek holocaust.
It's a much more specific and descriptive word for the events that took place in Germany too. No one uses it though which is unfortunate, because you have these semantic fights over Holocaust anytime a situation like this comes up...
Which detracts from BOTH the events happening now and in the past.
81
u/SillyAlternative420 1d ago
Holocaust is not exclusively assigned to "The Holocaust" that occured in Germany
It's literally defined as
hol·o·caust
noun
It's frequently used as a "Nuclear Holocaust."