Holocaust Supremacism Slights Gypsies Lemarchand

Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory, by Rene Lemarchand (Editor). 2011

Yes, Holocaust Preeminence Does Create a Zero-Sum Game (or Close To It). Numerous Long-Slighted Genocides

This book discusses genocides which very few have heard of: Eastern Congo, Burundi, Herrero, Tasmanian Aborigines, Tibetan, Assyrian, and others.

THE LONG-NEGLECTED NAZI GERMAN GENOCIDE OF GYPSIES (PORAJMOS)

In recent years, some Holocaust establishments have paid more attention to the Gypsies than before. Perhaps this is because they are too small a group to potentially threaten the standard preeminence of the Holocaust over all other genocides. In addition, the Gypsies, as a small, much-despised group, fit-in with the theme of the Jews as a small, much despised group.

Even so, the Porajmos remains very much in the shadow of the Jews’ Holocaust. Lemarchand comments, “Whereas some genocides have gained considerable public attention, others have not…Again, consider the marginal attention paid to the martyrdom of the Gypsy victims of the Holocaust. How the Auschwitz effect reduced their agonies to near-footnotes is well described by the late Sybil Milton, ‘Despite the similarity and simultaneity of persecuting, the disparity between the vast quantity of secondary literature about Nazi Judeophobia and the limited number of studies about the fate of the Roma and Sinti has inevitably influenced current historical analyses, in which Gypsies are at most an afterthought.’” (pp. 11-12).

Michael Stewart adds, “And yet the mass murder and sterilization of the Roma, Sinte, and Gypsies provides, perhaps, the locus classicus in the modern world of a genocidal catastrophe denied and cast into public oblivion. Despite the efforts of a number of historians and activists, the general European public remains almost totally unaware of the Nazis treatment of the Romany peoples and IN NO EUROPEAN COUNTRY ARE THESE PERSECUTIONS TAUGHT AS PART OF THE NATIONAL CURRICULUM.” (p. 140. Emphasis added).

CONCLUSION

And yet there are those who would have us believe that Holocaust supremacism does not create a zero-sum game. How much more obvious does it have to be that it certainly does?