“I cry for all the people”
As with Nikita Khrushchev in the above clip, if you say that you are sorry about the holocaust but not about Dresden and Hiroshima then you are a hypocrite—a cynical politician. Dresden, Hiroshima, and Auschwitz all work on the same principle: the targeted killing of civilians. If you think just one is “a unique event in human history, for which we should be deeply mournful” you are a hypocrite: you think the life of a Jewish child is worth more than the life of a German child or a Japanese child.
Further, if you accept that your country can have nuclear weapons then you accept the principle behind the holocaust itself: we have nuclear weapons on the premise that we would use them—perhaps that’s unlikely, but to produce them means we accept that their use is reasonable within principle. To use nuclear weapons would have the exact same effect as the holocaust, as Dresden, as Hiroshima; if you approve nuclear weapons, you approve the principle behind these events—we are only in discussion about when, how, and why we use that force level.
The purported justifications for these acts are immaterial—especially if Dresden is acceptable because “the Germans were the bad guys” (as, I believe, Hitler said about the Jews—touché). Hiroshima was justified on the grounds that it saved American lives—since American lives are worth more than those of Japanese women and children (a racially supremacist argument). Secondarily, Hiroshima was carried out because the Soviets were about to declare war on Japan—they could well have arrived on the Japanese mainland before the Allies, given their geographical proximity, and that would put Japan in the Red sphere. So the atom bomb was motivated by raison d’etat.
You do not care, not really, about the little children that died in the gulag, in Auschwitz, at Hiroshima. You can look at a picture in a book and feel sad in a general way—yet that is bland easy sympathy; you can smugly walk off and think, “Never again. Gosh, I’m such a good person—I’d never stand for it.” Did you know the Israelis have ghettos they keep the Palestinians in? Did you know they openly discuss their racial extermination? Have you seen the way they drop litter on them, like animals? Actually, what you just said is anti-semitism in accordance with the official definition…Israel has an atom bomb or two themselves, so they are also in the holocaust business—so to speak.
You feel sorry for your own children—for people you have met and known for a long time, for someone you see fall over in the street. You do not feel sorrow, true sorrow, for these historical abstractions that are held up like a puppy that shows you his wounded paw to garner sympathy. While you look at the puppy, several men whip into your house and make off with the furniture.
The holocaust is promoted as “the most important event in human history” to invert the crucifixion. 1 death is worth more than 6 million—Christ > holocaust. It’s a deliberate inversion. What message did Christ bring? To my mind “don’t be hypocritical”. So don’t, for example, weep crocodile tears about the holocaust and then condone nuclear weapons—either accept that massacre is inherent in a fallen world, or become a genuine pacifist who renounces all violence whatsoever (almost nobody). There may well be men who weep for all the world’s children in a sincere way, but they are in monasteries on a Greek island or up a mountain in Tibet. These men are like square circles—which actually exist, though most do not understand what they are (except in Tibetan monasteries, in fact).
No, when people ask you to “weep for the children” they want easy sympathy—if it’s about the holocaust, they want you to worship the Jews and do what they tell you (by the way, by the same logic, the British are responsible for an “African holocaust”; and now the Russians are implicated in the actual holocaust too—it’s almost like it was a cynical ploy from the start…). It’s unreal—just like the Kurds who used to stand on street corners when I was a boy to show you lever-arch files filled with plastic wallets that showed people Saddam gassed. “You look, my family, look (you send bombs, you kill my enemies for me, white man)”. Let’s be real—let’s not wave a little picture of Ann Frank about the place and feel smug; and let’s not be Nikita Khrushchev—an arch-executioner himself—and give empty speeches about how we “cry for all the people.”