Yesterday, I noted that the Trump White House Holocaust Memorial Day Proclamation completely omitted any mention of Jews or anti-Semitism. Well, Il Trumpe et alia doubled down on historical revisionism (boldface mine):
The White House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day didn’t mention Jews or anti-Semitism because “despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered,” administration spokeswoman Hope Hicks told CNN on Saturday.
Hicks provided a link to a Huffington Post UK story noting that while 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis, 5 million others were also slaughtered during Adolf Hitler’s genocide, including “priests, gypsies, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters.”
…Downplaying or disregarding the degree to which Jews were targeted for elimination during the Holocaust is a common theme of nationalist movements like those seen in Russia and Eastern Europe, Greenblatt said.
This is a standard Holocaust denialist trope: the Nazis murdered other groups, so the murder of Jews is, while tragic, not that important. It ignores the reality that the machinery of death was developed specifically to exterminate Jews.
Despicable. Just another day in the Trump Bannon administration.
mikethemadbiologist
Something seen elsewhere but apposite:-
After every defeat, & a respite, the Shadow takes a new form & grows again
Tolkein
I hate to correct you on historical matters, but here’s a link to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s entry on the Euthanasia Program, from its Holocaust Encyclopedia.
From the webpage:
“The “euthanasia” program was Nazi Germany’s first program of mass murder. It predated the genocide of European Jewry (the Holocaust) by approximately two years.
. . .
The “euthanasia” program represented in many ways a rehearsal for Nazi Germany’s subsequent genocidal policies. The Nazi leadership extended the ideological justification conceived by medical perpetrators for the destruction of the “unfit” to other categories of perceived biological enemies, most notably to Jews and Roma (Gypsies).
Planners of the Final Solution later borrowed the gas chamber and accompanying crematoria, specifically designed for the T4 campaign, to murder Jews in German-occupied Europe. T4 personnel who had shown themselves reliable in this first mass murder program figured prominently among the German staff stationed at the Operation Reinhard killing centers of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
While the machinery of death was extended to the extermination of Jews, the USHMM itself states that it was initially developed to kill people with disabilities.