Holocaust memorial day, Monday the 27th January

Try to think about the Holocaust as reminding us of all forms of genocide and political scapegoating, and don't get too bogged down in a very messy debate just about the jewish suffering.

Inevitably 70 years on it is easy to engage in detached debates about what did or didn't happen. The *** didn't just persecute and anihilate jews. They did the same to Romanies and Gypsies, homosexuals, AND many disabled, including the mentally ill.

And the way they did it, with Germanic efficiency, was to displace people from their homes into ghettoes and camps, and finally transport them to special camps where they were disposed of systemmatically using incinerators and gas chambers.

That's not war - even if you want to push up the question of whether the jews started it by challenging Germany on financial and economic grounds. War should not involve the killing of defenceless civilians, but should be between the armed combattants - but inevitably collateral damage to non-combattants is a fact of war. Dresden and Coventry, Hiroshima and Pearl Harbour all consequences of prolonged and destructive war and war strategies.

But what happened in the Holocaust, and in mass genocides before and since, was extermination of races, indiscriminant of whether they were combattants or not. Please don't call it war when people are shipped hundreds of thousands a week to extermination camps, for mass disposal.

It really is banale to label that "war".

Try to think about the Holocaust as reminding us of all forms of genocide and political scapegoating, and don't get too bogged down in a very messy debate just about the jewish suffering.

Inevitably 70 years on it is easy to engage in detached debates about what did or didn't happen. The *** didn't just persecute and anihilate jews. They did the same to Romanies and Gypsies, homosexuals, AND many disabled, including the mentally ill.

And the way they did it, with Germanic efficiency, was to displace people from their homes into ghettoes and camps, and finally transport them to special camps where they were disposed of systemmatically using incinerators and gas chambers.

That's not war - even if you want to push up the question of whether the jews started it by challenging Germany on financial and economic grounds. War should not involve the killing of defenceless civilians, but should be between the armed combattants - but inevitably collateral damage to non-combattants is a fact of war. Dresden and Coventry, Hiroshima and Pearl Harbour all consequences of prolonged and destructive war and war strategies.

But what happened in the Holocaust, and in mass genocides before and since, was extermination of races, indiscriminant of whether they were combattants or not. Please don't call it war when people are shipped hundreds of thousands a week to extermination camps, for mass disposal.

It really is banale to label that "war".