Sir, - Kevin Myers writes (An Irishman's Diary, February 8th) that "though the Holocaust was unique in the organised and sustained evil which made it possible, in terms of mass butchery or genocide it was by no means unprecedented or unrepeated".
Indeed. But it is not a question of one man's genocide being bigger than another's. This is not a competition. The problem, which Kevin Myers does not bring out, is one of words. The word genocide was coined after the second World War, and the words Holocaust and Shoah are still contentious through their implying passivity and sacrifice on the part of the victims. Let us call the Holocaust what it was: the industrialised annihilation of European Jewery by the culture/ civilisation which produced Goethe, Kant and Beethoven - Germany - and by extension the culture/civilisation born out of the Enlightenment.
The French thinker Alain Finkielkraut once wrote that faced with the Holocaust, words fail us. This is an intellectual tradition going back to the German philosopher Adorno who wrote that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". What many who trot out this remark at the first mention of the Holocaust forget is that Adorno later retracted and wrote that "perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured man to scream".
Finkielkraut also wrote that with regard to the Holocaust there are two interdictions. On the one hand we must not forget the Holocaust, while on the other we must resist the temptation to make sense of it. Between these two interdictions lies the duty to remember.
From Deuteronomy: Zakhor! The biblical watchword - Remember! - Yours, etc.,
Dermot Fagan, Llewellyn Grove, Rathfarnham, Dublin 16.