Re: Stranger in a strange land


Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:43FF78B0.44C6@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
benlizross wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:

Paul J Kriha wrote:

Peter T. Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:43FF052B.469F@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
benlizro@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Peter T. Daniels wrote:
Richard Herring wrote:

In message <43FDD944.6ACE@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Peter T. Daniels

One hates to sound like E. D. Hirsch, but how does one become a
25-year-old American ca. 1990 without ever having heard of
Belshazzar's Feast?

When I was a 15-year-old American ca. 1952, we sang a song in my
highschool that went

Now King Belshazzar took delight in
Starting wars and doing fighting.
Sons of Israel he called scamps,
And he sent them off to work in concentration camps.

Mene, mene, tekel, tekel, tekel,
Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.

Google doesn't know about it.

Me either, but I'm ca. 15 years younger than you.

It can't have been a very traditional song, because "concentration camp"
didn't exist before 1945!

A typo?
The war _ended_ in 1945. There were no (operating) Nazi
concentration camps _after_ 1945. The first ones were
established well before the war, in the thirties.

Did you overlook the quotation marks?

What are you suggesting is the importance of the quotation marks? I took
them to mean that you were referring to the phrase "concentration camp".

You did, but Paul didn't.

I noticed the quotation marks but failed to realize you
ascribed them the kind of significance that you did.

AFAIK the existence of concentration camps (I believe we
have not been talking about extermination camps) was not
a secret and was well known years before the war it did
not occur to me that you thought what you say you did in
your earlier closing paragraph below.


You have been given plenty of evidence that the phrase (and the concept)
goes back half a century earlier.

In Britain, perhaps. (The Boer War seems to have been a much greater
part of British consciousness than the Spanish-American War was of
American consciousness.)

We are talking about American high school boys ca. 1952.

Their existence was unknown (outside, one hopes, the OSS) before the
first Liberations at Buchenwald (American and British -- Alfred
Hitch*** was brought in to document the situation, and he insisted on
long, long takes with no cuts because he knew no one would believe them
if it looked like there was any sort of camera tricks going on) and
Bergen-Belsen (Soviet).
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx

I believe you may be referring here to "death camps" (where systematic
mass killings of Jews and others were carried out), whose existence was
not generally known until the end of the war. "Concentration camp" is a
more general term; the Bertrand Russell quote in the OED shows that the
existence of Nazi concentration camps (referred to by that term) was
known at least by 1935. Further quotes from 1940 and 1943 show an
awareness that Jews were particularly likely to be sent to them.

The US was utterly disinterested in the fate of the Jews. One of FDR's
great sins (along with the Japanese internment camps) was turning away
shipful(s) of refugees.

Philojudaism, historians are lately noticing, did not set in in the US
until after the Six-Day War (1967).
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx

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