In a post at Liberal Conspiracy, Unity suggests that I'm chasing shadows to see it as a reference to the Holocaust - the Shoah, the attempted destruction of the European Jews - when Brian Keenan says what I yesterday quoted him as saying. Keenan, says Unity, 'could simply be using the word "holocaust" in its generic sense'. I would be delighted to discover that this had been so and to acknowledge the mistake it would then have been on my part to assume otherwise. But I'm not persuaded.
First of all, Unity treats it as of some significance that in the phrase 'the word "holocaust"', Keenan puts 'holocaust' in quotation marks. This has no significance whatever for the issue in dispute, because it is just the standard convention in writing about the use of a word to put that word in inverted commas: thus, you would write 'the word "cheese"', 'the word "standard"', 'the word "convention"', etc. The same with Keenan and 'holocaust'. He tells us that that word came into his head. But his use of quotation marks around it says nothing one way or another about whether it was its generic meaning that he had in mind or the more specific historical meaning I read there.
Second, Unity could be right. Maybe Keenan intended only the generic meaning. In that case, however, he expressed himself ineptly. For he says that 'History is supposed to tell us what not to repeat'; and this is a standard Holocaust-referring trope. The Holocaust has become the paradigm 'never again' reference in public discourse. I don't agree, therefore, that I have put a 'misleading slant' on Keenan's remarks; though - to repeat - I would be glad to learn, if it were so, that he had intended a different thought from the one I read, and merely expressed himself badly.
In any event, Unity and I do seem to agree about one thing: if Keenan's meaning was the one I ascribed to him, it would be regrettable. I take our agreement over this to be implicit in Unity's effort to show that Keenan meant something else than I understood.