Unicef: 500,000 children (including sanctions, collateral effects of war). “[As of 1999] [c]hildren under 5 years of age are dying at more than twice the rate they were ten years ago.”

British Member of Parliament George Galloway: “a million Iraqis, most of them children.”

Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark: 1.5 million (includes sanctions, bombs and other weapons, depleted uranium poisoning).

1. As JAFB said, I think Daney’s beef is more with films that try to pretend their realistic, not with live-action cartoons like PF (which would probably fall into the category he consigns “Holocaust porn” into, one of disinterest rather than scorn). To be honest, he’d probably be more upset with some aspects of “responsible” films you like, like In the Valley of Elah (although that may be a special case since it puts a lot of the crisis offscreen). It’s that sort of 60s radical sensibility where apoliticism and conservatism are disregarded as irrelevant and it’s liberalism which is chosen as the “enemy” and attacked. (The folly of this became clear to a lot of people, at least in America, after Nixon was elected in ‘68.)

(Out of curiosity, as an aside, have you ever read Todd Gitlin’s book on the 60s? I’ve read it several times and found it pretty interesting; I’d be interested to know what you thought.)

2. This is an interesting point: animation vs. cinema. I’m not sure why, but I fully accept animation as cinema WHEN IT’S ANIMATION. Everything from Betty Boop to the Quay Brothers to the Disney classics to Brakhage’s shorts (which are a kind of animation) to WALL-E I see as part of the cinematic history alongside live-action “representative” cinema. BUT I share your and Daney’s antipathy when it comes to animation masquerading as reality, i.e. computer animation, except when used sparingly as in the first Jurassic Park. I think the CGI-zation of cinema in the past 15 years is a colossal blunder and have written about this elsewhere.

3. Americans have confronted many of those issues on screen, but certainly not on the scale of Schindler’s List, I think. But then this is where the Holocaust IS different to a certain extent – the scale and focus of the murder, for one thing (which is why it is more challenging to classify the various American crimes you mention as “genocide”), but mostly what Bobby mentions: the industrialization of the murder, the way it was carried out not as an exception to civilization but as the epitome of it. This was true to a certain extent in Vietnam for example, but the destructive force of the bombs (as in WWII, by the way) could be somewhat disguised by “other aims” – there was the distance of the killing, the fact that it was not “directly” aimed at a person, etc etc. Death from air (not that this was the only form of atrocity in Vietnam) has seldom been able to register the same impression on human consciousness as death up close. The Holocaust was up close – the killers confronted face to face with their victims – yet it was entirely impersonal and systematized. That’s what’s so scary, and why it keeps coming back to haunt us when other genocides have been forgotten or overlooked.

Also, of course, Western media and wealth basically controls the world (though that’s changing somewhat with the rise of China, even as it reflects certain Western values, somewhat warped, back at us) so it’s no surprise that a very Western genocide remains the grisly “gold standard” so to speak. The history of the Jews in the West is familiar to all and thus as a narrative, the Holocaust has more power as well – it seems the gruesome culmination to centuries of persecution and discomfort.

Those are my thoughts anyway.

Also, the passage JAFB quoted is not Daney, but Godard. Love the guy, but he is the epitome of mixing aesthetics and politics (as a result he’s made some very insensitive comments about the Jews and the Holocaust too) and in general I think his ideological views should be taken with a grain of salt.