On the Uniqueness of the Holocaust

On the contrary, I’d say that

(a) the Holocaust was not unique only in that genocide is not unique;

(b) all genocides are unique, as each has its own causes and trajectory; and

(c) that there are unique aspects of the Holocaust that differntiate in ways that make it worth studying, for example (some of these are more important than others, but all are interesting):

(1) Unlike the typical genocide, it involved multiple countries, governments, and the participation of dozens of different cultural, religious, ethnic, and linguistic groups as perpetrators;

(2) it had the basis in almost 2k years of religion-based hatred, though its ultimate ideology was ironically explicitly anti-religious;

(3) it involved the active, enthusiastic participation of scientists and medical professions in what had been considred the single most advance scientific nation in the world;

(4) it involved the active acquiescence of the judiciary in the country that led the charge against notions of inherent natural rights in favor of a pragmatic sociological jurisprudence.

And the factor that I think makes the Holocaust most interesting is that the standard genocide involves a longstanding real conflict between different national/religious/ethnic groups. The various Ottoman massacres of Christian minority groups, for example, culminating in the Armenian genocide, while obviously horrific and inexcusable, had their roots in non-imaginary Ottoman concern that its Christian subjects would, if given the opportunity, break free of Muslim/Turkish rule, violently if necessary (as of course happened after WWI, see Greece in particular).

In contrast, the conflict between Germans (“Aryans”) and Jews (“Judeo-Bolsheviks”) was almost entirely in the Nazi imagination. Sure, Jews were overrepresented among Communists. That’s the grain of truth.

But (a) the vast majority of Jews, and especially German Jews, weren’t Communists, and (b) even Communists didn’t see Germans, as such, as an enemy, this only existed in the Nazi mind.

So while all nationalist conflcts are based to some degree in irrational mythos, the irrationality of the Nazi war on the Jews was off the charts. The Nazis inveneted a world in which “the Jews” writ large were plotting to undermine Aryan civilizaton in general, and German civilization in particular, so that they could run the world and turn it into a Judeo-Bolshevist empire.

The insanity of this worldview is best capture in the poignant Jewish joke: Nazi brownshirt approaches an old Jewish man in the street in Berlin in 1934, and demands, “Old man, who is responsible for Germany’s humiliation in WWI? Woo is responsible for the inflation that bankrupted the German middle class? Who is responsible for starving German children in the countryside?” The old man replies, “The Jews. And the bicyclists.” The Nazi responds, “Old man, why the bicyclists.” To which the old man shrugs and says, “Why the Jews?”

The Jews, in short, were not a typical ethno-religious group threatening to seize power from the governing group, and in turn were ruthlessly suppressed via genocide. They were a historically oppressed group whose generally successful integration into mainstream society led to a crazy, irrational backlash born of nonsensical conspiracy theory that led to the murder of 6 million people based on pure fantasy. (And also weirdly led to massive denial that this ever occurred, an additional layer of irrationality, only made more irrational by those who take the position “it didn’t happen and anway the Jews deserved it.”)

I’m again not saying that other genocides, with which I am less familiar, may not also have their own fascinating idiosyncracies. But true delusion coming more from much of the top of society and spreading even before the genocide through a significant part of mainstream societies throughout Western civilization is rather different than the standard ethnic conflict over territory or resources, or the standard brutal conquests of Genghis Khan or Aztec warriors, or even the greed-and-power driven massacres accompanying colonization.