Reply #32: It's one of ten or so historical events people know.

[carpetbagger]

to an average person, there's only a handful of historical events they draw on. A representative group is as follows:

1. The execution of Jesus.
2. The moon landing
3. The Holocaust
4. The fall of the Berlin Wall
5. Pearl Harbor
6. The destruction of the World Trade Center
7. The assassination of John Kennedy
8. Vietnam
9. One event of regional significance, e.g. The Alamo, Lexington and Concord, the campaigns of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, Brigham Young, the California gold rush, Little Bighorn.
10. One event from a recent movie, e.g. William Wallace's rebellion, the Khmer Rouge.

So 9/11=Pearl Harbor. Not Pancho Villa's raid on Columbus, because nobody remembers it. Sneak attack means Pearl Harbor.

Iraq=Vietnam. Since people don't remember the lies (albeit less intentional) about the Maine and Lusitania, and they don't know much about the British debacle of the 1920's, war that's no longer fun must mean Vietnam.

So if you're looking for madman tyrants, us-and-them kililng sprees, and the face of evil, you reach for Hitler. That's all you know. You never heard about Rwanda, you don't understand Yugoslavia, you equate the Soviet era with the Berlin Wall, not remembering Stalinism, you never heard of the Armenians.

The holocaust is unique because it's the only one most people ever heard about. If you want secondary answers (like why it's the one), I'd go for (a) the victims survived and thrived, and (b) it involved a people who appear prominently in the religious text of the US's major religion.