What makes the holocaust unique?

[txaslftist]

On Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is important to think about this, especially in the context of a frightened (and frightening) US Govt. that is using scare tactics and the villification of an "other" race to justify increasingly totalitarian methods.

First of all, it was founded in law. The procedures undertaken to strip the jewish people of Germany of their rights were all passed through the German equivalent of parliament, congress, whatever you want to call it. The systematic & bureaucratic process of denying them professional licenses, then the right to hold property, then the right to work at all was all done according to German Law. Even the eventual construction of the camps and their use in genocide occurred in the context of construction contracts, transportation arrangements, etc. The German chemical companies that made zyclon and other gases did so legally, above board, and relatively openly. Since the time of the Mongols no other civilization has committed mass murder so openly, and with such profound respect for order and law. This was not a rogue element of society.

Secondly, the German people as a whole were complicit in the genocide. This is made abundantly clear in the movie Schindler's List, when the train rolls by a group of schoolchildren and one of them runs his hands across his neck in a throat slitting gesture. Max Schmeling, the one-time heavyweight champ, a German whom Hitler was so proud of, made it clear in public statements that the German people knew exactly what was going on in the death camps. This was not a rogue element of society committing mass murder as some would have us believe, but a people systematically attempting to destroy another people. At the very least the German people tolerated this, at worst they assisted.

Third, by the time the war began there was no longer even an attempt to criminalize the victims of the holocaust. Simply being jewish was enough. Sure there were people like Schindler who tried to slow the flow of people into the gas chambers, but by and large the Germans were much more likely to inform on hidden jews than they were to shelter them.

Once Hitler began his eastern conquests, he added Poles, Catholics, Russians and anyone else he could think of to his list of people he wanted to murder. Again, all the murders were done with the knowledge of the German people.

In this regard the Holocaust is unique among the slaughters of the modern age. This was not barbarism or cruelty, but systematic, even banal, murder by the state. This is what a government given too much authority, even in a pseudo-democracy, can do.

This is what your government could do. That is why it should never, ever, ever be forgotten. This is why you should be suspicious of ANY expansion of the power of government, especially expansion that comes at the expense of your rights or liberties.

[CBGLuthier]

1. Good essay, but it's Max Schmeling not Schnelling

[txaslftist]

6. thanx. good catch.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Behind the Aegis]

3. Apples and Oranges. n/t

[wuushew]

4. good thing those fetuses are not people

otherwise your argument might have merit on libertarian grounds.

[Mr.Green93]

24. that is what they said

about the Jews.

[readmoreoften]

5. Bwahhhhaaahhahahahaaaa

Heh-heh! Heh-heh!

Heh.

Heh.

That's a good one.

[LiberallyInclined]

7. oh boy...

:eyes:

babies aren't aborted- fetuses are(or would that be fetii?).

[txaslftist]

8. Are pregnant women being rounded up and forced to abort?

If not, then it ain't the same thing.

[Bunny]

10. Tony? Is that you?

[aaronnyc]

12. Are you just writing this to satisfy some masochistic urge to be flamed?

That's the only explanation I can think of for comparing abortion to the HOLOCAUST on DU.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

15. People like you are the reason 100,000 Iraqis who were ALREADY born are

dead.
HOW DARE YOU compare the rounding up and GENOCIDE of adults and children and compare it to an action a woman takes LONG before the zygot, embryo or fetus inside her is capable of surviving outside the womb.

Your twisted fucking logic got 3000 Americans killed since I FIRMLY believe that 9/11 would NOT have occurred at the size and manner it did if we had a leader that PAID ATTENTION to terrorism instead of letting it happen for political gain.

As someone whose relative was one of the children of Shoah (aka medical experiments by the Nazi's) I would love to say something stronger to you on her behalf.

[thebigidea]

21. its nutty statements like that make the rabid anti-choicers laughingstocks

you might as well be handing people a dead fetus and frothing at the mouth...

[Djinn]

26. yep and us libruhls

just loves killin' babies I personally make an effort to get preggers once a year so I can wait until the fetus is almost to term then I can abort for the pure joy of it :eyes:

[megatherium]

33. you're very brave,

assuming you're not just a Freeper slumming on DU.

Actually, I am reminded of a woman, a philosopher I think, who I saw be interviewed. She was advancing an interesting theory: we should declare the beginning of life to be at "brain birth" just as we say life ends at "brain death". It turns out the central nervous system forms and becomes active at week 10, or about the time the embryo becomes a fetus. So she was in effect saying that's when we should no longer permit an abortion. She said she wasn't liked by the feminists, who prefer week 22 (first trimester, where the criterion is viability) or later, nor by pro-life people, who of course believe life begins at conception.

[Behind the Aegis]

9. Very good essay.

I liked it the first time I read it, too. I am just not certain that the population of Germany had as great a knowledge about what was happening. They knew that Jews (and others) were being carted off. However, it wasn't until later, that the "labor camps" were actually "death camps" started to leak out because of escapes and defection among German guards. But it is interesting that people fail to see how "reporting a neighbor" for "suspicious" behavior is not reminiscent of the beginnings of Nazi Germany.

[txaslftist]

13. I know it's a double post, but that thread got locked.

And this was just one of the responses, not the thread itself. Is it just coincidence that congress is taking up a national ID bill on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps?

Shit I hope so.

[Behind the Aegis]

14. Yeah, I know.

I started that thread. That is why I commented about reading it before. I am glad you chose to post it as an individual thread. You make some very good points. Hopefully, this thread will not suffer the same fate.

AS for the national ID bill, I didn't even know that was happening today. I just commented to my partner yesterday that it sounds too much like "Papers please" to me. Although it would be great if they standardized driver's licenses!!!

[txaslftist]

17. The problem is they link the DL numbers to a database...

...and only the director of Homeland Security gets to know what goes into the database.

I know... hard to friggin' believe, but its true.

I'm sure it won't take long before "dissident" is put on my log, or at least "of questionable loyalty".

[Behind the Aegis]

18. That is just scary!!!

On this Day of Mourning and Remembrance, how can people not see the irony of this bill? The "slogan" of the day is "Never again," yet sometimes, I worry that people will let it happen again because they ignore history!

[txaslftist]

19. Isn't it?

I mean shit, they can search you without notifying you, they can check your e-mail or library records without a warrant or notification, they can read your computer/internet stuff...

All on "suspicion" that you might be a "terrorist". Substitute Dissident for terrorist and you've got a Stalinist set up. The fact that they don't abuse their new Patriot Act abilities (at least not yet that we know of) makes no difference. We've traded our constitutionally protected liberties in for a promise of security and the government's promise not to abuse us.

When has that promise ever been good?

[Freedom_from_Chains]

11. And this is the important point

"The procedures undertaken to strip the jewish people of Germany of their rights were all passed through the German equivalent of parliament, congress, whatever you want to call it."

After Hitler, and his band of 2000 or so, failed attempt to overthrow the government by force, it was during his time in prison while writing Mien Kompf that he realized the way to take over the government was from the inside, not the outside.

I would contend that religious fundamentalist understand this principle quite well.

"What makes the holocaust unique?"

The only thing that makes it unique, which all Americans know, is that those kinds of things only happen over there, not here. After all this is America. A perspective I have always had a problem with as it is the point at which our arrogance becomes a liability.

[prodigal_green]

16. I had a roommate once

who, while icing a bruise on her face, literally denied that her boyfriend beat her two minutes after I saw him punch her in the face.

It's amazing how often stuff happens to "not us".

[Freedom_from_Chains]

31. Like the saying goes

De Nile is not just a river in Egypt.

[pretzel4gore]

20. our people were there too

i know what you're saying tx, but if you read the history of the thing, and see how the repukes took the outrage over losing ww1 (the 'stab in the back' theory) blaming the 'liberals' and the leftists and the jews...compounded by the western allies insane insistence on germany paying its war reparations when the weimar republic (germany) simply wasn't able too...plus the natural human proclivity to cry out for BRUTE FORCE unrestrained by law when dealing with vast problems like what germany was experiencing, then you would not blame the innocent for what cold blooded killers did....
btw you'd think the hot shots geniuses in the western capitals woulda learned from the destruction of the russian empire/society ....russia could have easily transitted to a parliamentary democracy w/out becoming communist had the goofball punks running britain/france etc never INSISTED Czar Nicholas 2nd (cousin of britain's king george 5th i believe it was) not honour his treaty obligations and keep Russia in the war (had Russia pulled out of ww1 in 1916, the USSR never happen, Hitler never happen, and BUSH NEVER HAPPEN (oh he'd be fukking up something, but it would be very little league lol)...4 million germans voted againt hitler in '32 despite gangs of repukes threatening voters outside polling stations; the first people herded into the death camps were germans, many thousands of them. After the war, the lying fukkers who caused the mess in the first place eagerly held the entire German population responsible (at the same time they helped the nazi scientist/police/secret service escape to work for them!) for the holocaust....

[Karenina]

22. The "unique" aspect of the Holocaust

Is the "industrialization" of human death. How LOW we can go is about using HUMAN BODIES for commercial PRODUCTS. For a profit, of course. Prescott is gone but perhaps his progeny might have a word or two of "explanation."

[Disturbed]

23. State sponsored mass killings.

Soviet Union under Stalin
People's Republic of China under Mao
Cambodia under Pol Pot
Serbia
Riwanda
The Sudan


Others?

[Karenina]

25. None of those regimes

gathered body parts to manufacture a "product" to SELL.

[Djinn]

29. I was pretty sure most of those rumours were debunked

ie the lampshade/soap ones etc - that while certain officers etc and the infamous "bitch of Buchenwald" did use human body parts and cured human skin that it wasn't a Nazi program as such.

Tel Aviv (JTA) -- Professor Yehuda Bauer, head of the Hebrew University's Holocaust history department and regarded as one of the foremost researchers of the Holocaust, has denied the frequently quoted charge that the Nazis used the bodies of Jewish death camp victims to make soap.

Historian Yehuda Bauer said many Jews believed their murdered families and friends had been turned into soap because the Nazis themselves propagated the idea. "Nazis told the Jews they made soap out of them. It was a sadistic tool for mental torture." -- Reuter

Raoul Hilberg, professor of political science at the University of Vermont and a pre-eminent historian of the Holocaust, agrees that the soap rumor, although widespread, was probably unfounded.

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Auschwitz/docs/soaptale.html

[Djinn]

28. slaughter of indigenous populations in US/Australia and elsewhere &

Highland Clearances in Scotland and famine & clearances in Ireland all of which definetly had a commercial/profit motive

sadly what the Nazi's attempted wasn't unprecedented and most nations/religions/ethnic groups are implicated somewhere in their history of horrible brutality against their fellow man.

we're not anywhere near as evolved as we like to think

[solinvictus]

30. Armenians under Ataturk..

Several million killed during and after WW1.

[Djinn]

35. the Armenian genocide was carried out by the Ottoman's

not nationalists under Ataturk, Turkey wouldn't agree to certain territorial issues for Armenians under Ataturk but the genocide took place pre and during WW1 not post.

[bemildred]

27. Yes. Killing a few million is nothing new.

Treating it as an exciting technical challenge and revenue base was.

The allies terror bombings, or the Japanese occupation of Manchuria,
just to name two examples, were every bit as atrocious, maybe worse,
but they didn't have the same businesslike enterprise.

One could draw some parallels with the current feeding frenzy in Iraq,
although the body count is still modest by such standards.

[carpetbagger]

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

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.

[Astarho]

34. Good post

I think another factor is people still remember it. We still have first hand accounts, as opposed to just passages in books.

The propblem is people are already beginning to forget. Look at the situation of the Roma (Gypsies). Many are facing mounting discrimination and violence.