Hatred makes strange bedfellows: Ahmadinejad and David Duke

7,000......10 million....you know, somewhere in that ballpark. I don't think there were 10 million Indians total, much less killed.


What Makes the Holocaust Unique?

The memory of the offence

Norman Geras

Was there something singular about the Holocaust in a morally significant sense? George Steiner once wrote that he found the question repellent, although himself going on to address it after a fashion; and many others who have discussed the same question have confessed their discomfort with it. It's not difficult to see why. The worry is that to claim a singularity for the Holocaust must commit one to privileging the suffering of its victims over the suffering of the victims of other terrible crimes. This worry is well-founded. At the levels of atrocity and human suffering we are considering when we compare the Holocaust with other genocides or comparable episodes of blood-letting, enslavement and oppression, any exercise in competitive victimhood is indecent. Most of us will feel that all such situations are about as bad as the human predicament can get; or in any case that they are all quite bad enough that we might be spared the insistence that something else in the way of human suffering was worse.

However, the consciouness that developed in Nazi-occupied Europe and in the decades after the Second World War that what the Nazis perpetrated was something historically new and exceptional was not based on any historical computation of the suffering of the victims in relation to other groups of victims. It was a judgement about the nature of the crime. So, at any rate, I propose. It was not some particularity of Jewish suffering, or of the suffering of the other targets of Nazi barbarism - gypsies, Russian prisoners of war (of whom some 3 million died in German captivity), gay people, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, Poles, and so on - but a particularity of the Nazi offence, an offence against humanity itself, that stood out.

This particularity is not fully captured by any one feature of that vast reality of daily murder, torture and slavery over which the Nazis presided. But there is a group of features standardly invoked by writers who have argued for the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The three most prominent are these.

(1) The industrialization and bureaucratization of death. This is part of a wider thesis about modernity and the Holocaust - associated with the name of Zygmunt Bauman among others - and it focuses on the way a modern state brought all the resources of modern organization, industry, science, medicine and so forth to bear on a project of systematic murder.

(2) Comprehensiveness of intent. With respect to the Jews, what emerged as the genocide began to unfold was the aim of wiping out an entire people, every man, woman and child, and without any ulterior purpose: not for economic gain or as a means or a byproduct of political or territorial conflict; but merely on the basis of a definition of the victim group as unfit to inhabit the world.

(3) Spiritual murder. I take this term from Gitta Sereny. Others, including Primo Levi, have expressed it differently - as 'useless violence' and 'surplus cruelty'. These terms express a widely-shared sense that beyond the physically exterminatory impulse that motivated the Nazi killers and functionaries, they also displayed an extraordinary ingenuity and thoroughness in trying to reduce and destroy the humanity of their victims even before killing them, seeking to deprive them of everything, material, intellectual or moral, that a human being needs in order to affirm him or herself.

It is this combination of features and the terrible images they have left with us that support the notion of something morally singular here in the history of humankind: as near as I can formulate it, the idea of a permanent universe of death; not at the margins of social life, and not just at the point of conflict between two societies, and not because of social breakdown. No, the orderly, 'civilized', systematic production of death - the production of death as a (sub)system of social order.

There are reasons enough, as I wrote in January, to remember the particular victims (and the centrality to Nazi aims of the Jewish victims) of Hitler's Reich, and to memorialize their suffering. But if the Holocaust has a claim on our memory beyond this, it is not to do with the victims, it is because of what the perpetrators and their crime have taught us about the potential scope of human depravity. That should be worthy of note without sectionalist carping.

http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/09/the_memory_of_t.html

I think the Holocaust is also the first time you see a nation-state bring industrialization to bear in genocide, instead of the weapons of war. To have the whole system for the extermination plotted out - everything from using their labor to systematic killing chambers to mining their teeth for gold to using their bodies for soap. That magnifies the horror of the action IMO. It also is a situation where so many other countries might have stopped the action. Hitler did not originally set out to implement the Final Solution, but to deport the Jews. But the Jews were turned back in massive numbers, including by the US who refused entry for whole boatloads of those who eventually would go to the gas chambers.

 

Sorry I don't think I phrased that as well as I could've. I didn't mean to say that anyone on Clutchfans has defended the Rape of Nanking but there are defenders of those who would deny or diminish the signifigance of the Rape of Nanking. I'm speaking in particular regarding the debate around the Yasakuni Shrine and Japanese historical revisionism. In those debates many have defended the Japanese, and even argued its justifiable, to commemorate the perpetrators of the Rape of Nanking or revise their history to downplay what the Imperial Japanese Army did during WWII.

 

I haven't had a chance to look at the Wikipedia entry regarding how many American Indians died but I find it impossible that it was 7,000. 7,000 wouldn't even be half of the Toyota Center.

I don't think an accurate number can ever be determined but I would say its easily in the millions of Native Americans that died. The Aztec and Inca civillizations alone had millions and those were decimated. Farily large tribes like that lived in the Carribean were totally wiped out.

The big difference between the Holocaust and what happened to Native Americans is that the Holocaust happened in a relatively short period of time and was systematized. Native Americans were wiped out over centuries and wasn't systematized. I think the short time span of the Holocaust and its relative recentness had a lot great affect on why it is so prominent.

I don't see what them being a 100% peaceful has to do with this? Are you trying to say that American Indians were warlike so they deserved to be wiped out?

 

What a debate... we've been reduced to arguing over which genocide killed more and which one was worse.

Each one has its own set of unique characteristics. Obviously it wasn't possible for the Colonists to wipe out Native Americans with the brutal efficiency of the Nazi war machine but I'm sure some of them would have if they had the chance. Also, the wipeout of the Native American nations is unique in that an entire continent of nations were all destroyed and their populations were reduced to a fraction of what it once was. There hasn't been anything like this in modern history. No landgrab and subsequent genocide has ever paralleled this.

Also, the danger of prioritizing and categorizing genocides is that it leads us to forget the past. We put the holocaust on this pedestal but at the same time we ignore what happened with the Armenian genocide (which in terms of numbers parallels the holocaust), the "manifest destiny", the endless killings in the Balkans, Rwanda/Burundi, Darfur, and even now I'm forgetting several cases and that's probably because of an under-exposure to many of these.

 

I see. I would say that's not a good statistic in regard to assessing the Native American genocide as the figures for the Holocaust include those who died from sickness and starvation in addition to being killed by direct actions.

 

Smallpox (1525, 1558, 1589), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) pandemics spread throughout the indigenous populations of the North America continent. The number of indigenous peoples killed is estimated at 10 million to 110 million depending on the demographic model used. The large uncertainty in the full extent of these pandemics is due to uncertainty regarding: 1) the pre-European population size; and 2) the percentage of casualties.

wiki

 

Those aren't GENOCIDE. Now you're mixing stories of the army passing out smallpox blankets with diseases that spread from exposure to a new populace.

As for the estimate it seems fairly bloated.

Scholars vary greatly in their estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived in 1492. Estimates range from 40 million to 90 million for all of the Americas, and from 2 million to 18 million for the aboriginal population north of present-day Mexico.

http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761570777/Native_Americans_of_North_America.html

 

when did i use the term genocide capt. semantics?

 

Yeah, it was powerful alright. I wasn't there the night the survivor was (I was seeing a friend's play at another theater), but the artistic director told me she cried throughout and sought him out at the end to hug him and thank him for the show. She was too choked up to say anything more than that. Another night we had the daughter of a survivor in the house and she said the show was exactly in line with the stories she'd heard from her father. She wished he could come see it but said it would be far too difficult for him to watch.

Here are some reviews if you're interested:

http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/living/arts/theater/s_478156.html
http://www.pittsburghcitypaper.ws/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid:19790
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06313/736802-325.stm

 

my bad. thought you were trying to be relevant to the conversation.

Hey, let's not forget the plague that killed two thirds of Europe! That really sucked. Doesn't have anything to do with this discussion, but let's not forget it!

 

That's right, the plague was genocide against Europeans by Asians!

 

Just wondering, but is this your silly attempt to brush over the ethnic cleansing of Natives in the Americas? It's an indisputable fact that countless of Natives -- and in some cases, entire civilizations -- were wiped out by the European settlers. This includes all of the Americas, not just the land of the present U.S. of A.

The numbers are difficult to estimate, but it's generally accepted by historians to be in the millions.

There was a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Americas against the Natives, that much is true. Heck, we've had U.S. presidents who ordered the ethnic cleansing of Natives as a means of capturing their lands.

 

When you raise one people's suffering up
you
by default
diminish [downplay] the pain of the others

The Holocaust is almost like an Celebrated event
[anti-celebration? perhaps]
We go above and beyond to make sure it is in everyone's face, hearts and minds
I mean . . Laws against arguing the number????
But
People talk about how slavery was the best thing for black people
oooohh . . what happen to the native *wasn't* that bad or . .
. . . well they were Savages. . .etc
I mean . . If those events were given the same WEIGHT as the holocaust
people would be JAILED IN FRANCE for what they posted here.

You say something against 'THE HOLOCAUST' and you are an instant
Anti-semetic SOB [Even got their own term . . ANTI SEMETIC . .as oppose to bigotted, prejudice or racist, etc .]

Slavery was the systematic destruction of a people over 300 yrs
then another 50 yrs of 2nd class citizen ship

Native Americans were kill with no regard to the brink of extinction.

It is easy for us to POINT over THERE
but
Trust and Beleive. . . THOSE FOLX STANDING AROUND SMILING DURING THE LYNCHINGS were no different than those people Killing those poor People in Germany

Human Depravity and vile evilness. . . it is NOT limited by Race, Creed, Religion, Gender, or border.

Rocket River
. . NO . .. NEVER FORGET !!! EVER!!

 

There is nothing silly about trying to be accurate. There is a huge difference between a pandemic passed between two populations and ethnic cleansing. If you want to dispute that then do so. Don't construct strawmen to knock down because this:

Smallpox (1525, 1558, 1589), typhus (1546), influenza (1558), diphtheria (1614) and measles (1618) pandemics spread throughout the indigenous populations of the North America continent. The number of indigenous peoples killed is estimated at 10 million to 110 million depending on the demographic model used. The large uncertainty in the full extent of these pandemics is due to uncertainty regarding: 1) the pre-European population size; and 2) the percentage of casualties.

...isn't about ethnic cleansing.

 

What does someone like Jorge do when the president of Iran teams up with David Duke? This has to be so confusing for him.

 

wow...that's great. good for you for directing something like this...and communicating to people just how awful it was.

email me when you get a chance through the board...just wanted to share something with you.

 

I don't want to come off as someone who hates jews, but I do think that an accurate count or somewhat accurate would be good to have for historical purposes. 6 million is a big number, but you I think that number takes into account all victims, not just Jewish people. But its still a big number, given the time period. When you compare the destruction of native americans, you're talking hundreds of years.

on a side note, anyone ever seen this documentury on american businesses profiting from the holocaust and the Nazis in general. One of the companies they talk about is IBM, who developed a counting machine to keep accurate track of the number of people who went through the camps. it was coded, one character for the camp, one for why you were there, ie jewish, gay, etc. one for where you were from I believe, and so on. Seems the Nazis were zealous about accurate record keeping.

 

Just for comparison purposes:

Soviet deaths (soldiers): 10,700,000
Soviet deaths (civilians): 11,500,000

In that light the number of 6 million doesn't sound so unreasonable. In includes roughly 1,000,000 Soviet Jews and roughly 3,000,000 Polish Jews. Poland had a very large number of Jews because of the king of Poland sometime in IIRC the 16th century had a Jew for a mistress or something similar and so invited all the Jews to come and get away from persecution elsewhere.

6 million is the number for Jews killed by Nazis in concentration camps/ghetos, not a general total number of all types killed by Nazis in Europe.