Does memoralization of the Holocaust detract from the other "holocausts"?

Great Debates
1

Whenever I discuss the Holocaust with a Ukranian friend of mine, he brings up the fact that he’s very disappointed that the media almost never recognizes the Ukranian holocaust or other such genocides.

Recently, there was a news story that suggested that 30% of Canadians polled did not know that Jews were the primary victims of the Holocaust.

  1. Is it offensive to Jewish people to point out that a great many other peoples have also perished as a result of deliberate genocide?
  2. If so few people know about the Holocaust, why are we not outraged that far, far fewer still know anything about the other mass genocides of peoples?

It it right and to be expected to honour the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by telling their story through history books, movies, museums and through the power of the media in general.
3. Why do we not honour the victims of the other “holocausts?”

  1. Is it because “…an entire bureaucratic apparatus was created to define who they were, where they should live or be forced to live, and eventually, to see that they would live no more. This was not murder as a byproduct of war, not casualties as a result of skirmishes or partisan activities, but the end-result of an ideology that had for years been calling Jews vermin and also calling for their destruction. This was a sophisticated machine, an industry developed to exterminate first and foremost the Jews of Europe.”
    source: The Difference Between Holocaust and Genocide - http://www.york.cuny.edu/~drobnick/differ.html.

When I think about the Tutsis who were hacked to death by machete in Rwanda in 1994, I think that their deaths were no less terrible than those who died in the Holocaust. Maybe the Tutsi slaughter of 800,000 (and some Hutus, as well) in 100 days wasn’t as premeditated as what the Nazis did, but to me it was equally horrible. Try telling a parentless child of a Tutsi victim that what happened to their parents wasn’t as bad as what happened to the Jews in the Holocaust.

Here’s an excerpt from FrontPage magazine. I would encourage you to read the entire article.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1288
"The second source of the double standard lies in the excessive memorialization of the Jewish Holocaust in American life, which has squeezed out the historical memory of the other holocausts. This memorialization has many positive aspects, as we are certainly a culture that needs more historical memory, not less, and has an underdeveloped sense of the tragic dimension of politics. But it is also historically imbalanced, because now everyone is more conscious of the fate of the 6 million Jews than of the other 150 million-plus victims in our century. Let us review these holocausts:

  1. By Communist China: 65,701,000.

  2. By the Soviet Union: 62,000,000.

  3. By Nazi Germany: 30,000,000.

  4. By Kuomintang (Nationalist) China: 10,075,000.

  5. By Nazi Japan: 6,000,000.

  6. By Turkey: 2,500,000 (mainly Armenians and Greeks.)

  7. By Communist (Khmer Rouge) Cambodia: 2,035,000.

  8. By Communist Korea: 2,000,000.

  9. By Communist Vietnam: 1,700,000.

  10. In Africa: 1,700,000 (various Communist and other regimes and rebels.)

  11. By Communist Poland: 1,600,000 (mostly ethnic Germans post-1945.)

  12. In Pakistan: 1,500,000 (mostly in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.)

  13. By Communists in Afghanistan: 1,500,000.

  14. In Mexico (mostly in revolutionary chaos to 1920): 1, 417,000.

  15. In Communist Yugoslavia: 1,072,000.

  16. In Czarist Russia: 1,066,000.

  17. In Rwanda: 800,000.

(Sources: R.J. Rummel, Death By Government & The Black Book of World Communism. These are civilian causalities and do not include military losses for which these political entities were responsible. Figures are in some cases controversial and are intended to be indicative of scale, not exact. I refer to the Japanese regime as “Nazi” because it was based on a totalitarian cult of pseudo-racial supremacy; whether the pseudo-race in question is the “Aryan” or the “Yamato” is secondary. I use the term “pseudo-race” because the collectivities valorized by Nazi ideology do not correspond to any biologically valid taxonomy of human racial differences but are concoctions of racial, geographic, ethnic, national, linguistic and cultural concepts.)

One must commend the Jews who built the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington for starting the process of memorializing the victims, and it is time to complete this process by extending it to victims of the other holocausts. Therefore the United States Holocaust Museum should become the United States Holocausts Museum. It is time to tell not only the truth, but the whole truth."

2

That’s a good question. Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow suggests that roughly 15-16 million people died in the Soviet terror-famine in the early 1930’s. I think that’s for all affected areas; not just Ukraine. I think this gets much less publicity than the holocaust of Nazi Germany. In his book, Conquest emphasized that an institutionalized denial pervaded the famine. It was either ignored altogether, or blamed on poor harvests. Perhaps if the famine had been exposed by outsiders the same way the death camps were liberated by Allied troops, it would be better known today.

Perhaps another factor is that Nazi Germany made enemies of the US and most of Europe, whereas the Soviet Union was, at the time, an ally. So perhaps atrocities of Stalin were overlooked. That doesn’t explain why they continued to get less publicity even during the Cold War, so I don’t know.

3

Where did your online cite get those numbers? What is, for instance, “Nazi Japan”?

And by the way, I’d be leery of any publication that has a picture of Al Frankin with the word “Racist” plastered across his face. Sounds like they’ve got an axe to grind or are relying on sensationalism to get attention. Not something you look for in a fair and informed source of data.

4

This topic is worth discussion. (So much so that we have done it on several earlier occasions–which is not an effort to squelch this thread; the posters available to participate have very likely changed oer the years).

However, Rummel’s numbers are often bogus. He had an agenda (to make “communism” appear to be the Worst Event In History and he used whatever means he could to use unrealistically high numbers. Not wanting to be accused of “supporting” Fascism as he attacked Marxist countries, he also allowed some inflation of the German/Nazi numbers (usually estimated around 12 million non-combatants). Note that he does not include numbers for indigenous peoples who died under regimes of the expanding European-based conquests. That was “pre-Communist” and so does not fit into his scheme.

5

The same Holocaust that got the Jews also got several million other people. Gypsies, for example. And anybody who spoke up.

The Catholic church has several Blesseds and at least one Saint who were killed in the camps. I am horrible for names, sorry, can’t remember any right now.

An American friend of mine, Linda, says that her family has this in-joke about the Holocaust: when it gets mentioned on TV and all it talks about is the Jews they turn to each other and say “congratulations! I did not know you were a Jew!” All four of her grandparents are Concentration Camp survivors: 3 gypsies, 1 sister to a priest who had spoken up. Each of them was from a differtent country: Romania, Slovenia, Chzec Republic and Poland. The priest’s sister had another sister who also survived; the rest know of no other surviving siblings; some lost children as well as parents.

Should the Holocaust be forgotten?

No.

But we have to remember it all. Co-opting it is as wrong as making it sound as if it never happened.

This is coming from someone whose two grandfathers fought in opposite sides of the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, which is also being hidden and co-opted. I have as many horror stories from one side as from the other; I have histories of heroism and fear and pain and missing your loved ones from both sides; I have histories of admired opponent from both sides. People who are ashamed of either side and who hide parts of it from the “younger generations” under the excuse of “letting the old wounds close” don’t realize how many great and wonderful stories they are killing, or that only through knowing him do you realize that “the other guy” is also “your guy”.

6

(I added the bolding)

The fact that it was premeditated is important. Individuals can go crazy and commit a crime of passion. Even a million individuals can “go crazy” and murder for 100 days. It is horrible, but it is totally different than the premeditated, highly organized murder of the Nazis.

When cool-headed engineers draw up blueprints for gas chambers, with mathematical calculations and precise measurements, you are not talking about a crime of passion or mob psychology. The Hutus lost all control of themselves and their society, and went on an undefined and illogical rampage. The Nazis maintained control of themselves and their society, and went on a very well-defined and logically planned rampage.

We hold people( and countries) responsible for their actions, and the more carefully they plan their actions , the more we demand responsibilty. The evil of the Nazis was unique, because it was so carefully planned.

We should remember other mass murders…But the Nazis remain unique in history, and the word “holocaust” should be a label used separately, to distinguish the evil of Auschwitz from other human tragedies.

7

I also think there’s something unique in the way the Nazis viewed the Jews, that is, casting them as the enemy, the scapegoat, the other. I don’t know much about Nazi anti-Gypsy or anti-gay propagandizing, but a central component of the Nazi philosophy was the evil corruption of Jews, and their betrayal of Germany, particularly during WWI. That, combined with the systematic nature of the genocide and the disparity in numbers, is what makes The Holocaust seem like a particularly Jewish, though not uniquely Jewish, tragedy.

Sure there were, for instance, Catholics killed in the Holocaust. But the objective of the Holocaust was not to leave the European continent KatholicFrei.
I don’t know enough about the treatment of Gypsies to be able to meaningfully comment on the extent to which their plight was really comparable to the Jews.

8

I think it is arguable that the terror and mass murders of the Stalinist regime were equally carefully planned.

By the way, after reading the OP, I picked up a copy of Rummel’s Lethal Politics, about the history of mass murders in the Soviet Union from the Bolshevik revolution to the Cold War period. I don’t know about his statistics (except that they also struck me as very high) but he sure has an odd way of interpreting them. For example, he was comparing deaths from different causes during the earlier part of the century, and somehow concluded that because more people were murdered by the government than died climbing mountains, that it was “safer” to climb mountains…which makes no sense at all, since mountain climbers were a (presumably) small subset of the total population. He pulled a couple other strange interpretations, too.

But anyway, regardless of the exact numbers, sources seem to agree that the mass killings and starvation were deliberate plans of Stalin.

9

WpgTriniman, if you have been to the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., then you are aware that the museum does not focus only on the Jews, but on all of the victims of that particular Holocaust.

Excerpt from the mission statement:

I also recall that it pays tribute to those who worked in the resistance.

The United States Holocaust Museum website continues to call attention to the evils of genocide wherever they exist.

Genocide Watch: Sudan

Genocide Watch: Chechnya

If you think that the Holocaust in Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s has gotten too much attention, then that just means it is finally getting the attention it deserves. It was not openly discussed when I was in high school. (I graduated in 1961.) We didn’t fully understand the fate of Anne Frank and her family. I was a college student before I read a book called I Cannot Forgive and learned of how bad the atrocities really were. Not even my world history class went into any depth.

Because of it, I am more aware of the other killing fields and atrocities, not less.

Posted in memory of the White Rose, Munich, 1945

10

There are two distinguishing things that make The Holocaust so horrible:
(1) The systematic, technological, premeditated nature
(2) The fact that the Jewish victims were chosen for purely racial reasons

Even if Stalin came close on (1), which I don’t think he did, he’s nowhere near as bad on (2). I mean, sure, if you kill someone because you’re paranoid and think they’re going to rebel against you, they’re just as dead, but that doesn’t seem to me to be as horrifying and disturbing as killing someone just because of their ethnicity. Killing your enemies is not necessarily an irrational act, although the way Stalin killed HIS enemies certainly was.

11

As Zoe points out, it is a mistake to think that the Holocaust Museum concentrates only on the Jewish victims of the Nazis. It ably chronicles the atrocities against Gypsies, Homosexuals, the disabled and others. Also it does have special events dedicated to genocide qround the world. I’ve attended talks there on Rwanda and Darfur.

12

I would also add the historic racism faced by Jews throughout history, especially in Europe, prior to WWII and not just in Nazi Germany is a large factor in the amount of recognition the Holocaust gets. It is almost as if the world is atoning not just for Nazi atrocities but others throughout history against the Jews.

13

I would comment on the second, and add a third.

The comment on the second:

This means that the victims included children, no matter the age.

The third distinguishing thing I would add:

(3) The victims were brought into the killing centers from wherever in Europe the Nazis controlled. So it wasn’t like they were trying to get rid of what they perceived to be a local problem; they wanted to eliminate all Jews everywhere in the world.

Ed

14

These are all good points, but points (1) and (3) apply equally to homosexuals, communists, and other “undesirables”, and point (2) also applies to (non-jewish) Slavs, who in purely numerical terms were the biggest victims.

Maybe a 4th point is that in percentage terms Jews suffered the most. Wikipedia suggests that 60% of Europe’s Jews were killed during the holocaust, where even if we accept that 10 to 20 million Slavs were killed it would still be less than 10% of all Slavs.

I believe cold war spin may have played a part here too - the fragile alliance with east block countries came to an end, so they were stripped of their “victim status”. The holocaust is described pretty differently by Russians for example.

Although I’ve heard a lot of discussion of this question, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard a really satisfactory answer. I suppose it’s a combination of all these things.

15

Interesting. Would you care to give a brief explanation as to how the Russian view of the Holocaust differs from the Western view?

16

Incidentally, Jehovah’s witnesses, who refused to say Heil Hitler, serve in the Nazi army, or participate in any demonstration of Nazi pride, were also targeted in the Holocaust.

It’s important to note the damage as a matter of pure percentage. If, in fact, the OP’s numbers are correct, then the 65,701,000 killed by Communist China is about 5% of China’s 1.3 billion person population. About 1/3 of Europe’s jews were killed in the Holocaust.

17

I haven’t been to the Holocaust Museum yet, so I can’t comment on how it portrays the fate of non-Jewish victims. However, the Holocaust Museum, however wonderful a job they do, is but one small source of information, and one which is not directly accessible to the vast majority of the general public in the U.S., let alone the rest of the world.

Here in Illinois, there is a unit on the Holocaust required in the state public school curriculum (though in Jewish Sunday school, even Reform Jewish Sunday school, I got a lot more exposure than most people to Holocaust-related issues). Every year, we studied it in history class, and in high school we had annual all-school assemblies in the auditorium, during which a local survivor would come speak to us about his/her experiences. I don’t recall one specific mention of a non-Jewish victim (or survivor, for that matter), other than just a mention in passing that “oh yeah, non-Jews died, too.” The IL high school history curriculum back then didn’t even mention that the USSR fought in WWII; anything east of Germany practically might as well not have existed.

18

IMHO,there are several reasons why the Holocaust (or Shoah if you prefer) is viewed differently. I’ll list them here, no particular order of signigance.

The first one, which has been mentioned here, has largely to do with where it happened. Prior to Hitler becoming Chancellor, Germany was in the throws of the Great Depression but it was still not “third” or “second” world (I know these terms are not PC). It’s “easy” to dismiss mass genocidal actions in Africa and other countries by using the excuse that they didn’t have the advantage of being a fully developed country. A lot of racism plays into this, IMHO. Germany was supposed to be “better” than that. It shocked the world because it was tragedy made visable on a massive scale when the immensity of the Shoah finally came to light.

Second, and tying into the first, survivors of the camps came away from their experience into a world that would have rather just ignored that such a thing had ever happened. Certainly, the world knew some of what had happened, but the magnitude was not made clear. Add to that the fact that many of the places where the Holocaust took place fell under Communist governments, and therefor the records and archeological evidence wasn’t studied immediatly. In the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, scholars began studying the Holocaust, survivors began writing and talking and it was brought forth into the public concious to a level not before seen with genocides. The accesibility of information about the attrocity has a lot to do with the distinct status afforded.

Third, as was mentioned here, the extent of the bureaucratic maneuverings that were involved in the implementation of the genocide were abnormal. At certain points in the Nazi Third Reich, multiple levels of government were involved in the orchestration of displacement and genocide. The Holocaust can, by no means, be called spontaneous. However, a key argument here amoungst historians relates to whether the genocide was intended from the start or whether it was the outcome of a misguided “resettlement” strategy.

Fourth, our society, (blanket term Western Civilization) has a more intimate familiarity with Judaism and Jews than we do with other genocide targeted ethnic groups. We have a familiar and long standing history of persecution and pogram, Jews as scapegoats and as a maligned people is nothing new. So, hated or not, the victim was familiar to us.

Fifth, the numbers are mindbloggling in terms of the ethnic group. This isn’t the members of a country that were killed, they were a small minority spread across several countries. And, in many instances, entire communities and families were killed. The numbers shock us.

Finally, I just want to say that giving distinction to the Holocaust amoungst genocides doesn’t necessarily set up a competition. I doubt anyone is competeing for who has the worst tragedy. Rather, I think it is the best interest of everyone to understand the varied nuances of genocide. Once you start comparing everything to the Holocaust, you lose that distinction and thus cheapen the experiences of both parties involved.

IMHO, mind you.

  • Rebekkah
19

Additionally, there are no groups that I am aware of that make it a point to deny any of the tragedies listed in the OP, while there are Holocaust deniers, regardless of how small a number they are. Whenever anyone tries to deny an evil, it’s important to commemorate it.

20

Actually, it appears to be near-universal among Turks to deny that the Armenian and Greek massacres ever happened. The Turkish government still pitches a fit every time any organization or government even contemplates officially recognizing it.