# What Is So Special About The Holocaust? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [April 29, 2016, 2:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395 "2016-04-29T02:41:21Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![NAF1138](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naf1138/32/3245_2.png) [@NAF1138](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NAF1138)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2016, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/41 "2016-04-29T16:00:49Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > In Europe, that has never been particularly difficult. The Holocaust wasn’t much of an aberration; it was simply someone deciding to get serious about policies and practices that had been intermittently applied for centuries. And maybe that’s part of why it was so horrible? A line that had been held for decades was finally crossed? I don’t know. Maybe Europe thought it was better than that and what Germany did just shone a light on how close everyone was to crossing that line. ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Tildrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e95f7d/32.png) [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2016, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/42 "2016-04-29T18:18:28Z")
> [@Whack-a-Mole](#): > > Also, I would not characterize what Stalin or Mao did as genocide which is what the Holocaust was very explicitly trying to do. > > Staggering amounts of people died due to them but genocide is not about raw numbers. It is about eliminating a particular ethnic group. Well, there is ongoing debate as to whether the Holodomor was deliberate genocide, but the liquidation of the kulaks was an express policy designed to wipe out an entire social class. The Great Leap Forward was not deliberate genocide, but I think it’s well accepted that Chinese leadership knew about the ongoing famine and chose to continue to sacrifice millions of peasants to that policy. > [@Velocity](#): > > Perhaps because winners write history. Hitler lost, Stalin won. Perhaps more to the point, there was an accounting after Hitler, legitimate trials, and a deliberate policy of denazification. No such similar opportunity presented itself after Stalin or Mao, because their successors, despite making a show of denouncing past crimes or excesses, were still fully bought in to the same system. One still sees echoes of this effect more generally, in that Communist imagery remains socially acceptable in a way that Nazi imagery does not. I’d be surprised to find a swastika t-shirt on Amazon, for instance, but the hammer and sickle is [available](http://www.amazon.com/T-shirt-Hammer-Sickle-Adult-Soviet/dp/B004NQSXD8). ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2016, 6:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/43 "2016-04-29T18:21:37Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > In Europe, that has never been particularly difficult. The Holocaust wasn’t much of an aberration; it was simply someone deciding to get serious about policies and practices that had been intermittently applied for centuries. I think what made it so horrible wasn’t the violent anti-Semitism; like you say that had been there for centuries. What made it so horrible is that it was treated like an industrial production problem to be solved in a cold and dispassionate way. That’s what’s so chilling; there’s something drastically, chillingly evil about a sovereign state’s industrial might being coldly geared toward wholesale eradication of a particular group of people. A pogrom perpetuated by a bunch of illiterate and ignorant peasants taken up with dumb-ass religious ideas who perpetuate a pogrom is still horrible, but somehow less impersonally, mathematically, industrially evil than the Holocaust. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2016, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/44 "2016-04-29T18:31:05Z")
Enacting policies that have the deliberate effect of starving millions of peasants to death = horrible but boring. Using sinisterly modern methods to capture every last man, woman and child of a disfavoured group, and then send them off to massive industrial camps cunningly designed to murder people on a vast scale and process their remains for industrial use = horrible but memorable. Also, one of those two is more relatable to Western audiences. We don’t really have an exploited agricultural peasantry here, so anti-peasant policies designed to use starvation as a weapon simply isn’t an option. Similarly, when people think of the Holocaust they always think of the Death Camps. But just as many died in far more “traditional” ways - shot by firing squads, starved to death, disease, etc. The reason: industrial death camps are very memorable. The Nazis did everything they could to make themselves appear memorably evil. Think of the Nazi SS uniform - complete with death’s head, lighting-bolt SS runes, and natty in Black. Compare with a Maoist outfit. Which makes the better emblem of pure evil? ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2016, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/45 "2016-04-29T20:21:02Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > Because you are seeking to destroy an entire way of life, an entire way of looking at the world, a source of human cultural experience. And the people are being wiped out merely for their identity, for merely being members of a group. > > Wiping out political opponents is not as horrific. It doesn’t make you feel as helpless. It doesn’t threaten to wipe out the memory of your identity group from existence. And it also seems to have at least some connection to rational decision making. Sure, it’s evil, but genocide is a purer kind of evil. Still not seeing the difference. People are people. If you kill them for no other reason than you want them dead, it’s all the same. Every individual person has his own way of life. Having said that, I think that the modern definition of “genocide” is such that it would be near impossible to kill 6M people and NOT have it be labeled “genocide”. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2016, 8:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/46 "2016-04-29T20:25:20Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > Still not seeing the difference. People are people. If you kill them for no other reason than you want them dead, it’s all the same. Every individual person has his own way of life. People are people but not every group of people is a culture. Wiping out a culture is a separate crime from just adding up the people who are killed. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2016, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/47 "2016-04-29T21:00:57Z")
Many factors: 1. The German people are ethnically similar to the majority of the U.S. population and were part of a democratic government, much like us. In less than ten years they were killing millions of innocents. It is easy to say that we aren’t like those people in Rwanda, but it is an eye opener when Germans do it. 2. They were technologically and scientifically advanced and carried out the mass murder with cruel precision. They didn’t just go around killing Jews. They separated them and if a person was able-bodied, they worked them almost to death and then killed them. Such callousness goes beyond “mere” killing. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2016, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/48 "2016-04-29T21:21:46Z")
> [@Acsenray](#): > > People are people but not every group of people is a culture. Wiping out a culture is a separate crime from just adding up the people who are killed. You’re saying it’s a separate crime. I’m saying culture shmulture. Killing 6M people is not any less worse because they don’t represent a culture. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2016, 9:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/49 "2016-04-29T21:34:43Z")
> [@John\_Mace](#): > > You’re saying it’s a separate crime. I’m saying culture shmulture. Killing 6M people is not any less worse because they don’t represent a culture. I say it is. Wiping out all the Brobdignagians in the world because you don’t want Brobdignagians to exist is worse than killing the same number of assorted people only because they stand between you and your material goals, because it’s two (collective) crimes against humanity. Wiping out Brobdignagians completely robs human culture itself of something that killing the same number of random people does not. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/50 "2016-04-30T01:12:12Z")
> [@Tamerlane](#): > > Partially, not entirely. The horror of it was the systematic attempt to exterminate an entire ethnicity on an industrial scale and with a maximum of efficiency. Arguably there really hasn’t been anything else _quite_ like it, Yes, but every mass murder isn’t quite like any other. The already mentioned Rwandan genocide was peculiarly horryfying in its own ways, for instance. Plus it showed what is the real worth of sentences like “never again”. Call me a cynic. ---
**Author:** ![Dinsdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/97f17d/32.png) [@Dinsdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dinsdale)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 1:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/51 "2016-04-30T01:21:42Z")
I used to feel similarly to what the OP expresses. Then, in a thread here, someone said something like, maybe it isn’t all that special compared to other genocides, but it WAS horrible and IS worth remembering. If you want to drum up attention for some other genocide, knock yourself out. Kinda made sense to me. Maybe the issue isn’t that we are too concerned with the holocaust, but that we aren’t sufficiently concerned with all the other horrific acts of inhumanity. The other guy said it a lot better than I am… ---
**Author:** ![Bookkeeper](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bookkeeper/32/281_2.png) [@Bookkeeper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bookkeeper)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/52 "2016-04-30T02:40:50Z")
Part of the reason is that we are horrified that the Holocaust could have been so easily committed by People Like Us. And that the victims were also People Like Us. ---
**Author:** ![erocked](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f08c70/32.png) [@erocked](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/erocked)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 8:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/53 "2016-04-30T08:31:43Z")
Apparently not even the young Chinese knew about the Great Leap Forward until [recently](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/05/after-50-years-of-silence-china-slowly-confronts-the-great-leap-forward/257797/). Apparently they’ve been taught in text books about the Great "natural disaster. " Meanwhile it’s illegal in Germany to [deny the Holocaust](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_against_Holocaust_denial). ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 11:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/54 "2016-04-30T11:14:36Z")
Well I guess I should say it. I think some of it has to do with many Jews being in the western media. Now dont say I’m into some conspiracy about a Jewish controlled media but you have to admit that many Jewish people do work in Hollywood and the media so yes, they would like to get the message of their people out. It happens. People closely connected to the media have more access to get their message out. The movie “The Killing fields” came out partly I guess because the western reporter involved in it who earned a major award and prize for writing about it. Now looking at Netflix and the different movies about it I think their has been a push for movies to cover other genocides like in Rwanda and the Congo. ---
**Author:** ![DaphneBlack](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/daphneblack/32/5389_2.png) [@DaphneBlack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DaphneBlack)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 11:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/55 "2016-04-30T11:51:13Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Well I guess I should say it. > > I think some of it has to do with many Jews being in the western media. > > Now dont say I’m into some conspiracy about a Jewish controlled media but you have to admit that many Jewish people do work in Hollywood and the media so yes, they would like to get the message of their people out. It happens. People closely connected to the media have more access to get their message out. The movie “The Killing fields” came out partly I guess because the western reporter involved in it who earned a major award and prize for writing about it. > > Now looking at Netflix and the different movies about it I think their has been a push for movies to cover other genocides like in Rwanda and the Congo. Oh for fuck’s sake. What, pray tell me, is the “message” of my people? And if there’s lots of Jews in the media, then shouldn’t they get credit for all the media coverage of all the other genocides too! How is this supposed to work? If you actually did any research about the role of Jews in Hollywood, you would see if anything a strong reluctance to focus on identifiably “Jewish” issues, especially around the time of WW2. I agree with the poster above who suggested that the horror of the Holocaust is that it happened in the West, amongst people generally thought of as civilized and advanced. Most other genocides occurred amongst the Other, or too long in the past. It kind of blows up cherished notions about how Western Civilization is superior and protects us from Base Desires. ---
**Author:** ![NAF1138](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naf1138/32/3245_2.png) [@NAF1138](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NAF1138)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 12:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/56 "2016-04-30T12:55:41Z")
> [@DaphneBlack](#): > > Oh for fuck’s sake. > > What, pray tell me, is the “message” of my people? And if there’s lots of Jews in the media, then shouldn’t they get credit for all the media coverage of all the other genocides too! How is this supposed to work? > . Yup, like I said earlier, flashes of ice cold terror. But hey, there isn’t a cabal or conspiracy. Just an overwhelming number of Jews in media. As for the rest of your post I am going to go with subtlety and hope it works. Here is a video of boyscouts singing a happy song. [![]( " - YouTube") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Mg6Gfh9Co) ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Tildrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e95f7d/32.png) [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/57 "2016-04-30T14:21:14Z")
There’s a lot of Chinese people in the Chinese media, and yet little discussion of the Great Leap Forward. The controlling-the-media theory is plainly insufficient. ---
**Author:** ![andros](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/e480ec/32.png) [@andros](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/andros)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/58 "2016-04-30T14:36:35Z")
> [@NAF1138](#): > > an overwhelming number of Jews in media “Overwhelming?” :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![NAF1138](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/naf1138/32/3245_2.png) [@NAF1138](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/NAF1138)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 2:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/59 "2016-04-30T14:37:10Z")
> [@andros](#): > > “Overwhelming?” :dubious: Urbanredneck’s (implied) words not mine. Did you watch the link of the kid who wants to make his country great again? It could never ever happen here. Nope. That’s why I shouldn’t feel the icy cold terror. And yet… Second edit: for clarity. I’m jewish and my grandfather survived Dachau. The rest of his family didn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/60 "2016-04-30T14:38:05Z")
> [@andros](#): > > “Overwhelming?” :dubious: One? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395.md?page=4)