# 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:** 17\ **Page:** 4
**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, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/61 "2016-04-30T15:16:23Z")
> [@NAF1138](#): > > Urbanredneck’s (implied) words not mine. Sorry, hadn’t had my coffee yet. ---
**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, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/62 "2016-04-30T15:31:49Z")
> [@andros](#): > > Sorry, hadn’t had my coffee yet. It’s ok. I realized that if you hadn’t remembered my earlier post then that post probably didn’t convey what I meant it to. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 7:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/63 "2016-04-30T19:17:50Z")
> [@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. Yes it does. Masses of people have died throughout history, in wars, plagues and famines. What was new about the Holocaust was the intention of cultural murder which was not true in Russia or China. And considering the Holocaust the next level of horror in no way downplays the horror of the Great Leap Forward. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/64 "2016-04-30T19:25:11Z")
> [@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. However European culture had more or less moved beyond this by the 1930s - or so they thought. The reversion to savagery was almost worse than the continuation of savagery. There is another factor - in China and Russia there was a continuity of power, and even if Mao and Stalin were dead a lot of the people who committed the crimes were still in their positions. In Germany there was a lot more prosecution of lower level killers and a rejection of the political philosophy behind it. The picture of Mao still stands, while Hitler’s place of death in Berlin is unmarked. ---
**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, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/65 "2016-04-30T19:27:31Z")
> [@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? > > 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. Look, I’m not slamming Jews and I’m sorry if it sounds that way. ---
**Author:** ![mr\_wolf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5e9695/32.png) [@mr\_wolf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mr_wolf)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 9:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/66 "2016-04-30T21:15:56Z")
> [@NAF1138](#): > > And it happened I a powerhouse country that was seemingly safe and even pretty accepting. What if The UK suddenly decided to conquer Europe tomorrow. No, that’s not a good enough analog. Maybe what if the Sweden suddenly started conquering Europe and committing mass atrocities. I read this passage a few times to try to discover what is implied but I need help. Did you mean that because Germany flipped, Sweden’s going berserk would be similarly surprising, but the UK not so much? I’m not trying to be confrontational, just genuinely interested on how different the UK and Sweden are generally perceived nowadays. ---
**Author:** ![Hector\_St\_Clare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2016, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/67 "2016-04-30T21:52:06Z")
> [@Zeke\_N.Destroi](#): > > As to your first point, so it is the motivation not the end result that matters most? > > As to your second point, I’m pretty sure there are a fair number of Americans who lost a family member or three due to Mao and Stalin. Unless you lack any meaningful number of Slavs and Chinese.? America has a ton of Slavs, but most of their families immigrated prior to 1925 or so, and therefore didn’t have any personal experience with Stalin. ---
**Author:** ![Latro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/a87d85/32.png) [@Latro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Latro)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2016, 7:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/68 "2016-05-01T07:37:40Z")
> [@UltraVires](#): > > 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. > [@bump](#): > > 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. To add to the fear of ‘It could happen here’ was that all of this wasn’t just done a small group of German black clad murderers but that the civilian populations helped. Even in the occupied countries. You had the railways cooperating, the local police, the civil services and enough ordinary people were willing to denounce Jews. We can more easily imagine our own civil institutions just doing as they are told and process the necessary forms. This realisation was one of the driving forces behind the post war anti-authoritarian movements/sentiments. In Europe at least. ---
**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:** [May 1, 2016, 7:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/69 "2016-05-01T07:39:16Z")
> [@Urbanredneck](#): > > Look, I’m not slamming Jews and I’m sorry if it sounds that way. Then answer my questions. ---
**Author:** ![CCitizen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/4af34b/32.png) [@CCitizen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CCitizen)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2016, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/70 "2016-05-01T15:52:14Z")
> [@Zeke\_N.Destroi](#): > > [… Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag [during the] Stalinist period is likely between two million and three million. The Great Terror and other shooting actions killed no more than a million people, probably a bit fewer. The largest human catastrophe of Stalinism was the famine of 1930–1933, in which more than five million people died.](http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/03/10/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more/) So roughly 9 million. A catastrophe was not a genocide. The Holocaust was the most massive genocide since Mongolian Conquests. ---
**Author:** ![Velocity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/velocity/32/18006_2.png) [@Velocity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Velocity)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2016, 9:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/71 "2016-05-01T21:48:37Z")
I don’t think \*\*Urbanredneck \*\*is being anti-Semitic. I think what he is saying is that Jews are and have been good at getting their message heard. Nothing wrong with that. The Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks, on the other hand, for instance, has a much harder time getting attention. ---
**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:** [May 1, 2016, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/72 "2016-05-01T23:05:22Z")
> [@Velocity](#): > > I don’t think \*\*Urbanredneck \*\*is being anti-Semitic. I think what he is saying is that Jews are and have been good at getting their message heard. Nothing wrong with that. The Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turks, on the other hand, for instance, has a much harder time getting attention. No one said Urbanredneck was being antisemitic. Just that implying that “Jews control the media” or even that “Jews have a lot of pull in the media” is, well… Its probably factual that lots of African Americans enjoy fried chicken. You probably want to avoid brining it up as an argument when trying not to look racist. Unless you can prove that Jews actually hold more influence over the media than other ethnic groups AND that they are actively using that influence to bring attention to Jewish issue instead of non Jewish ones, this narrative gets troubling quickly. You may say that isn’t fair. I’m sorry that thousands of years of oppression of my people raises the burden of proof to a higher standard that average if you want to sidle up to a pernicious stereotype. ---
**Author:** ![clairobscur](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/839c29/32.png) [@clairobscur](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/clairobscur)\ **Post date:** [May 1, 2016, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/73 "2016-05-01T23:10:32Z")
> [@CCitizen](#): > > A catastrophe was not a genocide. The famine he was refering to wasn’t an accidental catastrophe. It was pretty much deliberatly created. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2016, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/74 "2016-05-02T00:59:30Z")
> [@NAF1138](#): > > No one said Urbanredneck was being antisemitic. Just that implying that “Jews control the media” or even that “Jews have a lot of pull in the media” is, well… Its probably factual that lots of African Americans enjoy fried chicken. You probably want to avoid brining it up as an argument when trying not to look racist. Unless you can prove that Jews actually hold more influence over the media than other ethnic groups AND that they are actively using that influence to bring attention to Jewish issue instead of non Jewish ones, this narrative gets troubling quickly. > > You may say that isn’t fair. I’m sorry that thousands of years of oppression of my people raises the burden of proof to a higher standard that average if you want to sidle up to a pernicious stereotype. And the Jewish movie people were petrified about being seen as too Jewish. Not a lot of movies about the endemic anti-Semitism of the pre-war years. Didn’t matter how famous you were. Groucho, excluded from a country club, famously said that maybe his daughter, who was half Jewish, could go into the pool up to her waist. ---
**Author:** ![Enola\_Gay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/3ab097/32.png) [@Enola\_Gay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Enola_Gay)\ **Post date:** [May 2, 2016, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/75 "2016-05-02T04:36:46Z")
In addition to the reasons others have pointed out: Deliberate murder + Industrialized + Western victims & perpetrators + Our relationship w Israel + If it could happen there, it could happen here + Photographs of the horror & suffering + Many of our fellow Americans are survivors or descendants of survivors + The victors write the history books… IME of American education, much more attention was paid to the Holocaust than any other genocide as the OP indicated. In addition to the reasons mentioned above, I think the US has a lot of pride that we were instrumental in stopping this particular genocide. Go us! Let’s make sure that every American school child knows just how awesome we are. ---
**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:** [May 2, 2016, 11:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/76 "2016-05-02T11:29:41Z")
> [@mr\_wolf](#): > > I read this passage a few times to try to discover what is implied but I need help. Did you mean that because Germany flipped, Sweden’s going berserk would be similarly surprising, but the UK not so much? I’m not trying to be confrontational, just genuinely interested on how different the UK and Sweden are generally perceived nowadays. Yeah my point was that the UK would be very surprising but not surprising enough. It has its own issues what with the troubles and all that. So as shocking as it would be if the UK turned homicidal we needed to pick a different country that is westernized and know for being liberal and accepting, because it was one step further along the path in terms of shock than the UK. ---
**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:** [May 2, 2016, 11:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395/77 "2016-05-02T11:36:34Z")
> [@Enola\_Gay](#): > > IME of American education, much more attention was paid to the Holocaust than any other genocide as the OP indicated. In addition to the reasons mentioned above, I think the US has a lot of pride that we were instrumental in stopping this particular genocide. Go us! Let’s make sure that every American school child knows just how awesome we are. I think this is probably pretty accurate. I remember passover dinners from my childhood where my grandfather would invite over friends who had grown up in the USSR and escaped in the 70s or 80s. Every year the topic of WWII would come up and every year the Russian guests would take the position that the US was hardly involved I the war and are overly congratulatory about their involvement, while the American grown ups would take the position that we would all be speaking German now if not for the intervention of the United States. The reality was a lot more nuanced than that, but my guess is that cold war propaganda had a little to do with these extreme attitudes as well. Building up American accomplishments in the war was very important in those early cold war days. I hadn’t thought of that until just now. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-so-special-about-the-holocaust/753395.md?page=3)