Perhaps because winners write history. Hitler lost, Stalin won.
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, though certainly there have been plenty of other horrible mass killings that rival it in scale as you note.
The Jews get singled out, because they were the primary targets. I’m half-Serb with family lines tracing back to southern Croatia. Most of said lines were wiped out in WW II by the Ustaše. But bad as the Croatian Serbs in particular had it, the Jews definitely took it on the chin harder. If we accept the 11 million and six million figures, then Jewish victims of genocide outnumbered all other groups combined, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the pre-war populations. Reason enough or them to become the symbol of the devastation of the Holocaust - they suffered by far the most.
It is the motivation for doing it which is nothing more than being a member of a particular group.
Plus we tend to believe wiping out a particular thing is bad in and of itself. Akin to making a species go extinct. We may catch millions of fish but over-fishing to the point of extinction is a bad thing. Analogous to killing millions of people in war as opposed to exterminating Armenians or Jews.
This.
What about America’s treatment of the natives? You could argue that disease wiped out more natives than bullets or policies ever did. You could argue that the official policy of the US was never genocide vs. the natives. But you could also make the case that plenty of influential Americans were basically pursuing a policy of genocide. Andrew Jackson comes to mind (though I think we also have to acknowledge that he is an American hero, too. I mean, he still is, right?)
I realize it wasn’t an industrialized effort, but geez, there certainly used to be a lot more natives in these parts than there are today. If not genocide, I don’t know how else you’d describe the effect. And IIRC, Hitler admired America, for this and also for its eugenicist policies. Scary that it could happen here? Um, scary that it did happen here, and that some found it inspiring.
The Chinese government killed tens of millions of people through gross incompetence, but it didn’t want to. After seeing what they had done, their response was not going to be “Awesome! Who should we kill next?”
The world has witnessed the Holocaust more than any other similar event. Picture after picture of humans starving to death, skin and bones, hopelessly staring into the camera. Humans standing in line for their final shower. Bodies piled on top of bodies in ditches dug in some nameless location. Trains loaded with victims being shuttled off to either work or starve to death, or be poisoned. Through those pictures one can feel their hopelessness, their suffering and agony. One can feel an anger at those who allowed this to happen to so many innocent people.
Pretty hard to get those images out of your head once you’ve seen them.
IMHO, that’s why the Holocaust tops the list of human on human atrocities.
What is so special about the enslavement of black people in the United States?
After all, slavery has existed in myriad cultures for thousands of years, under even crueler conditions.
There are about 30 million people living in slavery in the world right now.
But you don’t hear about these other slaves during Black History Month.
So what is so special about the American experience?
Does anyone see how bogus and insulting such comparisons are, seeing that anyone who wants to highlight modern or other instances of slavery is free to do so without denigrating the African-American experience?
And what of paragraphs starved for words, condemned to exist as a single sentence?
What don’t people discuss this travesty?
Thank you for your time.
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.
I know you say later that you aren’t intending to say anything negative about “the Jews in any way”, but this section of your post filled me with icy cold terror. I’m not exaggerating. It was fleeting, but it was real.
Beyond the fact that it was a calculated, intentional, mechanized attempt to kill an entire people. It was also the ghettos, the transformation of the Jewish people into not only a group of animals to be purged but a scapegoat upon which to lay all blame. 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. It was shocking.
Also, there aren’t that many people, on a world stage, who still think that the Chinese labor force or that Russian peasants, or Rwandans, or the Sudanese or Armenians are a powerful group capable of creating mass propaganda and maybe should be watched a little. Just in case. Which, whatever your intention, is what your quote above suggests to me, as one of “The Jews”.
I’m not saying that antisemitism fuled your post. I don’t even want to imply it or disparage you in any way. But you can see, maybe, why it frightened me.
For me, it’s because it was industrialised and deliberate, and that’s about it.
A netter example would be the Armenian Genocide. The world didn’t care. In a speech to military leaders just before the invasion of the USSR, he used the example of the Armenian Genocide to suggest that the world wouldn’t care about the fate of the Jews.
Did the Nazis aim to kill all the Jews in the world, or just those in Germany? I haven’t any idea really.
All the Jews in every country they conquered.
You are probably right that I was “taught” about the Great Leap Forward in high school. Most of my history classes amounted to rapidly memorizing dates and names, regurgitatIing them for the tests and then quickly forgetting them so I could cram the next chapter. History was always the worst offender of that cycle.
Which is why we need better ways to learn history. (Like musicals!)
Those who fail to learn from the past . . .
This is my answer too. Patton said “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” Hitler was a loser, so we really hate him. Mao and Stalin, they won, so we hate them less.
Oh, I don’t think it’s that high. Americans don’t like Europe that much. It’s probably more like 10-1. And it probably varies widely by which American you’re talking to. Some wouldn’t mind seeing Trump supporters killed, blacks, gays, Tea Partiers, etc. Tribalism is alive and well in America.
Well, yeah. The Maoist and Stalinist purges weren’t genocide, just a lot of people who got killed as sort of collateral damage. The Great Leap Forward’s deaths were mostly due to a famine that was caused/exacerbated by stupidity based on ideological considerations, like Lysenkoism and ignorance of science. In other words, they didn’t set out to kill tens of millions via famine, but did anyway, because they were ignorant of science, and did a bunch of other dumb things. The Soviet Famine of 1930-1933 was similar, in that the famine was caused/exacerbated by stupid-ass socialist policies. But in neither case was the famine the goal or the point of the policies.
The Holocaust, on the other hand, was literally the killing of a people organized as an industrial process on a colossal scale. The killing of the Jews (and others) was the entire point of the process, not a side-effect or “fortuitous” (from the perspective of the Maoists or Stalinists) unforeseen consequence.
That’s why people consider the Holocaust to be “special”, as you put it.
Now as to why the world stood by in the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides; I don’t know. I think it showed a certain degree of moral cowardice on the part of the Western leaders, especially Bill Clinton. He could have singlehandedly ended that whole business easily with paratroopers or Marines or any other rapid-reaction forces in his capacity as President, but chose to remain passive. The same goes for the European leaders as well, although I think considering the capabilities of the US military, Clinton was the best positioned to do something in a rapid manner.
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.