Many Holocausts, One Holocaust

Meryl Yourish and Sasha Volokh are locked in a debate over whether the Holocaust was any worse than some of the other mass genocides in history. Volokh says the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews was morally equivalent to murdering 6 million people from different ethnic and social groups, no more and no less. Yourish, on the other hand, says the Holocaust was uniquely evil because, among other reasons, it was an attempt to exterminate a particualar group - the Jews - from the entire world, and because the Nazis had plenty of help from the other nations they had conquered.

I was thinking about this the other night, when I wrote the subject heading - "Denying Another Holocaust" - for this post. I have no qualms about using the word "holocaust" to describe what is happening in North Korea, especially in light of recent revelations that the North Korean gulag includes gas chambers and experiments on human beings. The word existed long before the Nazis came along, and current events in the DPRDC are so horrifying that I can think of few other words which appropriately describe them.

Nevertheless, I think Meryl's basic point is a sound one. Stalin and Mao each murdered even more people than the Nazis, but neither of them singled out a particular group to the extent that Hitler singled out the Jews. There have been other genocides in which a particular group was singled out - the Armenians in Turkey, the Tutsis in Rwanda, the Albanians in Serbia - but the oppressors never had plans to eliminate the "enemy" everywhere in the world, as the Nazis intended.

And the way the Holocaust was carried out makes it particularly horrifying. Most genocides have been almost spontaneous in nature, with people whipped into a frenzy and going out to kill the "enemy" with violent mobs. We saw that in Rwanda. With the Nazis, it's like the violent, angry mobs weren't enough to suit their purposes, and that's why they had to build an entire infrastructure, and set up a bureaucracy, to eliminate the Jews more effieciently. Real thought went into what the Nazis did, and that's uniquely horrifying.

There have been many holocausts in history, but only one Holocaust with a capital "H". Do you understand what I mean?

Posted by damian at February 6, 2004 07:28 AM