Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Why was the Holocaust different?
Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been to media training, and he no longer is willing to say that the Holocaust did not happen, or that it is a myth. His new strategy is to wonder in a faux jovial, inquisitive way why the West makes a bigger deal out of the deaths of six million Jews than the other 54 million or so people who perished violently during World War II. Mark Bowden, author of the excellent Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam
It is a tricky business, rating the moral depredations of the human species, because just when you have settled on the worst, somebody somewhere achieves a new low. In the 20th century alone, communism and its variants in the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia have been responsible for the slow and rapid execution of millions. Millions more perished in the saturation bombing campaigns and the atom bomb blasts of World War II. Conflict and murderously misguided idealism were big players in the atrocity game, and accounted for the deaths of many times more innocents than Adolf Hitler and his Final Solution.
The Holocaust haunts us more than these others for a good reason. The Final Solution was the deliberate act of a government to exterminate a portion of its own people. It employed the resources of the state--its policy makers, planners, intellectuals, legal system, police and military, industry, transportation system and to a large extent its people--to single out a particular group of citizens, systematically demonize and isolate them, and then count them, label them, strip them of everything, round them up, ship them to concentration camps, kill them and incinerate them. It attempted to squeeze some last value out of the most fit among those doomed, by employing them as slave labor or subjecting them to medical experimentation before killing them, and even then looked for ways to make saleable products out of their remains.
This horror began in peacetime, so the nation was not lashing out in self-defense, nor was it being threatened in any concrete way. In the early 1930s, when the state-driven process of isolating and demonizing Jews began, Germany had rebuilt itself after its defeat in World War I, and was the most powerful nation on the European continent. Indeed, it would soon sweep across its borders and conquer every country within its reach. Its science, medical and technological prowess were the envy of the world.
The Holocaust disturbs us so deeply because it demonstrates that none of the things we associate with the advancement of civilization--peace, prosperity, industrialization, education, technological achievement--free us from the dark side of the human soul. Just as there is evil in the heart of every man, there is evil at the heart of even the most "civilized" human society. It is a humbling recognition. Man and society are both capable of the most appallingly depraved behavior. Only in the case of society, it occurs on an industrial scale.
The lives lost in the firebombing of Dresden or the nuclear flash over Hiroshima are no less significant, and the military choices that brought about those deaths remain profoundly disturbing, but they at least took place in the context of war. Whole societies were caught up in a life-or-death struggle.
What the Holocaust demonstrates is the danger of a one-party state. It shows what can happen when a group of true believers, convinced of the superiority of their own ideas, have unchecked power. They are then free to rewrite history to suit their political ends, and crush those who disagree or protest . . . or who worship God in a different way.
It is a grave mistake to think that the Holocaust was in some regard deviant. In fact, it happened very shortly, in historical terms, after we had developed the technology that made it possible. There was nothing in the genes of the Germans that made them different. Most humans, under the right conditions, will slaughter the "other," often at great peril to themselves. What is it about Iran -- or other parts of the Muslim Middle East, for that matter -- that leads us to believe that it cannot happen again?
5 Comments:
By 
, at
Wed Oct 04, 10:11:00 AM:
Who is the blame for the HOLACAST? well BLAME IT ON CHARLES DARWIN becuase the nazis used evolution to try and claim that the jews were lower on the evolutionay ladder while the arians were evolved to the very top
By , at
Wed Oct 04, 10:46:00 AM:
BOP: I certainly hope that was intended as sarcasm.
TH: It's interesting, and I think valid, to distinguish between the holocaust (which as you noted used the full resources of the state) and something like the Rwandan or Sudan genocides where one group slaughters another while the government stands by and does nothing.
When could it happen again? Never again, unless we permit it.
By 
Sissy Willis, at
Wed Oct 04, 01:17:00 PM:
Not genes/nature, but more likely childrearing/nurturing practices lie behind a culture's likelihood of spiraling down into a pit of homicidal dysfunction:
Whatever happens, we are winning
By Cardinalpark, at
Wed Oct 04, 02:50:00 PM:
The application of modern industrial production techniques to scale the barbaric act of genocide was and still is unprecedented.
It boggles the mind still.
By , at
Thu Oct 05, 12:41:00 AM:
I agree that the Holocaust was something in an entirely different class than anything else.
As somebody mentioned, the Rwandan and Sudani genocides, while state organized, are a bit different. The Nazis created a whole philosophy to dehumanize the Jews. They created a whole "industry" to kill them. And finally, the Nazis did something that I suspect they did alone in the world. They went after not only their own Jews but also after Jews in other countries. Did the Rwandans or the Sudanis do the same? Or did anybody else do anything similar?
Vilmos
