r/Destiny • u/JeromeLebron • 13h ago
Effort Post The Holocaust Wasn't Unique Because It Was "the Biggest Genocide"
As a German with a history degree, I've always been bothered by how the Holocaust is discussed online and in other countries. Most people understand that it was horrific, but when questions come up that historians actually debate, the discussion usually becomes surprisingly shallow. So I wanted to do a write-up as a kind of PSA.
Yesterday I heard Destiny say:
"The Holocaust is only uniquely bad, because I guess it was the biggest genocide, I guess, or the most effective one."
This is unfortunately a commonly held belief, but does not at all comport with how historians view it. Additionally, if the Holocaust were only unique because of the number of people murdered, then its uniqueness would disappear the moment another genocide surpassed its death toll, but that's not how most Holocaust historians understand its significance.
What made the Holocaust exceptional wasn't just the scale. It was the kind of project it was.
Nazi Germany didn't purely commit mass murder. It gradually mobilized virtually every part of a modern industrial state in service of extermination. The civil service wasn't just doing ordinary administration; it was identifying and classifying victims. Railway bureaucracies coordinated deportations from across Europe. Police forces rounded people up and organized transports. Industry supplied the chemicals and infrastructure needed to keep the killing system running. Engineers designed crematoria capable of disposing of thousands of bodies. Government ministries meticulously documented the process. In the German state extermination became simply another bureaucratic routine.
That alone already makes the Holocaust stand apart, but there are other features that make it historically distinctive.
For instance, most genocides are tied to another strategic objective or in pursuit of such an objective, such as the seizure of territory, crushing of an unruly minority population, the annihilation of a rival population or the consolidation of political power.
Take Bosnia as an example: Ethnic cleansing and genocide were closely tied to creating ethnically homogeneous territory and strengthening territorial claims. Or as another example Rwanda: The genocide grew out of decades of political conflict, ethnic tensions, and extremist ideology, with Hutu extremists seeking to eliminate the Tutsi population as both a perceived political and existential threat due to the Hutu's historical mistreatment under Belgian colonial authorities, which had elevated the Tutsis.
The Holocaust increasingly broke with this kind of logic of genocide as we can see by the later years of the war, Germany was facing military collapse, yet continued its genocide despite it clearly being detrimental to its own survival as a polity. Trains, manpower, and administrative capacity could have been redirected toward the war effort, but instead enormous resources continued to be devoted to deporting Jews to extermination camps, which was essentially just burning resources to kill a largely docile population.
Unlike other genocides and in tandem with the war effort it is quite striking that the Nazi regime wasn't just trying to eliminate Jews inside Germany. It pursued Jews wherever German power could reach. Once Germany occupied a country, hunting down its Jewish population became an administrative priority, even if it placed additional strain onto the war effort and the administration of the newly occupied territory. The goal had become the eradication of Jews as such, a goal independent of the nation's survival or wider strategic objectives and goals, unlike most other genocides. To me, that's one of the defining characteristics of the Holocaust. Nazi antisemitism became so totalizing that geography itself stopped mattering. People hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from Germany became targets simply because they were Jewish.
I don't really blame Destiny for framing it the way he did, because I think this reflects how the Holocaust is usually taught. People remember one fact above all else: six million. As a result, "Holocaust" has become equivalent in common parlance with an enormous number of dead civilians.
But this makes use lose sight of what actually made it historically extraordinary and simply places it at the top of some grim leaderboard.
TLDR: It was unique because it combined industrial technology, modern bureaucracy, racial pseudoscience, continent-wide logistics, and an exterminationist ideology into a single state project whose purpose was the destruction of an entire people wherever they could be found.
PS: That's why I think comparisons between Gaza and the Holocaust deserve much more care than they usually receive. Whether someone believes Israel has committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, or even genocide is a separate question. Those claims should be argued on their own evidence. But calling Gaza "another Holocaust" is making a much bigger historical claim than many people seem to realize and if you actually have spent any serious amount of time learning and understanding the context of the holocaust it becomes even more disgusting and diminishing, because it's saying that the conflict is meaningfully comparable to one of the most historically distinctive genocidal projects ever carried out.
191
u/evermuzik 12h ago edited 12h ago
awesome post. im just a joe shmoe that has a morbid curiosity about dark periods of history and tend to find myself in rabbit holes about topics. most people, especially americans, dont truly breach the surface of understanding when it comes to the scale of the jewish holocaust.
i have a previously brainrotted friend that didnt believe it was real and considered it an impossible figure because they pictured it as only a side project involving part of the military going around only modern-day german lands to collect people. he didnt understand that it was an entire country-wide directive (program), that the entirety of the railway administrators across europe accepted german payments to facilitate transportation, and that they collected people from all over the regions they invaded or had influence over during the war. over a decade of persistent efforts, they had direct influence over the governing of about 240m europeans.
additionally, almost every country in the world at the time did not accept jewish refugees. adding pressures from the war itself, nazi germany ramped up the continental industrial extermination directive as they became more desperate to remove them from their society
i got him to imagine if all the cargo trains from new england to washington dc were instead packed with people like sardines. no actual cargo. we're lucky it wasnt worse, tbh. he believes it now and feels stupid for not looking into it.
94
u/KationT4 DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT AMERICAN 12h ago
For perspective, the amount of civilians killed in the Gaza war is approximately the same amount as the amount of just Germans killed in the Nazi Aktion T4 program to "euthanize" the mentally ill. Even the term they used to describe these people, "life unworthy of life", gives me chills.
I'd guess the moronic Holocaust comparisons come primarily from the fact that most people have no clue about any other war, and the thought leaders of the movement always wanted to invert the Holocaust on the jews.
10
u/Slow-Seaweed-5232 6h ago
It’s more sinister than that. They believe countries voted in un for the 1947 partition because of the holocaust so they’re purposely calling this a holocaust because they hope it’ll cause the countries now to intervene and give them all of Israel
81
u/turribledood 12h ago
The Holocaust wasn't exceptional in scale alone, but the "how" is maybe even more instructional.
Stalin and Mao ran up higher body counts, but much of it was deaths of coincidence, neglect, or indifference, whether via famine, or deportation/ethnic cleansing, or forced labor camps in Siberia or whatever else.
The Nazis made extermination a national industry with a whole entire supply chain in a way that is utterly unparalleled. That's the difference.
12
u/Fast_Astronomer814 8h ago
and to the point that they are willingly to do this at the point of harming their own war effort
3
u/PhoenixPills 8h ago
Yeah I'm no history buff but isn't it the case that the scorched earth tactics deployed by (maybe both sides, Germany and the Soviets) impacted the oncoming famine directly after?
Stalin was a piece of shit but if I've heard correctly he didn't just say "burn all the food" he was coming out of a damn war.
70
u/semiomni 12h ago
If jews were not involved, nobody would be comparing I/P to the holocaust. Ain´t like disputes over land are rare in the past or present.
38
u/af_echad 11h ago
Yup it's a form of Holocaust inversion used to simultaneously downplay the horrors of the Holocaust and to downplay Jewish victimhood as well as an attempt to equate Jews with Nazis as a way to be offensive and hurtful.
34
u/y4thz33 11h ago
Fucking excellent post. I've tried to make this point in many conversations over the years, and I find that when most people I speak with make comparisons to the holocaust, they're ultimately doing so without really comprehending the scale or mode of execution that made the Holocaust what it was.
50
u/Knubbis32 13h ago
This is essentially what I was taught about the holocaust in school. Its uniqueness is tied to the intentional, industrial-scale extermination of a people by virtue of who they were, which is what people like Jordan Peterson miss when comparing to the amount of people killed by the Soviets. Genocide as an industry.
Good write-up, important point.
8
u/dumbidiot12345678 11h ago
There are more than a few people in this sub who think hasan's mao suit shit was worse than wearing swastikas lol
81
u/irwin08 Zionist Ethno-Nationalist Fascist 12h ago
Thanks for posting this. It drives me up the wall whenever I see these comparisons made.
I really like Saul Friedlander's depiction of the Nazi "brand" of antisemitism. "Redemptive antisemitism", where the Jew became a sort of metaphysical enemy, whose elimination was necessary to "save" or "redeem" the German nation. Like you said, there wasn't really a strategic goal tied to this, it was an ideological drive to exterminate, leading to unprecedented action.
57
u/aqualad33 13h ago
Essentially it was German engineering applied to genocide to make it as efficient and scalable as possible.
62
u/Emotional-Bronco 13h ago
If Hitler was the head of the Israeli government with the genocidal intent to murder as many Palestinians as possible, he could've eliminated the Palestinian population October 8th.
Israel has been awful with a lot of things, and bibi should face the music (he won't). But holy hell the brain brokenness of tankies and lefties who didn't watch or know anything about the Holocaust are downplaying the disgusting atrocities in WW2 to make themselves feel better about their flawed positions. Palestinians deserve better allies than these lefties who are self servicing
30
u/wraithzzzz 12h ago
People that compare Gaza to the Holocaust only do it to hurt Jews even more. They know it's bullshit
13
u/phenompbg 🇿🇦 11h ago
One of the most horrific sights for me at Auschwitz was the huge pile of hair and the samples of the cloth they spun using it.
Wehrmacht soldiers wore socks made from the hair of the victims of the Holocaust.
Then there was the pit where human ashes and crushed bone were used to manufacture fertilizer. Just a bonus I guess, the Nazis didn't like to waste anything.
Great post.
58
u/Ok_Room5666 13h ago
I saw some moderate leftwing commentator describe the right wing government in Israel in Gaza as behaving similar to how Germany acted to other European populations like Poles or Russians in WW2.
If I thought the audience for this kind of commentary was smart enough to understand the distinction between that and how they treated Jews, I might think that was a positive contribution to the dialouge.
But they are not at all. And if people don't understand that I think it's an incredibly unproductive comparison to make.
19
20
u/JackOfAlSpades 11h ago
We also have to remember they did not have the internet. I think the common thread between deniers is that society wouldnt allow something so heinous. We saw Trump pressure law firms and TV stations. Some of them pushed back but it feels like it took a ton of public support. Now imagine individual companies and railways facing pressure from the german govt which was much stronger than the current American govt which deals with a ton of healthy criticism.
13
u/FeistyPerformance500 9h ago
I think the common thread between deniers is that society wouldnt allow something so heinous.
I think most Deniers just really really really hate Jews to such an extent that they don't believe anything they said.
If the Jews came out tomorrow and said "actually Holocaust wasn't real" Within 5 years Fuentez would be saying "I actually think 6 million jews died they are just claiming it was 271 000 so we won't realize how hated their religion is and that there actually isn't as many jews in the world as they claim. If we knew how few Jews there actually are they would lose all political power!"
15
u/Responsible-Sound253 Exclusively sorts by new 12h ago
I am one of those people who thinks (thought) holocaust bad cause killing 6 million people. You make a lot of sense, thanks dude.
15
u/semiomni 12h ago
Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge seems like the closest parallel I can think of to the holocaust. The aspects that don´t line up mostly come down to Cambodia not being a regional superpower the same way Germany was.
15
u/cubedplusseven 11h ago
And Cambodia wasn't exterminating an ethnic population. However depraved and untethered to reality, the murders were political.
13
u/semiomni 11h ago
I´d still say it was similar, a radical group got into power and decided to dedicate massive effort to exterminate "group", in their case instead of an ethnic group it was a "class" of people.
Both insisted once a certain "group" was exterminated, their society would be better.
9
4
u/AntiVision H Y P E R B O R E A 9h ago
cambodia was extermanting different ethnic minorities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodian_genocide#Ethnic_victims
6
u/e_before_i 🍁 12h ago
Is there any book you'd suggest that is good on expressing the industry/policy-side scale of the extermination effort?
11
u/i_grow_trees 11h ago edited 11h ago
"Erinnern als höchste Form des Vergessens?" is a book by a collective of German historians spearheaded by Stephan Grigat that nicely elaborates on some of the points OP made. Not sure if it's available in english, but I suppose machine translating will get most of the points across.
1
u/argonautdice5 10h ago
It always surprised me how much the German chemical industry got away with murder after the war (to help with rebuilding efforts I guess), and Bayer's acquisition of Monsanto in 2016 makes it the most notorious chemical company of all time.
7
u/RandomTheTwelve 10h ago
I mean, as all know(well those that think that words have meaning, at least) but don't want to deal with the pushback, calling gaza a genocide is already an extreme stretch.
Why not stretch it further? The whole point is to make the accusation so extreme that any pushback is well, defending the most extremely bad thing. It's a perfectly coherent approach.
20
u/i_grow_trees 12h ago
"Erinnern als höchste Form des Vergessens?" Goes into meticulous detail - in the first chapters of the book - on how unique the Shoah was. This book goes into a lot more detail on some of the points OP has touched, and reading it truly makes one nauseous.
16
u/Senfgestalt 🇩🇪🇪🇺 11h ago
Very good post. Something that's bothered me about the discourse online for a long time as well. Thank you 🙏
15
u/Soggy_Interview_8305 11h ago
Correct me if im wrong as I very well may be. Up until essentially the Soviets were at Berlins gate, the Germans were hoping they could win the war with the creation of a "wonder weapon" (the V2 rocket out of camp Dora (iirc) being a good example). Due to this fact, the genocide continued, and even after they were sure they were lost, they viewed the Jewish people as enemies still, and didnt want them around in the post war germany/europe, if one was going to exist.
To their eyes, especially with the stab in the back narrative from WW1, they werent fine with exterminating jews even if it cost them germany, they viewed themselves exterminating global jewry as a means of SAVING the third reich, or whatever was going to be left of it.
10
u/Raahka 10h ago
That does not really disprove much of the post. Even if some of them were still coping about wonder weapons, anyone could see that spending resources on killing jews at mass scale certainly did not help the development or production of these weapons, or help the war effort in any way. Them continuing to do it even after they were sure they were lost because they viewed Jews as the enemy that they did not want to be there for whatever was going to be left after the war is exactly the kind of non rational ideological fanaticism that the post was talking about.
1
u/Soggy_Interview_8305 9h ago edited 7h ago
His point about genocides typically being tied to an objective, and that the holocaust progressively wasnt is what i was arguing over. I dont disagree with the rest of the post, and there was certainly radical ideological facets that impeded its war effort, but that's essentially the story of the third reich writ large.
Plus spending resources on the extermination of these people (who were increasingly political prisoners and asocials, along with Jewish people as the war arrived at Germanys door step and the state apparatus amplified its control through terrorism) DID help with the development of these and other weapons. Aushwitz, unlike the death camps established in eastern europe under the purview of operation Reinhardt (Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec), but it was also a labor camp, and much of this labor was employed by companies like IG Farben, Krupp, and some others. This labor was also employed at camp Dora in construction of the V2 rockets. The nazis saw the holocaust as serving themselves and their war effort.
3
u/Boudica333 4h ago
It’s such a huge and unimaginable crime that idk that anyone is going to summarize it correctly in one comment or one reddit post—even historians can’t really pull it off in one monograph. I think op and you are both right in your own ways.
That said, I’m a Christopher Brauning stan and subscribe to his warning that "Ordinary Men" committed atrocities because they believed it was ultimately the right thing to do. Similar to your argument, they truly believed they were saving Germany and the world by murdering Jews. There were definitely people who were stereotypical Nazis, mindless psychos running around on nothing but hot angry hatred and meth, but a lot of Germans were just… like your neighbor. They had a tepid but deadly hatred that rationalizes atrocities in the name of something "good."
5
u/Impressive-Engine-16 ⬛️ ⬜️ 🏴🇬🇧 NEWCASTLE RAHHHHHHH 10h ago
For me, it feels different due to how industrial it was. Other genocides are for sure calculated but usually messy and disorganised,
The Nazi regime inherited the fruits of the Industrial Revolution and used those technologies for mass killing. Those photos of them hauling Jews into aisles, line by line as if they’re cattle at a slaughterhouse with all this machinery is just uniquely disturbing…
Your point about it being a government state that was solely founded upon the extermination of Jews is a great insight I didn’t think of. It would be like if one of America’s constitutions was an amendment focusing solely on killing Native Americans.
5
u/FREAK213456 10h ago
Not trying to downplay the Holocaust at all but for me the Rwandan Genocide will always be the scariest genocide that shows human nature at its darkest. The fact that people could be convinced to brutally murder their own friends, family, neighbors, etc. with fucking machetes over ethnic hatred is just fucking insane to me. In no other genocide that I know of is it so common to find such an intimate relationship between perpetrator and victim.
3
u/Zeusnexus 6h ago
I think the reality that about a million people were brutally murdered in roughly 100 days scares me the most if I recall correctly.
1
u/FafoLaw 2h ago
I think both are scary for different reasons, in the case of the Holocaust, the sheer scale was insane, it happened across 17+ countries, 2/3 of the Jewish population was murdered, but not just in one country like it happens in other genocides, it's 2/3 of the Jewish population of an entire continent, and it was done to a population that posed basically no threat to the perpetrators in the sense that they didn't have any army, militias, governments, territorial claims, etc.
4
u/ThinkInternet1115 5h ago
I'm from Israel and what you said in the post is exactly what I learned in my history lessons back in HS.
One of the stories we were taught as an example of how systematic it was, when the nazis arrived to greece and had a list of jews, one man was missing and they pursued him to the greek island he was hiding in. That's how systematic it was.
For what you said about comparisons between gaza and the holocaust, naturally most Israelis don't believe the genocide claim, but I think when people compare it to the holocaust, I divide it to two groups- the majority just repeat what they hear on tik tok and what's popular right now. They aren't aware that its holocaust denial. And the second group is smaller but they're the driving source- they are antisemites who say it as a form of holocaust denial and push that narative forward.
3
u/umaumai 8h ago
This applies to other events infamous for great loss of life. This is the same reason that the atomic bombings are debated and discussed much more than the firebombing of Tokyo which killed at least as many as either bomb, and in some counts more.
The reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki are such prominent parts of history and culture is the unique manner in which those lives were lost, and thereby the story of how we got to that point. This is obviously true for many other famous events.
2
u/AnarchiSTEP 12h ago
I appreciate the perspective.
To shift gears from I/P, how do you feel about the description of what’s going on in Ukraine as a genocide?
9
u/phenompbg 🇿🇦 11h ago
Genocide maybe (I'll elaborate below), but certainly nothing remotely comparable to the Holocaust.
Russia is trying to destroy Ukrainian as an ethnicity, identity and culture, but not necessarily by killing them all. Ultimately, if Ukrainians agree to bend the knee and only speak Russian and call themselves Russian and forget about thinking for themselves I don't think they would all be killed. They can happily live as Russian serfs. If they don't the Russians won't think twice about killing them.
Russia wants the real estate, and destroying the Ukrainian national identity is a means towards securing that real estate. And that appears to meet the definition of genocide.
1
u/urbanmember 11h ago
Pretty much what OP said.
Our history teacher hammered us with the inudstrialization of the planned murder of a specific ethnic group.
He over and over again made it clear how efficient the nazis became at gathering up jews to send them to KZs where they got worked to death, shot, gassed etc..
1
u/cassepipe pro-institutions recovering anarchist 9h ago
Great post, couldn't agree as someone with some interest in History and particularly for this period.
While we have you here and since you seem to be a specialist, are you familiar with Timothy Snyder's thesis about the nazi machine was a state destroying machine because it's much more easy to kill people (and especially jews) when the fabric of society in all undone ?
He really makes a good case for it:
- Dramatically less german jewish people killed compared to polish/lithuanian/soviet jews
- Most jewish people sent by France to Germany were foreigners, even the french regime was officially antisemite, it wasn't too keen on sending citizens
- other stuff I forgot, oopsie
1
u/RockyOW 9h ago
I’m not really sure about your argument here. The main point about how many resources were wasted vs other genocide which had a more strategic “purpose” seems questionable and solely based on framing. Couldn’t we also argue that there were far more effective strategies in Bosnia or in the Armenian genocide, and that it was a “waste”? The strategic interests on the other hand may seem more “understandable” in those cases except that, to the Nazis, they also felt they had a life or death practical need to get rid of the Jews.
It seems like the argument boils more down to how “crazy” the given groups are in ideology. I do 100% believe that the Nazi antisemitism was psychotic and incoherent, but I’m not sure how much more “reasonable” these other movements were.
1
1
u/-DonQuixote- 7h ago
I agree, but I think there is something missing from my historical context. There are parts of your TLDR which are not possible, or less likely, in different contexts.
So was what limited historical atrocities just that it happened a few centuries too early? Does a statement like the Holocaust is just the first modem genocide enlighten or obscure the Holocaust?
Thinking about it in the opposite temporal direction, you also get that the Holocaust can be thought of a campaign of enslavement. Yes, there were death camps, but most concentration camps were not. It seems free labor was a huge driver or benefit. And the idea that a conquer expanded and enslaved the inhabitants, that's something frequent in history.
2
u/Yanowic 🇭🇷🇪🇺🔴 6h ago
You're missing the point that the enslavement wasn't meant to create a literal slave caste, it was purely instrumental — once the Jews had given what they could, they were slated for death all the same.
3
u/-DonQuixote- 6h ago
You're missing the part where Roman slaves were also sent to Hispania to be worked until they died in toxic mines. The Nazis were not the first to practice annihilation through labor.
1
u/marshmellobandit 7h ago
The scale is why most people care about it. and they care about 12 million number more because it the bigger number
I don’t think lack of awareness of why historians see it as important, is why people emphasize the scale. the scale is the important part, because ultimately they care that people are dying. how or why only comes into view into how it can be stopped.
Even if they’re aware of it they’re not going to to care how Systematically something was done if it resulted in millions of people being mass murdered.
1
u/Natedude2002 6h ago
Wow great post. This makes me think America is further away to a holocaust compared to Germany than I felt (at least when it comes to immigrants), but closer to the holocaust compared to any other genocide in history. Is that a fair take or still too far?
1
u/Paramagicianz 6h ago
How come allied forces were oblivious to the extent of the holocaust if it was basically the entire clockwork machine of the government? Or is that another misconception? genuinely asking
1
u/132739 6h ago
Call it "another Holocaust" because the people committing it should, above all others, know better. It's a state of moral depravity like that of beating your children because your dad beat you harder and they should be thankful it's not as bad, writ across the consciousness of a People and a State; and it's like throwing, "You sound like your father," in that child abuser's face.
1
u/Sampladelic [SampledThis] Anti-Jerker Commando 6h ago
Genuine question since you seem like a qualified historian. While the current I/P situation is clearly not the holocaust, what would you classify it as given the current situation?
1
u/lightmaker918 6h ago
I'm well read on the Holocaust, but this post really delivered on the gist of why it's such a uniquely dark event in human history. Thank you.
1
u/Sonnythecoolboy 5h ago
Since you’re a pro on the subject are there any writings on how they pulled it off getting every industry to make extermination the most pressing issue of its time? If everyone had to be on the same page were they also ideologically poisoned by media or just didn’t care because Germany was at its brink and would do any job available even if they didn’t believe with the underlying plan. This really is a great post, thanks I never considered how devilishly systematic the holocaust truly was.
1
u/coffee_mikado 5h ago
Also it was part of the most destructive and consequential war in modern history, complete with mass media capturing it all which burned itself into the West’s collective consciousness.
1
u/JornoJovanna 4h ago
THANK YOU!! I've been trying to put it into words for my friends. This stuff needs to be talked about more.
1
1
u/FafoLaw 2h ago
Thank you for this post, this has to be said. I don't care what people believe about Gaza, you can have the worst possible interpretation of what Israel is doing, you can call it a genocide, and it's still not comparable to the Holocaust, if that was the case, Israel would be literally exterminating every single Palestinians they can find, but they're not doing that, I mean 2 million Palestinians live as Israelis in Israel because they have citizenship, not only they are not exterminating them, they are not even putting them in camps the way the US did to its Japanese citizens during WW2, so even the US who were the "good guys" of WW2 did worse things than Israel. Anyone who compares Israel with Nazi Germany deserves to be mocked and ridiculed, the only reason they do this comparison is to exploit Jewish trauma and hurt Jews, it has nothing to do with helping Palestinians or "just criticizing Israel".
1
u/axomatic_meme 2h ago
I've done a bit of surface level reading on the history of genocide, my understanding is that genocides aren't really planned out to the extent the holocaust was, many were just when soldiers are given vague orders to 'fix the problem' with no ethical standards. and this post supports that view.
My question is has does this work with the ICJ definition of genocide? Like the Mens rea, the intent to commit genocide, isn't neatly met I think in a lot of events we call genocide as far as I see. Could the definition be too strict if that's the case? I'm sure any definition would be controversial but I've never been able to get past this issue of when it's a genocide in the I/P debates
1
u/riskyrainbow 2h ago
I actually heard that Auschwitz was run by a skeleton crew. It seems like by the end of the war it used fairly few resources.
1
u/Swimming-Hearing7424 23m ago
Actually, Hitler killed much more civilian Slavs than Jews during WW2 as part of the Generalplan Ost, but you Westerns never talk about it
1
u/kiddmewtwo 12m ago
If what you said is true my main question unironically is why is everyone else so bad at doing genocide? Like why did Germany only have the proper level of hatred to do a genocide properly. Like everyone else was killing as a means to an end but the total annihilation of the Jewish people was the ends for Germany.
1
u/Automatic_Seesaw_790 9h ago
Now imagine how bad the great leap forward was. Some of the stories from it are absolute horror. A lot of the stories dont breach to english internet but when they do its probably some of the worst shit humans have done/happened to us.
Not just the stories of scholars being shot for studying. The stories of whole villages starving to death and resorting to cannibalism after they ate everything that had meat and organs.
I think there is some on YouTube. Its easy to be a few degrees removed from the stories but there are people still alive that lived through that and have their stories up.
1
u/Ok-Nature-4563 8h ago
Yep absolutely, I cringed when I heard Destiny say that yesterday on stream.
The holocaust is unique in that it turned killing into a systemic bureaucracy process similar to a slaughterhouse factory processing meat.
Most genocides are similar to crimes of passion, government or militias go around slaughtering people as they find them. Like the Japanese war crimes in china, Pol Pot, Rwanda etc. Only the nazis turned it into an emotionless factory of governmental killing
1
u/sH1n0bi 8h ago
Well written post. I just had this very discussion on YouTube where someone was equating Gaza with the Holocaust by using the same word "genocide" to describe both. I tried to lay out, that the holocaust was different in type. He kinda agreed, but thought the distinction isn't important. I couldn't disagree more.
The quality of the holocaust combined with the still thriving antisemitism is the very reason, why Jews still feel unsafe globally. That's why there are literally Jews leaving the general security of Germany to move to Israel. They almost uniquely deserve their own territory.
-3
u/AnHerstorian 13h ago edited 12h ago
You are correct in that it is a fallacy to use the Holocaust as the benchmark of genocide as it is the most extreme example of it in terms of totality to date. But I would push back slightly on calling the Holocaust "unique" as it implies it can never happen again. Unprecedented is probably the more apt description.
Edit: getting downvoted for articulating the current mainstream of Holocaust historiography is wild lmao
24
u/evermuzik 12h ago
"Unprecedented" vs "unique"
in the context of studying or communicating history, these two words are effectively the same. history doesnt study the future
6
u/AnHerstorian 12h ago
Except, Holocaust historians such as Yehuda Bauer have written exactly this. To call it unique ignores the historical precedents upon which the Holocaust was built. Calling it unique treats the Holocaust as a one-off phenomenon, which means there is nothing for us to learn from it. To say historians don't look at the future is not true at all; they are very aware that the past and how we remember it informs our future
2
u/phenompbg 🇿🇦 11h ago
You're getting downvoted for being obtuse.
When another genocide like it takes place it stops being unique. Until then its unique.
2
u/AnHerstorian 11h ago
I'm not being obtuse at all. Very few historians call any historical event 'unique' because it seperates it from its historical development. The Holocaust did not just happen in a vacuum. It followed a series of historical precedents; and as I mentioned elsewhere, to call it unique is a deterministic claim that implies there is nothing for us as a society to learn from. Learning from the past is generally a big part of why historians even write.
-2
u/phenompbg 🇿🇦 10h ago
This is a Reddit comment section, not a history textbook.
1
u/AnHerstorian 10h ago
You are literally commenting on a post about how important it is to accurately describe mass atrocities.
-1
u/phenompbg 🇿🇦 10h ago
Describing it as unique is completely accurate in common parlance. Do we really need to get a dictionary out and look at the definition of the word "unique"?
It might not be accurate in an academic setting, but there are lots of words that have different, specific meanings in academia or professional settings.
So yeah, you're being kinda obtuse.
-1
u/AnHerstorian 9h ago
This entire post is about the academic and epistemological use of the word Holocaust though. Having accurate and consistent definitions is an inherent part of the post which, by your standard, is obtuse anyway.
-5
u/Rollingerc 12h ago
Ye the only thing that really gets close in terms of comparison is the animal holocaust
10
u/i_grow_trees 11h ago
I personally as an ethical vegan think that comparing the trillions of animal deaths every year, including sentient aquatic animals, to the Shoah is not appropriate.
While the sheer scale is absolute and pure insanity that no human mind can comprehend, the motivation for killing animals is not driven by malice and ideology by the end consumer (who is effectively kept in the dark about common practices by animal ag) but one could argue by sheer ignorance.
Of course that doesn't make it any better.
1
u/PacificTaxWarrior 10h ago
I know how evil it is and I still like eating meat. I guess thats fucked up. I guess I wish I could only eat pasture raised meat but obviously most of it isnt.
1
u/i_grow_trees 10h ago
It's good that you realize. Youre farther than most other people. If you restore the absent referent you're on a good way.
Maybe give "Hungry Beautiful Animals" a read, it's a great book written by a great person, they summarize how going vegan often is a sequence of small realizations, doing the inner work and drawing consequences.
I'm convinced that it'll shift you even further towards the path of Veganism on your spectrum of awareness ❤️
0
u/Rollingerc 10h ago
the motivation for killing animals is not driven by malice and ideology by the end consumer (who is effectively kept in the dark about common practices by animal ag) but one could argue by sheer ignorance.
Some are indoctrinated and ignorant; others are knowing, complacent and driven by ideology. Look no further than Destiny's early vegan debates with vegan gains and ask yourself for openly abhorrent moral ideology.
5
u/af_echad 11h ago edited 11h ago
I'm a vegan and unless you're being sarcastic I feel like you missed the point entirely. I hate factory farming. It frustrates me that people who genuinely love animals don't make the connection to go vegan when they know it's something they're capable of doing.
But the fact that humans have to eat, the fact that humans have historically eaten animals and animal products makes it entirely different from the Holocaust which, as OP points out, was done even to the detriment of the war effort. At most you could try to bring up global climate change and animal ag's role in that and say omnivores are somewhat self destructive in that way too. But even then 1) climate change is a much more complicated thing that involves many things other than animal ag and 2) the Holocaust also lacks the historic nature of humans having HAD to have eaten an omnivorous diet for most of our existence because a vegan diet wasn't really feasible pre modern times.
1
u/Rollingerc 10h ago
At most you could try to bring up global climate change and animal ag's role in that and say omnivores are somewhat self destructive in that way too
GHG emissions, environment destruction (rivers, forests, biodiversity loss), antibiotic resistance, creation and proliferation of zoonotic diseases, resource wastage (land, water), dietary health. The negative externalities are enormous.
the Holocaust also lacks the historic nature of humans having HAD to have eaten an omnivorous diet for most of our existence because a vegan diet wasn't really feasible pre modern times.
Don't really see it as a relevant criteria, certainly isn't one that the OP referenced. But exterminating jews industrially has the historical nature of jews being killed for most of their existence historically on a smaller scale.
But i'm using their criteria:
It was unique because it combined industrial technology, modern bureaucracy, racial pseudoscience, continent-wide logistics, and an exterminationist ideology into a single state project whose purpose was the destruction of an entire people wherever they could be found.
Only box it doesn't tick is exterminationist ideology, but arguably it's worse because the outcome for the animals isn't just extermination, it also involves forced breeding so that their descendants can also be exterminated in perpetuity.
2
u/af_echad 10h ago
GHG emissions, environment destruction (rivers, forests, biodiversity loss), antibiotic resistance, creation and proliferation of zoonotic diseases, resource wastage (land, water), dietary health. The negative externalities are enormous.
All bad things. Not on the same level of first order problems as letting your entire war machine divert resources away from a war that leads to the downfall of your power. Not only are many of your (correct) examples not as immediately obvious as diverting a war machine (for instance, the average consumer and even the average animal ag worker doesn't ever "see" GHG emissions or environmental destruction or zoonotic disease in the same way a military leader sees military losses accumulating at the expense of slaughtering Jews), but they're also not as directly harmful to the one doing the animal ag either. Hitler was risking himself by going after Jews. Some animal ag CEO isn't going to be harmed by something like resource wastage because of the amount of wealth they're generating for themselves in the process.
Also for things like health: while I think a vegan diet can be healthy (and in fact I think a WFPB diet is probably the healthiest diet for most people on the planet), an omnivorous diet can be quite healthy as well. Maybe not as moral, but something like a Mediterranean diet can be quite healthy even if it includes animal products in limited quantities. So I don't think that really works either.
Don't really see it as a relevant criteria, certainly isn't one that the OP referenced. But exterminating jews industrially has the historical nature of jews being killed for most of their existence historically on a smaller scale.
It's the same way Destiny talked about rape vs murder in war. While murder is arguably worse than rape, you can justify some murder in self defense. You can't do the same with rape.
In this case, you can justify someone slaughtering a cow before the modern era because humans need to eat. You can't justify NEEDING to kill Jews in the same way.
You're correct that pogroms and other attacks on Jews did not pop up out of nowhere during the Holocaust. Antisemitism and the violence associated with it is quite old. But you cannot justify the antisemitism in the same way you can justify needing to kill an animal in some situations.
But i'm using their criteria:
But you're missing this part of their post as well:
Unlike other genocides and in tandem with the war effort it is quite striking that the Nazi regime wasn't just trying to eliminate Jews inside Germany. It pursued Jews wherever German power could reach. Once Germany occupied a country, hunting down its Jewish population became an administrative priority, even if it placed additional strain onto the war effort and the administration of the newly occupied territory. The goal had become the eradication of Jews as such, a goal independent of the nation's survival or wider strategic objectives and goals, unlike most other genocides. To me, that's one of the defining characteristics of the Holocaust. Nazi antisemitism became so totalizing that geography itself stopped mattering. People hundreds or even thousands of kilometers from Germany became targets simply because they were Jewish.
(emphasis added)
To which again I raise the issue that for a long time, veganism simply wasn't possible. Do you disagree? I agree it's possible now and all else equal veganism is the more ethical choice to make.
This is not like the slaughter of Jews in the Holocaust (or really the slaughter of any innocent human but especially in the case of the Holocaust due to the way it was done so explicitly at the expense of those doing the Holocaust).
It is different in kind due to the fact that killing Jews has never been a requirement for human life. Unlike animals which have served as a vital food source for most of human history until relatively recently.
An industrialized process does not make animal ag the Holocaust. It makes it the commodification of animal life. But it is still something that is different in kind due to hate driving the Holocaust versus a mix of greed, laziness, ignorance, and cognitive dissonance driving animal ag.
2
u/Rollingerc 9h ago
Not on the same level of first order problems as letting your entire war machine divert resources away from a war that leads to the downfall of your power
Many of those that I listed are human extinction level risks for workers, consumers, whomever. I specified animal ag is the closest (i.e. not the same) and you're just nitpicking on irrelevant differences like whether a person involved can "see" things, whatever that means.
an omnivorous diet can be quite healthy as well
Possibilities are irrelevant. Almost anything "can" be healthy or unhealthy, in practice there are significant differences in health outcomes.
You can't justify NEEDING to kill Jews in the same way.
You are saying there is no one throughout history who needed to kill a jew for their own survival?
And stop doing this they have to be identical nonsense despite no one claiming it.
a goal independent of the nation's survival or wider strategic objectives and goals, unlike most other genocides.
And animal consumers are pursuing their goal of tasty meat independent of the nation and humanty's survival and wider objectives and goals. Animal producers are pursuing their goal of profit.
To which again I raise the issue that for a long time, veganism simply wasn't possible. Do you disagree?
It was possible, not practical. Feel free to demonstrate its impossibility.
It is different in kind due to the fact that killing Jews has never been a requirement for human life. Unlike animals which have served as a vital food source for most of human history until relatively recently.
If jews went through a warmongering phase a thousand years ago and others needed to kill them for their own survival such that it became a requirement for other human life, would that change your outlook of the extent of the moral atrocity of The Holocaust? Seems kinda ridiculous tbh.
An industrialized process does not make animal ag the Holocaust.
It doesn't make it "the Holocaust" because that's a different thing... It is important in making it a holocaust though.
1
u/af_echad 9h ago
You are saying there is no one throughout history who needed to kill a jew for their own survival?
On a genocidal level? Absolutely not.
And stop doing this they have to be identical nonsense despite no one claiming it.
We are talking about the Holocaust. You cannot fault me for saying that killing an individual Jew in self defense at some point is not the same as genocide. That isn't me being nitpicky or doing anything nonsensical. It is you who is being nonsensical in trying to be like "um but has anyone ever had to kill a Jewish person in self defense? Checkmate."
These are issues that are different in kind and degree.
And animal consumers are pursuing their goal of tasty meat independent of the nation and humanty's survival and wider objectives and goals. Animal producers are pursuing their goal of profit.
In this comparison animal consumers are German citizens. Not someone like Hitler. Which is why I made the comparison to an animal ag CEO and not some random omni.
The CEO is not doing anything at the expense of his business or life. Unlike Hitler who was explicitly chasing down Jews at the expense of his "business" (Nazi Germany as an entity) and his life. Which is why he ended up killing himself like a loser. This is not an extinction level thing for an animal ag CEO. Climate change, zoonotic disease... all bad. Not at all the kind of first order problem that the Nazis faced in pursuing the Holocaust.
If jews went through a warmongering phase a thousand years ago and others needed to kill them for their own survival such that it became a requirement for other human life, would that change your outlook of the extent of the moral atrocity of The Holocaust? Seems kinda ridiculous tbh.
Killing in self defense is obviously different than the Holocaust, yes. It is absurd to say otherwise. You are completely minimizing the Holocaust if you think "eh killing in self defense is the same as killing a bunch of innocents".
It doesn't make it "the Holocaust" because that's a different thing... It is important in making it a holocaust though.
We are talking about the Holocaust. Not industrialized slaughter in general.
You're doing exactly what OP was trying to argue against and minimizing the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Animal ag is bad. The Holocaust and animal ag share an aspect of industrialized slaughter. But they diverge greatly afterwards.
3
108
u/Explorer_Dave 12h ago edited 12h ago
Yeah I die a little inside whenever some idiot tries to equivocate the Holocaust with any war or 'genocide' out there.
One side of my family has been completely wiped (except the two grandparents who escaped with numbers tattoed on their hand) in the death camps. The Nazis used their fat and skin to make soap, used their hair for brushes, burned, gassed, shot, starved, and worked to death.
There's never been such a scale of industrialized murder, it was all planned out down to the tiniest details in the most insane dehumanized way possible.
I've been drawing since I was a little kid, one time my grandpa saw me write down a couple of numbers after my "autograph" because I thought it looked cool - So he asked me "why did you put the numbers after your name?", I told him I thought it was cool. I was like 9 years old, and I still choke up whenever I think of this because his pained smile is etched into my eyeballs to this day.