h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Over on the 'What will be unacceptable in 50 years?' thread, Hoo pointed out that the Holocaust wasn't unique. Its place in our history/culture *is* unique though, so maybe he's wrong.

I've been thinking about this for a wee bit, due to two things I've read. One is this article in the New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/10/29/121029crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all

and another is a review of a book called 'Bloodlands', also mentioned in the above link.

To summarise both sides of the argument:


<< “Bloodlands,” by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder. A much praised, and occasionally reviled, history of the massacres in Poland, Belarus, the Baltic States, and Ukraine before and during the Second World War...

...What happened was not a war on the Jews so much as a convulsion in a long-disputed territory, in which everyone killed everyone.

...Snyder sees twelve years of total war. Stalin starves Ukrainians to death on a genocidal scale; Ukrainians then aid in the execution of Jews (identifying them with the Communists, who had caused the great famine); Soviets and Nazis kill Polish officers; Germans kill Jews on the western side of the fence by gassing them, and on the other side by shooting them; and then, in a last horrible descant, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Russians invade Germany, and rape, in unimaginable numbers, the undefended wives and daughters of the soldiers who, four years earlier, had marched off to kill the Slavs.>>

This vision is of one of the most hellish periods in human history, but seems to imply that genocide and mass murder is an integral part of human history.

But... Was there something different, more callous, calculating and therefore somehow *worse* due to the organisation which was methodically put in place to murder millions of Jews, socialists, homosexuals and other 'deviants'?

<< these twentieth-century massacres were increasingly a pure product of ideology, enforced by technology. Evans accuses Snyder of ignoring ideology, “despite the fact that this was the driving force of mass murder in both the Nazi and Soviet cases...

...The real voice of the new kind of killing is that of the railroad bureaucrat who, in Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah,” calmly discusses the scheduling of trains to Treblinka. And, indeed, there is a difference between a pogrom, where men kill their neighbors in rage, and a genocide, where children are shipped in from distant parts in order to be killed...

...The first makes you despair of man’s inhumanity to man; the second makes you despair of humanity. The instant popularity of the diary of Anne Frank in the postwar years suggests an intuitive grasp, on the part of its readers, of what made their war different from previous wars. That a modern state was searching, at great expense and at a cost to its own war effort, to find a fifteen-year-old girl in an attic in Amsterdam in order to get her on a train bound for a concentration camp in Poland showed something new in the theatre of human action. You had to be the captive of an idea, not the inhabitant of a bloody terrain, to do that... >>>



I don't feel strongly either way, except just to be hugely thankful that I wasn't part of it. But was the Holocaust exceptional, or just one of the worst of the ones that have littered human history?

It was genocide done in a more coldblooded and industrial way than the previous ones. Though it is sad how we don't even hear about some of the others, such as the Armenian genocide.

So, does that mean genocide by railroad timetable is worse than hacking people to death with machetes, or even Gatling guns? The point of the 'Bloodlands' point of view was that the whole arena was a giant Killing Field. Everyone was killing everyone, and more people died from bullets than gas chambers.

Is killing someone by sending to them a gas chamber worse than giving them a smallpox-infested blanket? At least the gas chamber doesn't kill their relatives by 'accident'.

Btw, I'm not arguing that this wasn't one of the most disgusting episodes ever. Just the why. Why is it seen as the worst, beyond compare?

The scale was also rather unprecedented. 6 million people, killed in cold blood rather than as part of war or conquest.

But Stalin killed more, through bad farming practices. As did Mao Zedong.


Well, I say bad farming, it was so bad as to be intentional genocide. Mass murder either way. And yet the Holocaust is 'worse'..

There's a difference between killing a lot of people and genocide.

Yes: intentionally killing all the Jews in Ukraine, say, is worse than generally killing as many Ukrainians as possible. Yes?

So does this suggest a bigger psychological deficit in Hitler than Stalin? Or is it such a cluster***k that any kind of 'rules' just go by the by?

(Genuinely don't know here, just asking)

What was the question again? Wether it's worse, why it's seen as worse or if it's unique?

Whether it's worse, and why?

It's certainly not unique

The methods were rather unique.

Well,

We generally hold that a premiditated murder is a worse crime, deserving of a harsher punishment, that a heat of the moment crime. Doesn't mean we think the latter is ok or acceptable just different from the former.

Given that I think it does not take a massive leap to understand why one could feel that the meticulous planning, scale and premeditation of the holocaust somehow elevates it over other comproble mass killing effects.

Whether or not that is the right way of thinking I am not su sure but it is why I think people, at least form our legal system, think of it as being so bad.

FB

Yes, that - and the circumstances. The surrounding events affected 'Us' and our families, cities towns villages, farmers in their fields.
(Me, slightly though I didn't understand at the time, and father-in-law, who was shot at by a fighter 'plane presumably with the remnants of his ammo).

It indirectly affected so many more, via family, friends, contacts and refugees.

It was direct and personal for so many of our kith and kin in a way that hasn't faded as much as earlier events - and later events haven't affected such a great proportion of us.


This one may or may not have been unique in world history but its effects were close - and still are, to many of us.

I think that's a good point there.

It's seen as worse as it is on our own doorstep. I'll bet it's not burned into the psyche of the Cambodians () or Chines (re their treatment by Japan in the 30s/40s) to anywhere near the same extent.

Ghengis Khan's armies did true genocide i.e really did wipe out entire nations/ethnic groups - the Holocaust did not extinguish the Jews from the face of the earth, even if it was the intention and an awfully high proportion of them did die - but of course these things are separated from us (i.e Western Europeans mostly) not just by geography/race but also by lots and lots of time - so it's a matter of interest rather than lurking horror.

I think the point Hoo was making in the other thread wasn't one of a sort of genocide one-upmanship, but that it wasn't exclusively genocide against Jews, but of a wider number of identifiable groups.

It certainly wasn't unique: Stalin attempted to wipe out dozens of different races and came awfully close to succeeding in some cases. It was done in similar ways to the Germans: there were no gas chambers, but concentration camps, starvation, work camps, transporting entire populations across huge distances all happened. It's not a bigger story because it was kept so well hidden: the Nazis had nothing on the Soviets when it came to state sponsored terror and keeping secrets.

I'm not sure I buy the killing fields argument: after the German conquest and before D-Day, Western Europe was relatively quiet and yet, as the quote in the OP says, a state was expending huge resources in an otherwise pacified city, to find a Jewish girl hidden in a loft to kill here. That indicates an intent, a determination to exterminate that hadn't been seen before. The Armenian Genocide didn't include stories like that: there were still Armenian communities left in Western Turkey/Anatolia, because no-one had made the effort to get *all of them*. Genghis Khan's armies killed people on a lavish scale, but they only killed the people in their direct path: the thought of sending troops thousands of miles from where they were needed to murder one family wouldn't have occurred to them.

Whilst I don't think we'd ever seen anything like the Holocaust before, we have seen it since: in Cambodia, in Rwanda, in the Balkans a few times over, in Iraq and small scale attempts elsewhere. It's very telling/depressing that we've now got a phrase to describe a limited genocide: ethnic cleansing.

>Genghis Khan's armies killed people on a lavish scale, but they only killed the people in their direct path: the thought of sending troops thousands of miles from where they were needed to murder one family wouldn't have occurred to them.<

And you know this how?

I'm not trying to be unfriendly, just trying to point out that with 700+ years between then and now, it's kind of hard to have any sort of clue about their motivations, methods and levels of genocidal determination. Still, I'll bet their wrath was writ large on the ancestors of those who came after for some time. His name still has a certain resonance even after all this time. I wonder if Hitler's name will still be as bad after that length of time - probably amongst the Jewish I would bet certainly. They still hate the roman emperor Hadrian rather a lot as I understand it.

>Genghis Khan's armies killed people on a lavish scale, but they only killed the people in their direct path: the thought of sending troops thousands of miles from where they were needed to murder one family wouldn't have occurred to them.<

Maybe not one family, but he'd send armies to burn previously pacified towns and villages that wouldn't pay tribute.

Didn't the Jewish tribes led by Moses go on a pretty genocidal rampage as they made their way to the 'promised land'?

Pretty much every race went one some sort of rampage to get where they are. That's basically what history is about. Moving, murdering and then subjugating the womenfolk.