in Wikipedia<\/a>, the latter case is called the \u201cRomani Holocaust,\u201d it has never seemed appropriate to me to combine them together.\u00a0 I know that there is a certain preference to include the euthanasia of the disabled as a part of the Holocaust, because of its status as a sort of \u201ctrial balloon\u201d (that is, the narrative that the Nazis might not have moved on to genocide if enough people had fought against the T4 program) but, again, it\u2019s not the same thing \u2014 not every repugnant thing the Nazis did is The Holocaust.\u00a0 And, again, sending political dissidents and Russian POWs to the horrendous conditions of the concentration camps or, at some points, for Russian POWs, to their deaths, was not a part of The Holocaust.<\/p>\nSecond, what makes the Holocaust distinctive among genocides?<\/p>\n
First, the magnitude of the killing.<\/p>\n
Second, the fact that the killing was industrialized.<\/p>\n
Third, the fact that it was perpetrated by \u201cpeople like us\u201d \u2013 simply put, even if you say, \u201cwe in the United States are not Germans\u201d or claim on the basis of your own racial\/ethnic background to have nothing to do with it, my point is that teh Germans were educated, modern, and secular \u2014 that is, the Holocaust didn\u2019t have anything to do with \u201ctribal\u201d animosities or some kind of religious conviction.<\/p>\n
And, finally, although their status in places like Poland is a different story, in Germany, Jews had been thoroughly integrated into the social and economic life of the country.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s something that has bugged me periodically, and again when I was looking into legislation and other commentary earlier, and even regarding recent claims regarding Gaza and the Palestinians:\u00a0 there is a regular refrain that \u201cDehumanization is the first step towards genocide.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s used to police speech, by saying that anything that even resembles criticism is forbidden.<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s the reality of the Holocaust, based on everything I\u2019ve read:\u00a0 the \u201cdehumanization\u201d of the Jews, the rhetoric that they were vermin, subhuman, that they needed to be exterminated without regrets, that even a small child could not be allowed to live \u2014 that was the effect, not the cause, of the Holocaust.\u00a0 These were words used by men who had already decided on the path of genocide.\u00a0 I\u2019ve read several books on the topic of \u201chow did individual men become killers?\u201d and I vaguely recall that the architects of the Holocaust worried about the effect that mass shootings would have on the killers themselves, that they would be morally corrupted by their task; they imagined that instead somehow the men would or should just be methodical and clinical, if only they managed the process right.\u00a0 At the same time, some Nazi leader or another groused that Germans were willing to agree to the persecution of Jews, in general, but thought the Jews they were friendly with, should be exempt, and they needed to be persuaded to accept the necessity of a complete genocide.\u00a0 In other words, having decided upon mass murder, Nazis chose dehumanizing language to justify their plans and get others to accept them.<\/p>\n
So how *should* the Holocaust be taught, if not with the instruction, \u201cdon\u2019t ever use dehumanizing language because that will trigger others into perpetrating a genocide\u201d?<\/p>\n
In the first place, with a great deal of humility.\u00a0 So many people like to believe that they, themselves, would have fought against the Nazis and ensured that Hitler never would have risen to power, or that they would have hidden Jews, or joined the resistance or acted heroically in some other way.\u00a0 But the plain reality is that most of us wouldn\u2019t have.\u00a0 What do we do with this awareness?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know, really.\u00a0 I suppose that\u2019s an exercise left to the reader, as they say . . .<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So over the weekend (as part of my overall effort to blog more often) I fretted about an apparent trend to \u201cdemote\u201d the Holocaust, by turning it into just one among many genocides\/mass killings, and just one lesson among many, in the general category of \u201ctolerance\u201d and \u201cdiversity.\u201d\u00a0 And as a follow-up, I wanted to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":3753,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[285],"class_list":["post-18635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-holocaust"],"yoast_head":"\n
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