Oh yeah, one problem with my theory though. It’s hard to see a bunch of liberal democracies making the shared sacrifices necessary to avoid the worst of global warming. At least if our shaky democracy is any indication.
The enemy shooting their own wounded is almost always a lie. Leaving them behind alive puts a burden on the enemy because the Geneva convention says you need to take care of them so there is absolutely no reason to do this. Finishing off your enemies wounded is common though.
https://twitter.com/ksvarnon/status/1505902563186466817
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https://twitter.com/ksvarnon/status/1505905335919263748
https://twitter.com/ksvarnon/status/1505909465584836613
https://twitter.com/ishgooda_l/status/1505906907860680710
https://twitter.com/eastern_gooner/status/1505909024608370689
Still waiting for any examples or support for this nonsensical assertion.
There’s a history of people trying to defend the uniqueness of the Holocaust, from criticism of AOC for referring to migrant detention centers as concentration camps to Israel’s history of supporting denial of the Armenian genocide. The extreme version of this are those who argue that the Holocaust was the only genocide in history.
There is also a strand of thought that an emphasis on the Holocaust is sometimes used to distract from other mistreatment of people, such as that of Native Americans.
I think the Holocaust was unique in scale. Also, has genocide been official government policy in any other case?
Is the strand of thought you’re referring to here neo-Nazism?
The Cherokee worked together to stop this relocation, but were unsuccessful; they were eventually forcibly removed by the United States government in a march to the west that later became known as the Trail of Tears, which has been described as an act of genocide, because many died during the removals.[5]
Depends on how you feel about the Porajmos, I suppose. It’s possible that industrialization made killing preferable to enslavement as a policy, so older genocides are not comparable.
It’s a strand of thought I’ve seen from a few scholars of Native American history, a field that I suspect is not particularly compelling for neo-Nazis.
Rwanda. Armenia. Darfur. Cambodia. Australia. Namibia. Myanmar.
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Those countries literally had laws on the books that they were going to commit genocide?
Not being facetious, I genuinely don’t know much about this.
This seems an arbitrary and misleading requirement. When the army or any other organ of the state does it does it it’s an official act.
Historical example – when the US forcibly removed the Cherokee (and other indigenous groups) from their cities and towns (trail of tears, alluded to above), it was expressly against the law – early on the Cherokee sued, the Supreme Court found in their favor, the President ordered the army to continue anyway. Nobody argues that it wasn’t genocide because it wasn’t legal.
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I didn’t argue that it wasn’t genocide, I was suggesting that being a matter of official policy made the Holocaust unique. That may well be incorrect, but I just wanted to clarify what was saying as I think it was lost in subsequent posts.
The uninteresting answer is that you likely were taught, you just don’t remember. You remember reading Night or some other Western European Jew who was sent to Auschwitz and survived unspeakable cruelty through courage and luck and the indomitable strength of the human spirit.
You don’t read the stories of Polish Jews, because (among other reasons), they either escaped the Nazis entirely or they were sent to Treblinka and killed on arrival, no matter how brave or tough they were. Instead, you read that X million Jews in Poland and Y million non-Jewish Poles and Z million Soviet civilians were killed during the war and it’s impossible (especially a child) to have any understanding of what that means. So, you remembered the story with a narrative attached to it and integrated it into your understanding of the world, and you either forgot entirely about the East, or it went into a box labeled “Things Were Really Really Bad in the East,” but without the details.
There’s a hideous paradox in the way we understand the world through narrative. The worst things in history that we can really get a grip on are the most baroque cruelties, but it really doesn’t take elaborate cruelties to kill a person, or even a lot of people. We can’t grasp that Nazis rolled up to village after village in Poland or Belarus, rounded everyone up, then methodically shot every single one of them in the back of the neck. There’s no story there. There’s no elaborate killing machinery to serve as a museum and a memorial.
As an example, there’s a passage in Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction describing what happened to all the Soviet PoWs who were captured during Operation Barbarossa. The short answer is that they were mostly starved to death. Out of 3.35 million Soviets captured during 1941, something like 500,000 were alive by February 1942. Tooze says that 600,000 were shot, but the rest (2.2 million people) died from “natural” causes–those causes being that they weren’t given any food or shelter so they all starved and froze to death. In my mind, at least, this episode is like a phantom, because it doesn’t really have a narrative to it. When I try to remember it, I get this vague sense that the Germans didn’t run proper POW camps for the Soviets in 1941, and they just fenced them all in in a big open field and waited for them to die. That’s not actually how it happened, it’s just a confabulated narrative that my brain makes up to match the sense of the reality. But the reality is slippery, and it’s hard to look it up later. You can easily find how many people died at Chelmno, because it’s a crime with a name and a handle. I feel like Wikipedia has a lot more on the murders of Soviet POWs than it did the last time I looked, but it’s still a bunch of stuff like this:
- Stalag V-A: During 1941–1942 many Soviet POWs arrived but they were kept in separate enclosures and received much harsher treatment than the other prisoners. Thousands of them died of malnutrition and disease.
- Stalag VI-C: Over 2,000 Soviet prisoners from Operation Barbarossa arrived in the summer of 1941. Conditions were appalling and starvation, epidemics and ill-treatment took a heavy toll of lives. The dead were buried in mass graves.
- Stalag VI-K (Stalag 326): Between 40,000 and 60,000 prisoners died, mostly buried in three mass graves. A Soviet war cemetery is still in existence, containing about 200 named graves.
Just a barrage of alphanumeric designations and statistics. And this is just a sampling from a list with 20-odd entries. The mind is just not equipped to grasp it. Every educated American is familiar with the Trail of Tears. The only people who’ve ever heard of Stalag VI-K are people whose job it is to study Nazis crimes. But Stalag VI-K was a worse crime with more victims. You can come up with all kinds of post hoc rationalizations as to why this is, but it doesn’t really need an explanation. The Trail of Tears was a vicious and cruel crime, and the stories of its victims make you want to weep. Stalag VI-K was brutal, anonymous, and none of its victims were given the chance to tell us what happened to them.
None of this is novel, by the way. The very concept of genocide was created by a Polish Jew during the war out of an understanding that the world would not grasp what had happened to his people if he didn’t give it a name and a story. No one in the West (or the East, frankly) really cared about remembering what happened to Soviet POWs, so no one helped our culture build an understanding of it. To be very clear, I want to specifically denounce the vile idea that Holocaust remembrance (vis-a-vis other victims of the Nazis) is some kind of political ploy aimed at some nefarious ends. People understand the Holocaust too little, and we should be grateful that Lemkin and Wiesel and others gave our culture what understanding we do have. It’s our failing that we need survivor narratives and names and monuments to give real weight to these things.
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Yeah, I don’t think this is the case at all. I mean, you could define ‘official policy’ in such a way as to make it true, but it’s always the organs of the state doing it, so the Holocaust is not unique in that respect, it is typical.
A portion of the Seminole Tribe successfully resisted attempts to ship them west. AFAIK, they are the only tribe to do so.