Welcome to the real world, Neo

"Is the Holocaust unique" is a controversial book, first published in 1995. This is the second edition, but the book is presumably as controversial as ever. "Is the Holocaust unique" is an anthology edited by Alan Rosenbaum with a foreword by Israel Charny. It contains contributions from both opponents and proponents of the idea that the Holocaust is unique. However, the opponents predominate. In effect, then, the book argues that the Holocaust wasn't unique, but one in a series of gruesome genocides in history.

The most important contribution to this book is David E. Stannards spirited article "The Politics of Genocide Scholarship". Stannard points out that every argument of the proponents of Holocaust uniqueness is either inherently contradictory, or applies equally well to other genocides. Those who believe that the Holocaust was unique, claim that its the only instance in history when an entire people was intentionally targeted for extermination for purely ideological reasons, despite not being a military or political threat, with the support of a centralized state apparatus and high-tech killing facilities. Stannard points out that there are many extermination orders directed against specific American Indian nations, that Gypsies were targeted by the Third Reich for ideological reasons, that Jews occasionally did constitute a threat to Nazism, and that some Jews were exempted from being killed, showing that the Nazi evil was pragmatic rather than metaphysically cosmic. Other recommended contributions include "Responses to the Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust" by Ian Hancock, "Stalinist Terror and the Question of Genocide" by Barbara B. Green, and "The Holocaust and the Japanese Atrocities" by Kinue Tokudome.

When I first read this book, I regarded it as really bad. At the time, I was toying with the idea that the Holocaust was indeed unique. Re-reading some of the contributions a few months later, I changed my mind completely. Of course the Holocaust isn't unique. Unfortunately! World history is a scandalous chronicle of wars and genocides. The Holocaust was indeed "unique" in some ways, but so was every other genocide in their way. Yet, they are all genocides, all holocausts if you wish, and any attempt to claim that the Jewish Holocaust was unique in some fundamental, qualitative sense is untenable. It can only be based on some kind of religious reasoning: if the Jews are indeed God's chosen people, then their sufferings through out history simply must be of a different order than the suffering of Gentiles. The idea that the Holocaust was unique is often coupled with the claim that it was incomprehensible. This makes it impossible to analyze the Holocaust by regular methods of historical research, and hence once again makes a purely religious explanation necessary. But even that is often found wanting. After all, why would a good God permit the Holocaust?

I know that anti-Semites often take advantage of the non-unique character of the Holocaust to downplay Jewish suffering altogether. But, unfortunately, Jews do the same to victims of other genocides. For some reasons, Jews seem to resent Armenians in particular. Perhaps the Israeli-Turkish alliance has something to do with it. Or perhaps the Jews fear competition. After all, being Armenian is just as intimately connected with the Turkish genocide of Armenians during World War One, as being Jewish is with the Holocaust during World War Two. But what kind of bizarre competition is this?! If the Holocaust actually was unique, then logically it was morally worse than genocides-as-usual. Thus, the extermination of the Tasmanians, the Armenian experience, Nazi atrocities against Gypsies or Byelorussians, or the mutual Hutu-Tutsi massacres in Rwanda, are seen as somehow less important, than the Jews killed during World War Two. Such a mindset hardly promotes sensitivity. Some defenders of Israel even reason like this: "Since Jews went through a unique experience of genocide, Israel have a unique right to attack Lebanon". Such arguments were heard in 1982, and presumably again today.

In my opinion, it would actually be a good thing if the Holocaust was unique. Ironically, those who claim that it was unique risk downplaying the evil inherent in human history. The fact that constant holocausts are business-as-usual shows what a wail of tears the human existence has been for the past 10,000 years or so. The fact that Auschwitz can be given a "normal" or "rational" explanation doesn't downplay human evil either. Quite the contrary. If evil is a temporary irrational outburst, or something only directed at Jews, it could presumably be lived through, contained or avoided (at least if you're not Jewish). But what if evil is a product of "normal" and "rational" workings of political ideology, state bureaucracy or the needs of a regular war effort? In other words, what if evil is banal, like a grey office clerk signing death warrants, rather than dramatic, like the Führer screaming forth a speech? Doesn't this actually make evil EVEN WORSE, even more demonic? Perhaps the idea that the Holocaust was completely unique give some people a kind of strange psychological solace, since at least the rest of the world, while bad perhaps, isn't completely dark.

Welcome to the real world, Neo.

It's also curious that defenders of Israel's right to exist couple this with the claim that the Holocaust was unique. The Zionist movement was founded long before the Holocaust. Note also the strange flip side of this idea: if Israel has the right to exist because the Holocaust was unique, does that mean Armenia doesn't have a right to exist, since the Armenian genocide wasn't unique? Does Turkey or Russia have a right to swallow Armenia, perhaps?