hundredmillionlifetimes
Banned
To answer Craner the Holocaust is the pre-eminent icon of genocide, the one that combines the most horrifying level of moral deliberateness with a pretty large scale. But there are lots of comparable events which either have smaller numbers, (Turkish massacre of Armenians) or a more ad hoc implementation approach (Rwanda anyone?) or less intentionality (Leopold II's forced labour programmes in the Congo estimated death toll of ten million). How are we to measure the weight of these things, and to what purpose? Whilst it is fair to say that the victims and relations of victims of genocide deserve whatever reparations are possible, two interesting points arise as to: The specific Jewish groups that have harnessed the moral horror created by the Jewish Holocaust, and as to why other ethnic groups associated with other comparable slaughter have not done so.
There always appears to be a double movement, a doubly inscribed deadlock in discussions of the Holocaust: having been raised to the status of the Ultimate Trauma, to the level of the properly metaphysical diabolical evil, all attempts to historically contextualise it, to politicize it, are immediately judged as a denial of its singularity, as indeed anti-Semitic, the questioning or denying of its sacred position then equated with being a "holocaust-denier."
And it is because of its status as untouchable fact, as depoliticised total radical evil, that it is so easily and cynically manipulated by BOTH sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among others: isn't it those who repeatedly compare current conflicts with the holocaust who are exploiting it, instrumentalizing it for self-defeating, opportunistic political uses? On the one hand, "the very need to evoke holocaust in defense of the Israeli acts secretly implies that Israel is committing such horrible crimes that only the absolute trump-card of holocaust can redeem them," and on the other hand, evoking the holocaust for purposes of condemning Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, that Zionist actions have been comparable to Nazi actions towards Jews, or the equally farcical contention that “what Nazis were doing to the Jews, the Jews are now doing to Palestinians.”