Its uniqueness was due to the fact that a nation set out to exterminate all the people in a certain ethnic group, all over the world. Hitler started with the Jews of Europe, and did an astonishingly thorough job. His goal was to continue until the entire planet was judenrein. He didn't "just" kill a lot of Jews. He created an efficient, organized death machine whose purpose was to eliminate Jews from the planet. . . .It's depressing that - after 50 years of museums and classes and documentaries - anyone has to continue to point that out. As Lynn notes, this is in the same class as the "Bush=Hitler" type of holocaust denial noted by Jonah Goldberg. These people don't deny that it happened and was horrible, but they still are unable or unwilling to get their minds around the whole program: the stark fact that less than 100 years ago someone baldly and repeatedly stated that his goal was to exterminate every single one of a people (and in fact compared them to vermin on many occasions), and not only did nobody protest much, many people - even those he conquered, who hated his oppressive rule - enthusiastically helped him.
Another aspect of the uniqueness of the Holocaust is that many of the nations which Hitler conquered were willingly complicit, helping to round up Jews and ship them off to the camps. They, too, wanted to see a world without Jews. No such thing happened in any of the other atrocities you mention. Pol Pot wasn't aided by Korea and Thailand. Stalin didn't have help from China. Hitler had his adherents in eastern Europe, even in Poland. Read the stories of Holocaust survivors. Polish Jews were massacred by the Poles while under German rule. Half the world was complicit in this, Clayton. That's why it remains emphasized.
Just sit and think about that for a few minutes. If you can.
UPDATE: The debate continues. Meryl quotes Sasha Volokh:
Take any six million people murdered. You can draw a circle around them and say, "These six million people define a particular group X," and the killing of these people is especially evil because it's the systematic extermination of everyone in group X. Of course, in the general case, there's nothing "special" about group X. It's just a somewhat random assortment of people: {Fred, Dave, Sasha, ...}. Why should the set Y = {Jews} be "special"? Only because there's something special about having Jews in the world. But "an entire people" has no moral value, except insofar as that "people" contains people. I don't care whether Jews as a group exist; but I do care about every individual Jew, as much as I care about every individual whatever-else. Corollary: Every group X containing six million people is equally valuable, and any murder of any group X is equally immoral.Wow. Utterly destroying a unique and ancient culture is exactly equivalent to destroying an equal number of random individuals. I wonder if eating a fine perfectly cooked filet mignon is exactly equivalent to receiving the same amount of nutrients and vitamins via a swallowed pill, or if listening to a lilting Irish brogue is exactly equivalent to listening to a computer-generated synthetic voice, or if a unique ecosystem - with its sounds, smells, and textures - is exactly equivalent to a carefully manicured suburban lawn.
I am not trying to minimize the slaughter of 6 million random people, each of whom is a unique irreplaceable creation. On the contrary, I respect their irreplaceable uniqueness more than Volokh does. Irreplaceable unique humans create irreplaceable unique human cultures. Put a group of humans down in a particular locale and that's what they do: as a group, over a period of time, they create unique languages, metaphorical systems, inflections, combinations of tasty spices and foods, musical modes and instruments, historical sagas, colorful clothing and utensils, approaches to the mystery of existence, all of which can be distinguished from those of the group on the other side of the mountain or river. The only humans who don't do that are sociopathic or autistic. So to Volokh, those 6 million random individuals might as well be 6 million unique configurations of amino acids.
Sasha, would you be as sanguine about the extermination of the entire American way of life and approach to social organization. Are the individuals who comprise the current manifestation if the 300 year old American experiment equivalent to an equal number of random individuals? Can you see that if all Americans were exterminated, more would be lost than simply a large number of individuals? (I hope I don't need to add that of course this applies to any culture, each of which beings its own unique gifts to the global table.)
If you can't see that, I have to agree with Meryl that I have no idea what makes people like you tick. All I can say in response is this: the tastes, textures, sounds, metaphors and unique insights of my culture are more precious to me than my life. There there is still a vibrant Jewish culture today because thousands of us have felt that way, century after century. I'm sorry you don't get it.
By the way, even if you don't get it, you get to benefit from it.
An expansion of these ideas on the value of cultural uniqueness.
MORE: Sasha also writes about Hitler's blatant intentions to exterminate the Jews, in the context of legal meanings of "intent."
"Intent" is a very particular animal: in the words of Glanville Williams, "A consequence is intended when it is desired to follow as the result of the actor's conduct." I've got a gun, I knowingly point it at you and pull the trigger, knowing that you'll probably die as a result and desiring that you die -- that's murder. Did I do it for money? For sex? To eat you? Because I hate Jews? Those sorts of motivations are irrelevant to whether it was murder.Sasha engages in a bit of sleight of hand here. Meryl's comments were not about motivation, but about passivity and/or subtle encouragement in the face of repeated threats. And those are addressed by the law.
Sasha, if my next door neighbor or ex-husband repeatedly threatens to kill me, I can go to the police and get a restraining order. The law recognizes that threats have to be taken seriously. If this person repeatedly slanders me to my community, that's libel. If this person's libel causes me to suffer loss of livelihood and physical danger from neighbors who buy into his lies, that is incitement. If my local courts do nothing, and I take my case to higher and higher courts outside my immediate neighborhood, and tell newspaper reporters, and everyone knows this person is repeatedly threatening to kill me but does nothing . . . well, some states have "failure to rescue" laws. If you know someone is in danger and you have the ability to help, and you do not, you are liable. If an entire community stands by and lets an innocent person be murdered because they didn't want to intervene or were secretly glad to be rid of that person, then we have the Kitty Genovese case, and lynchings.
Hitler applied slander, incitement, and threats - publically, over more than a decade - to a particular group, which to him was not just a random collection of individuals, but a cohesive entity which deserved elimination. And Western civilization stood around and yawned.
Yes, most of us stood around and yawned while the Hutus were attempting to exterminate the Tutsis. But the Hutus did not attempt to implement a carefully designed system of progressive removal of civil rights, sophisticated media propaganda, and extermination camps, over a period of years, all the while announcing their intentions to the world at large. And I can't think of any person or group who joked to each other at cocktail parties how the Tutsis had it coming, and how the Hutus were doing the world a favor. Nor was this the case with any of the other attempted genocides mentioned in this debate.
That's the difference, which your legal analogy simply ignores.
UPDATE: More from Meryl, with links to more bloggers who offered their opinions. I have to take issue with Brant Hadaway for his classification of Jews as a race. Judaism has two modes of transmission: by birth and by conversion. Children of a Jewish mother are halachically automatically Jewish, regardless of the ethnic identity of the father, unless the children convert to another religion at some point. But anyone can convert to Judaism, which people of all races have done and continue to do. it doesn't make sense to talk of Jews as a race when some of us are black Ugandans and some are blond Russians.
More here.
UPDATE: So let's not stand around and yawn this time.
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