| To many whose lives it directly affected, the Holocaust defies
comparison. But although the destruction of European Jewry exceeded other
instances of mass slaughter in its scope, its genuinely eliminationist motives,
and the sophistication of its implementation, the hatred that made the Holocaust
possible has thrived despite world-wide horror at the Nazi terror. Because
ethnic hatred has played a central role in so many cases of extreme mass
violence since 1945, to avoid comparison out of fear of dishonoring the
memory of Holocaust victims seems misguided. What makes the Nazi genocide
so terrifying is that the executioners were human, even though their behavior
was grossly inhumane. More unsettling is the realization of how difficult
it can be to draw the line between blamelessness and guilt. We can recognize
the unique qualities of the Nazi genocide without denying that it was as
much a human tragedy as a specifically German one. With that in mind, the
Washington College course, CNW 213 "The Holocaust and Genocide in the
Twentieth Century," takes the Holocaust as the most extreme example
of sentiments and behavior all too common to our century. That said, we
must be careful not to diminish the reality and severity of the Holocaust
or any instance of mass slaughter by thinking of it as just another in a
long line of genocidal acts. Every victim was a living, breathing, thinking
individual and not, as Joseph Stalin would have it, merely a statistic. |
