Is the Holocaust Unique? by S Rosenbaum Alan;

Author:S Rosenbaum, Alan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Genocide Defined

Before it is possible to discuss whether genocide has occurred in a particular case, a clear understanding of the meaning of genocide is essential. Michael Ignatieff argues:

“Genocide” is a worn and debased term, casually hurled at every outrage, every violence, even applied to events where no death, only shame or abuse, occurs. But it is a word that does mean something: the project to exterminate a people for no other reason than because they are that people. Before the experience of genocide, they may believe it a matter of personal choice whether they belong or believe. After genocide, it becomes their fate.9

An article in Economist, after noting that the Ukrainian terror-famine of 1932–1933 may have claimed as many victims as the Holocaust, has this to say:

Yet the peculiar circumstances of the Holocaust do make it unique. Never has the extermination of an entire people, coupled with the technology of industrialisation … been attempted so systematically as an end in itself. Never has mass murder been so efficiently, so scientifically, perpetrated. Never has the annihilation of a race been so central to an ideology.10

The meaning of genocide and the uniqueness of the Holocaust are revealed in a few characteristics. The Holocaust was aimed at the extermination of an entire people because they were that people. The extermination was not a means toward an end; it was an end in itself. It was not an act of demonstrative violence in which some were killed in order to terrify the other members of the people into sub-mission. It was not intended to affect behavior. It was not a pogrom or the result of uncontrolled mass violence. It was, rather, an intentional, systematic effort to exterminate an entire people utilizing modern technology to ensure efficiency.

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