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Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide

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This is a very interesting book that discusses matters that are usually overlooked in discussions of the Holocaust. It gives a good introduction and comparison of other historical events that involved the elimination of thousands of people and that are sometimes ignored in mainstream discussions about genocide. Topics include the killings of the Gypsies, Armenians, Ukrainians and Native Americans.

This is a fine collection taken as a whole, but the standout essay is certainly David Stannard's "Uniqueness as Denial." Indeed, it is one of the finest and bravest essays I have ever read, although absolutely merciless in its polemic against "uniqueness" theories.

To any person who has the ability of thinking in a more or less logical fashion, the statement that the Nazi holocaust of the Jews was "unique" is simply absurd. The politically motivated proponents of this concept not only confuse "unique" with "different", but also do so for morally suspicious reasons. This book reflects the current state of the debate; especially important is the essay by David E. Stannard ("Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship") in which he totally demolishes all pro-uniqueness arguments, and the foreword by Israel S. Charny where he discusses various data-doctoring attempts by the writers presented in the volume. All in all, "Is the Holocaust Unique?" should be required reading in any Holocaust studies curriculum.

The question posed by this book is well summarized by David E. Stannard: "Within the conventional range of explanations for the Holocaust, from the so-called intentionalist perspective (which views the unfolding of events in Nazi Germany as directed and controlled by a powerful, single-minded, and consistent core of ideologues) to the so-called functionalist interpretation (in which decisions of the Reich are seen as largely improvisational and even chaotic, in response to changing circumstances), the claim that Jews and only Jews have ever been singled out for total extermination emanates from the extreme intentionalist position. This is the way of thinking that also undergirds most conspiracy theories on a variety of topics." (p. 267).

The development of Holocaust-uniqueness notions long postdate WWII: "In the late 1970s and early 1980s the Holocaust became a cornerstone of American Jewish identity and was enlisted for a whole range of Jewish and non-Jewish political objectives. As a result, the idea of the Holocaust's uniqueness was embraced by the Jewish community..." (Wulf Kansteiner, p. 231). Furthermore, "...there is a disquieting pattern of claims of the `incomparable uniqueness' of the Holocaust and a good deal of political power used in many places in academia, museums, and communities to back up these claims by pushing down and out nonadherents." (Israel W. Charny, p. x). As an example, Ian Hancock, a defender of the view that Gypsies had also been targeted by the Nazis for complete extermination (pp. 73-74), alleges that: "The director of one Holocaust center referred to me as a troublemaker; another writer on the Holocaust called my discussion of the Romani case in the Jewish context `loathsome'" (pp. 85-86). Interestingly, Vahakn N. Dadrian argues that the Turks did plan to exterminate all of the Armenians (p. 141), including those living beyond the borders of Turkey (p. 159).

Jewish scholars Israel W. Charny and Arno J. Mayer are quoted as opposing the uniqueness of the genocide of Jews (p. 274). Alan S. Rosenbaum (p. 2) is willing to accept a non-Judeocentric definition of the Holocaust, in which all victims of the Nazis (including Poles, specifically named by him) are embraced by this term. So does Richard J. Goldstone, who also seems to have anticipated what later became known as the Holocaust Industry: "Substantial reparations have been paid...Claims continue to be recognized...The victims of no other genocide have received this kind of acknowledgement. Neither have the Roma or the other non-Jewish victims of the Holocaust." (p. 41).

Both Hancock (pp. 81-82) and Stannard (pp. 268-269) challenge common wisdom relevant to the Wannsee Protocol. They point out that the language of Wannsee is nonexplicit and is subject to interpretation. They reject the claim that this was a decision-making meeting (as opposed to a policy-coordinating one) or one which tacitly called for the physical extermination of all Jews on Planet Earth, much less one that was the last word on Nazi genocidal plans. Clearly, the fact that Gypsies (or Poles, for that matter) were evidently not mentioned at Wannsee is not proof that these peoples were to be spared. (In fact, none of the authors in this book mentions the fact that the Nazis repeatedly spoke of the eventual extermination of Poles in various other contexts).

There is some discussion on what has become known as "industrial genocide" relative to the destruction of the Jews (and, to a lesser extent, Gypsies). What is not mentioned is the fact that some of the 2-3 million murdered Polish gentiles also died in "death factories". Some 200,000 Poles were gassed and cremated in the little-known death camp of KL Warschau, and tens of thousands of non-Jewish Poles met the same fate in such exterminations centers as Treblinka and Birkenau.

Several authors (pp. 71-72, 75, 142, 253) elaborate on the fact that many Jews were either spared by the Nazis, or at least failed to be killed by them. Israel W. Charny (pp. xii, xiii) objects to the survival of many Jews in Nazi Germany as a valid argument against Holocaust uniqueness. He calls it post hoc fallacious reasoning. But how then are we to identify the non-uniqueness of Jewish deaths when we see it! And wouldn't the uniqueness of the Holocaust (Judeocentric definition) be much more convincing had the Nazis indeed exterminated virtually all Jews within reach of Nazi Germany?

In any case, it is obvious that arguments about the survival of targeted peoples are used inconsistently in this volume. Steven T. Katz, a strong proponent of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, uses the large numbers of Armenians surviving the Turkish genocide (p. 65) as evidence against a Turkish intent to exterminate all Armenians. And, ignoring all physical reality (the fact, for example, that the Germans lacked the manpower to exterminate tens of millions of Poles during the war itself), Katz actually believes that more than 15 percent of the Polish population would have been done away with had the Nazis actually intended genocide against them (p. 60)!

Stannard (pp. 270-271) points out that Nazis were always willing to trade Jews for money or other goods, and refutes the argument that this was only a temporary expedient pending German world conquest and ensuing destruction of the world's Jews: "In short, the supposed Nazi pseudo-religious mania for pursuing and murdering every Jew on earth, thus distinguishing Jews as the victims to end all victims who had ever lived, melted rapidly away (to the largely imaginary extent that it ever truly existed) once defeat was apparent and the possibility occurred to Nazi leaders that living Jews might be more valuable to them than dead ones." (p. 271).

"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?

Having been fascinated by this subject since my first visit to Dachau in the 60's I thought this book would be a compilation of the "best and the brightest" but I was very wrong. There are a couple decent sections written by some fairly good academics, but some of them, especially the chapter written by Barbara Green, are just plain ridiculous in their analysis and conclusions. Her conclusion that Stalin's murder of millions of Ukrainians was not "genocide" is just silly. Not only that, her reading list is very incomplete in that it did not include eye witness accounts of how systematic the death sentence of starvation was actually carried out. The chapter by Stannard which compares the settlement of the USA over several centuries in an era long gone with Hitler's attempted extermination of the Jews and Gypsies is ludicrous. While he may make some interesting arguments, he ignores the reality of the cultures existing in the "New World" where human sacrifice was rampant, slavery and war-making were the norm, long before the Europeans showed up. Not a word about that in his analysis. He also equates the massive deaths of Indians by infectious diseases brought to the new world with the deaths in the Nazi concentration camps, which would mean that the AIDS epidemic which started in Africa makes all Africans the biggest perpetrators of genocidal death in the history of mankind according to his logic.

While this book is one of hundreds on the topic, it is not one that is worth the investment of time or money if you are interested in the subject.