Anonymous #2 5w

The only reason people mad a big deal out of it was bc it was white people doing horrible shit to white people.

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Anonymous #2 5w

yeah i also think “uniquely” evil is usually in reference to the mechanical and methodical nature of it. not so much saying it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened, more like it was a type of evil that had never happened before. the methodical targeting of Jewish and Roma minorities across more than an entire continent and the industrialization of the killing were unique in history

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Anonymous #5 5w

it does get more attention in the US than a lot of atrocities committed by white colonists but i think that’s more because we can pretend we were the good guys in that particular moment (we were not)

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Anonymous #4 5w

orrrr maybe you hear about it because a lot of Jewish diaspora, including survivors and their families, live in the United States? And talk about it?

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Anonymous #3 5w

^ also that

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Anonymous #5 5w

Yeah I mean it’s not that genocide had never happened before, but to turn so much of the educated class into brutal murderers, I think is really what shocked Western civilization. In a time where “free thinking,” science, and such were all very popular in Europe, it shocked a lot of people that those things could be weaponized for such cerebral evil if you will, in the heart of Europe nonetheless. I think people generally just get more disturbed too that the killing was almost industrial rather

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Anonymous #2 5w

than some army plowing through and killing tons of people

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Anonymous #2 5w

yeah definitely that’s really well said

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Anonymous #3 5w

People talk about slavery but it’s not as big a deal as the Holocaust

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Anonymous #4 5w

I think that’s regional. Where I come from people absolutely do make as big a deal of slavery as the Holocaust

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Anonymous #4 5w

where i come from (northeast) slavery was a huge deal, bigger than the Holocaust. it’s easy for many americans to talk about evil that other people committed. not so much when it was us. and america being against the nazis is a narrative people are comfortable with (even though its not the whole truth), while america being founded on slavery is deeply uncomfortable. even where im from part of the reason we can talk about it is because we think of it as a “southern thing” (also not accurate)

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Anonymous #3 5w

In the Holocaust yhr narrative is that the Jewish people and those murdered by the Nazis were innocent (and they were) but in slavery people put the onus on black people at times

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Anonymous #4 5w

that is definitely not always the narrative around the Holocaust

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Anonymous #4 5w

Antisemitic propaganda certainly doesn’t frame the victims of the Holocaust as innocent, and modern antisemites also continue to believe Jews somehow deserve death I’m not sure comparison here is useful. Racists and antisemites always try to justify their hatred by blaming their targets for shit they didn’t do

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Anonymous #4 5w

honestly the more that we talk the more sure I am that you’re just from an area that skews more racist against black folks than antisemitic in other places, that’s not the case

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Anonymous #2 5w

I mean King Leopold the 2nd I think is up there with Hitler but due to his victims being black & it being further back people don’t care/know. P.S don’t get me wrong Hitler is still super evil

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Anonymous #6 5w

Yeah King Leopold is undoubtedly one of the most evil people ever if we’re quantifying that. His victims were mostly viewed as subhuman by the rest of Europe at the time and they also didn’t really have the opportunity to publicize their accounts of the atrocities widely. I still think we can consider Hitler and Leopold both “uniquely” evil in the sense that they truly organized such evil that it’d almost be inconceivable if it hadn’t happened.

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Anonymous #2 5w

Sorry the second sentence is there just to second your point that he’s not quite as notorious in Western history despite being an absolutely vile person

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Anonymous #2 5w

No one cares about Gaza in any meaningful capacity to bring about political change, I don’t know of any other genocides we really even care about culturally speaking. You can couch these ideas behind industrial scale violence, but I think you agree with the post when you mention it being “in the heart of Europe” as a big reason. Apathy is built in, and white supremacy is little more than an ivory tower talking point of critique, it remains fully present in our foreign policy

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Anonymous #3 5w

The "western" ethos is little more than horror after unmistakably evil horror upon meaning and the good itself. No, Hitler was not uniquely evil, and the reason this troubles people is not that it some how downplays the Holocaust (it doesn't, evil being commonplace does not make it less evil) but rather that we are forced to confront the fact we live and partake in such evil systems. Systems we just don't actually care enough to do anything about—unless it's white western people that suffer

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Anonymous OP 5w

except the Holocaust didn’t happen to white Western people. Jews and Roma both have ethnic roots in Asia and were hunted down specifically because they weren’t white or Western. and the Nazis didn’t go away because people dismantled the system of antisemitism, it went away because the Allies defeated the Axis powers in order to stop their invasion of Europe

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Anonymous #5 5w

the reason antisemitism and anti-Roma hate are less common in Europe isn’t because they went away but because there are hardly any Jews or Roma left anymore

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Anonymous #5 5w

it’s a bit of an anomaly that Jews are considered white (at least by some/to an extent) in the US but it wasn’t like that in Europe and in many places it still isn’t

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Anonymous OP 5w

Maybe it’s not as universally “cared about”, but people absolutely talk about the genocide of indigenous natives and slavery quite a bit here in the US. And the concept of “whiteness” applied to the Holocaust honestly seems retroactive and like an oversimplification of things. The Nazis targeted people who would generally be considered lower class (Jews, Romani, etc.) in most of Europe at the time. If anything, I think the reason it’s taught so heavily in American history education is because

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Anonymous #5 5w

Nobody at scale thinks of the Roma when they think of the Holocaust, they think of Jews, who were white. Ashkenazis are white.

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Anonymous #2 5w

the US gets to be the good guys who saved the world, while that’s almost universally not the case in any other example of genocide you could bring up

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Anonymous #2 5w

Okay, name one actual non-white genocide euros have tried to stop and taught about in the educational system

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Anonymous OP 5w

I think you could make the argument that the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the subsequent slavery of black people was an example of genocide, the end of which in the US was certainly aided by white abolitionists. And it’s taught pretty significantly in the American education system, although I’m sure it varies depending where in the country you are

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Anonymous OP 5w

no, Ashkenazis were not considered white at the time of the Holocaust or at any time before. they are the ethnic group i am talking about when i say Jews who are considered white in the US

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Anonymous #5 5w

at different times throughout the past few centuries, Europeans have classified Ashkenazi Jews as “Asiatic”, Black, and racially Jewish

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Anonymous #2 5w

It's really not. The only unique thing about it is how industrialized it was. But we've done far worse to other people around the world over the centuries. The holocaust is only unique because it happened to white people.

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Anonymous #8 5w

In the matter of three sentences you just said that two different things were the only thing that made the Holocaust unique

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Anonymous #2 5w

Yes. It was not uniquely horrific. It was just uniquely white people and uniquely utilitarian. Which is not what you were saying in your original comment.

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Anonymous #8 5w

I’d like you to Google what utilitarian means and then explain to me how the Holocaust was utilitarian

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Anonymous #5 5w

Yes, they were so not white that they were used in Nazi propaganda as ideals of whiteness. People can say they weren't considered white at times, but the fact they categorically were after, and were literally accidentally held up as models of whiteness by white supremacist societies is all you really need to know to cut through prior euro cognitive dissonance and just use your eyes. No one cares in government really cares about Gaza or Sudan as we speak, bc they are not white

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Anonymous #2 5w

Well now they’re trying to remove that from the textbooks in parts of this country, and slavery is different from genocide. Statues still stand in honor of slavery’s greatest proponents, and the triangular trade as a means of importing slaves had ceased well prior to the civil war

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Anonymous OP 5w

Alright well those same people removing those from the textbooks are also often Holocaust deniers. And sure, slavery is different from genocide, but the removal of millions of people from their homeland, stripping them of their culture, murdering many of them, I think could be considered genocide. And you’re leaving out the fact that the slave trade started being banned and slowed due to abolitionist movements

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Anonymous #2 5w

Actually, they're not, they're people directly connected to Israel

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Anonymous #8 5w

Ok, many people in that political tribe are starting to go down the path of Holocaust denial. Is that better? My point being that it’s not like people universally feel sympathy for the Holocaust

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Anonymous OP 5w

In my public school we learned about the Rwandan genocide, the Armenian genocide, the Cambodian genocide, darfur, and actually quite extensively the Native American genocide

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Anonymous OP 5w

also, there have been plenty of attempted genocides (by straight up killing people but also cultural genocide) in Europe between European peoples that aren’t commonly acknowledged as such for example, the Irish potato famine and the cathar genocide.

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Anonymous #10 5w

Evil is not new, and it is still evil. I was actually going to bring up unit 731 in response to someone above but yeah, that’s a great example of more industrial scale mobilization of normal educated people toward unhuman levels of cruelty we simply ignore as a society. This willful ignorance on part of our educational system begs the question of why, and it takes us back to the conclusion I posed in this post imo

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Anonymous #5 5w

I used to hold a similar view to you, but the blinders have since subsided past my eyes these last few years. We are the horrors, we swim and breathe in them, horror is all we know, and what we constantly subject the world to from the plants to the animals to the environment to our fellow human beings and even unto ourselves. And so we obscure this fact. Waking up to this reality goes against all that we’ve been nurtured with, but the truth cuts past ties of mere culture & association

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Anonymous #5 5w

And I don’t think this is unique to us as western whites any longer, this whole evil philosophical enterprise of modernity has infected the world over with such cruelty, apathy, & ignorance (the result of colonialism culturally, epistemically, & physically). I think we’re beginning to get to something even worse than only caring when horrors are visited upon our fellow white western man though. I think we’re getting to complete detachment, where all horrors on all people are acceptable

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