Discussion about this post

User's avatar
sistersmith's avatar

To be direct, my firm belief is that the Holocaust is called "incomparable", because, horror upon horrors, white people were suffering dehumanising and industrial-scale mass murder for once. That's the reason.

White people are supposedly incomparable, therefor, so is a mass murder of them. White people refuse to be in the same class of victim as everyone else. There is something supposedly unfathomable about the mass killing of white people, it is all too fathomable to mass kill people of color.

Expand full comment
Dylan Kerrigan's avatar

A good read. thank you. As a Caribbean person, in your comparisons and claims about the Holocaust being a genocide worse than another, how come you dont see or recognise the genocidal aspect of chattel slavery in the Caribbean?

British slave ships brought 5.5 million enslaved Africans into their Caribbean colonies over 180 years. When slavery was abolished in 1838 there were 800,000 people remaining. That is a retention/survival rate of 15 per cent.

The regime of enslavement was crafted by policies and attitudes that were clearly genocidal.

Indigenous genocide, African chattel slavery and genocide, and Asian contract slavery were three acts of a single play, a single process by which the British state forcefully extracted wealth from the Caribbean resulting in its persistent, endemic poverty, that we still live today. No one has made amends for the genocide of Caribbean Chattel Slavery, yet here you are erasing it from the conversation.

Expand full comment
3 more comments...

No posts