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.
I don't disagree with that assessment at all! There's been a large body of works studying Fascism and I remember Aimé Césaire's words that "fascism is colonialism applied upon the colonizer" (from Discourse on Colonialism).
It's true that when seeing what Europeans did in their colonies, and knowing the history of Hitler's fascism, the continuation becomes clear: he didn't get his ideas out of nowhere and was inspired by, well, European and US history. In this way one can say I think that the conditions that brought the Holocaust were not wholly unique, but I still find myself thinking that the Holocaust itself was -- so far in history, and until new evidence comes up to light -- the methods of it made the event itself unique.
At the same time, I also think that the Holocaust played in Western Europe's plans perfectly. They too were just as antisemitic as the Nazis prior to the war (and there were large contingents of Nazi-aligned fascists in European governments that we just sweep under the rug now), and getting rid of Europe's Jewish population and deporting it to Palestine was indeed the final solution. It wasn't just Hitler's. So in that way I'm not sure just how white European Jews would have been considered. The second big enemy of the Nazis was Soviet Europe, and we know for a fact that France and the UK (under Chamberlain) were hoping they would attack each other and leave the rest of them alone, after which France and the UK would swoop into the remnants of each and destroy both. I'm not sure how "white" the Soviets were considered after the October Revolution though, I should look that up now. At least, I know for a fact that they were invaded by a coalition of European powers (and the US) during the Civil War period exactly to prevent a socialist revolution.
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.
I agree that the institution of slavery in the Americas ought to be considered a genocide. The damage it caused in Africa is certainly cause enough for it. I also don't dispute the figures and consequences of the slave trade.
At the same time, this article is focused on the Holocaust because it starts from the "Israeli" hasbara video in which the assertion that "[the Nova deaths] are the Auschwitz of our time" is a form of Holocaust denial. I didn't intend to tackle every single genocide and their various denial arguments in this piece.
Thus I don't think it's possible to erase the genocide of the slavery institution in the Americas if it wasn't brought up in the first place.
Actually, I would say that avoiding the comparison of two different genocides makes their evidence much stronger. Genocide is genocide, it stands on its own without needing it to be compared to another. This can actually be detrimental to the recognition of a genocide if we start to think of it as lesser or greater than the Holocaust (making this a factor of uniqueness in the Holocaust in that it's the go-to genocide to compare others to, but that's beside the point).
Genocide isn't defined by the number of victims, the effectiveness of policies or the rate of death. It's defined by intent -- regardless whether that intent was actually effective or not -- to destroy an ethnic group or nation in any capacity.
Some might disagree that the institution of slavery in the Americas was genocide if they can't see intent, but I think the intent was there. Certainly when an entire continent was depopulated to be used for forced labor with no care for their life, it's hard to think nobody in high office didn't stop and think about what they were achieving with that. But it wasn't the topic of this article.
If you have good reading recommendations I'm happy to hear them.
I just saw your comment above about Cesaire, and i think he was right too. Might be worth adding what youve wrote in your comment to your article to better explain your nuance about why the genocide of chattel slavery is seen as different
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.
I don't disagree with that assessment at all! There's been a large body of works studying Fascism and I remember Aimé Césaire's words that "fascism is colonialism applied upon the colonizer" (from Discourse on Colonialism).
It's true that when seeing what Europeans did in their colonies, and knowing the history of Hitler's fascism, the continuation becomes clear: he didn't get his ideas out of nowhere and was inspired by, well, European and US history. In this way one can say I think that the conditions that brought the Holocaust were not wholly unique, but I still find myself thinking that the Holocaust itself was -- so far in history, and until new evidence comes up to light -- the methods of it made the event itself unique.
At the same time, I also think that the Holocaust played in Western Europe's plans perfectly. They too were just as antisemitic as the Nazis prior to the war (and there were large contingents of Nazi-aligned fascists in European governments that we just sweep under the rug now), and getting rid of Europe's Jewish population and deporting it to Palestine was indeed the final solution. It wasn't just Hitler's. So in that way I'm not sure just how white European Jews would have been considered. The second big enemy of the Nazis was Soviet Europe, and we know for a fact that France and the UK (under Chamberlain) were hoping they would attack each other and leave the rest of them alone, after which France and the UK would swoop into the remnants of each and destroy both. I'm not sure how "white" the Soviets were considered after the October Revolution though, I should look that up now. At least, I know for a fact that they were invaded by a coalition of European powers (and the US) during the Civil War period exactly to prevent a socialist revolution.
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.
I agree that the institution of slavery in the Americas ought to be considered a genocide. The damage it caused in Africa is certainly cause enough for it. I also don't dispute the figures and consequences of the slave trade.
At the same time, this article is focused on the Holocaust because it starts from the "Israeli" hasbara video in which the assertion that "[the Nova deaths] are the Auschwitz of our time" is a form of Holocaust denial. I didn't intend to tackle every single genocide and their various denial arguments in this piece.
Thus I don't think it's possible to erase the genocide of the slavery institution in the Americas if it wasn't brought up in the first place.
Actually, I would say that avoiding the comparison of two different genocides makes their evidence much stronger. Genocide is genocide, it stands on its own without needing it to be compared to another. This can actually be detrimental to the recognition of a genocide if we start to think of it as lesser or greater than the Holocaust (making this a factor of uniqueness in the Holocaust in that it's the go-to genocide to compare others to, but that's beside the point).
Genocide isn't defined by the number of victims, the effectiveness of policies or the rate of death. It's defined by intent -- regardless whether that intent was actually effective or not -- to destroy an ethnic group or nation in any capacity.
Some might disagree that the institution of slavery in the Americas was genocide if they can't see intent, but I think the intent was there. Certainly when an entire continent was depopulated to be used for forced labor with no care for their life, it's hard to think nobody in high office didn't stop and think about what they were achieving with that. But it wasn't the topic of this article.
If you have good reading recommendations I'm happy to hear them.
I just saw your comment above about Cesaire, and i think he was right too. Might be worth adding what youve wrote in your comment to your article to better explain your nuance about why the genocide of chattel slavery is seen as different