In the Annals of Genocide, the Holocaust Has No Parallel

By Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Though the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was passed in 1948, it was virtually ignored for decades. Has the pendulum now swung too far in the other direction?

In recent times the term genocide, coined as a response to the attempt to exterminate the word’s Jewish population by the Nazis, has begun to lose much of its original meaning. 

Many of the events so described today were the result of inter-ethnic massacres, as in Rwanda or Darfur, where each side at one time or another engaged in violence against the other.

Or else the atrocities were the horrific by-products of war, where the stronger party felt the other was a “fifth column” supporting its enemies. That was the accusation brought by the Ottoman Turks against the Armenians in the First World War.

And we all know of the mass destruction of various peoples in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas, by European conquerors. 

The term “cultural genocide” is now used to describe Canada’s shameful and misguided attempt at the forced assimilation of aboriginal peoples. Similar events occurred in Australia and the United States.

In Southwest Africa, now Namibia, the German colonial authorities nearly exterminated the Herero before the First World War. And while the Namibian example is particularly terrible, it differs only in degree, not in kind, from what all the colonial powers were doing.

Communists were responsible for mass murder based on ideological madness: Joseph Stalin’s enforced starvation of Ukrainians and other Soviet citizens during collectivization of agriculture in the 1930s, Mao Zhedong’s slaughter of untold millions in Communist China between 1949 and 1976, and Cambodian leader Pol Pot’s murder of at least 1.5 million of his own people in the 1970s, fall into this category. They were all considered “class enemies.”

The Holocaust is different than all of these, in any case, in that the entire basis of a world view – National Socialism or Nazism – revolved around the absolute world-historical necessity of cleansing the world of a terrible menace – “the Jews,” deemed carriers of evil, like viruses or rats. 

It was a metaphysical idea that hardly involved “real” flesh-and-blood Jews, though they were the ones who paid the price. It was more like the witchcraft paranoia of earlier times.

So, though the Nazis also killed millions of other civilians, as well as over three million Soviet prisoners of war, those were war crimes, but not genocide.

The Holocaust was not a matter of settling scores between enemies, as in the Yugoslav wars and mutual “ethnic cleansing” among Albanian Kosovars, Muslim Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs in the 1990s, or the desire for plunder. It was the culmination of a centuries-old, and meticulously crafted, ideology – anti-Semitism – which had now reached the final stage of “eliminationism.” 

In none of the other cases did the perpetrators deem it an absolute requirement to rid the entire planet of their foes – the deeds were more contingent on specific conditions and limited in scope. In fact the Rwandan massacres were in the nature of a massive pogrom, the state hardly had a role in it – neighbours killed neighbours with machetes or burned them alive. 

Other than the Kristallnacht events in 1938, ordinary Germans did not slaughter their Jewish neighbours or destroy their properties; the Holocaust to come a few years later was carried out methodically by a massive bureaucracy created for that very purpose. It was industrial murder.

It is true that the Holocaust might not have happened had there not been a war, but then the war itself was made “necessary,” in the mind of Hitler, to eradicate the control by “world Jewry” of, among other states, the Soviet Union.

Of course this doesn’t mean that these other barbarities were any less loathsome or less tragic for the people murdered. But they were not the same as the Holocaust.

So if we are now to apply the word genocide to all these other events, perhaps we should differentiate between them and the destruction of the Jews – and just use the word Holocaust for the latter.