Valuing Genocide

[English assassin]

Considering PJ opened a thread a while back stating the case for Fascism in today's world, and considering I've seen him advocate the extermination of all Muslims, I'd have thought the current thread title is quite accurate to its intention. It's just another attempt to rehabilitate the Nazis, saying they couldn't have been that bad if we are more alike to them than we'd admit. Of course, it takes quite some twists of rhetoric, not to mention logic, to make them so supposedly akin to us.

I can think of a specific answer to that, but I will keep it to myself.

In addition to the points made in posts above, which seem to me to be most of the answer, I would add one other observation. In a sense, the Nazis were indeed like us. For a civilised western European nation to carry out the holocaust is particularly shocking. (Yes, that comment is, I suppose, culturally imperialist or something. So sue me.) Obviously the Germans have the misfortune that we know for a fact that there was something in German culture c.1930-45 that made the holocaust possible, whereas for the rest of us its speculative, but that should not let the rest of us off the hook. They were still forcibly sterilizing people in Sweden in the 70's for heavens sake. The US was in effect an apartheid state. (My father in law was turned away from a hospital in the US in the early 60's because it was "whites only".) And so on. So there is a nasty "there but for the grace of god" element to it.

Also, although I do not buy into the "its horrible because they lost" point, there is a dreadful sense that they could have got away with it. The Nazi/racial ideology sort of makes sense, internally to itself anyway, if you know nothing better than the axioms it puts forward. No doubt that explains its perennial popularity, most recently in jihadi form. Had the war ended in 1941, had a new generation of children been raised in the party with no knowledge of liberal Germany, who knows? Holocaust day might have had a whole other meaning.

(It occurs to me that had the war ended in 1941 the holocaust as it actually happened may have taken some other form. as i am sure that form would have been almost equally unpleaseant it doesn't detract from the point, which is in any case more of a Monastery debate than the backroom).