Quote Originally Posted by Philippus Flavius Homovallumus View Post
OK, let's talk for a moment about Nazi "barbarism".

Nazi Germany was a highly advanced, ordered, cultured, and in some ways "progressive" society. Nazi Scientists identified the "Jews" as a distinct race within Germany who refused to integrate into the Reich, confirming their Leader's suspicion about these people. Nazi engineers and planners then came up with a typically German (logical and efficient) way of solving this problem.

That solution which we call "The Holocaust" was, in fact, mechanised culling of a type actually far more humane than methods we use for pest control in the modern day - see discussion of the downsides of shooting foxes.

The point is, and this is essential, is that only a Civilised Nation could have done what the Nazi's did, both morally as well as technologically a pre-Enlightenment society would have been incapable of such "barbarity" because, at the end, the Nazi's were actually the polar opposite of barbarians.
While focusing on the killing process, you seem to forget the violence, torture, forced labor, and protraction that precede it. And given the drain it took on the German war economy, and the ultimate failure of existing camps to liquidate their occupants, I would argue against their efficiency (though to be fair saboteurs and resistors at all levels were part of this picture)

So what's barbarism? Does Japanese vivisection and biowarfare testing not count either? Be sure to distinguish between characteristics of an act itself, and the circumstances in which it appears. Is it just a Hellenic "not-us", or the Renaissance equivalent in "Gothic"? Is it specific to a particular time-period, or the size of the state apparatus?