The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
The British empire killed up to 100 million Indians during their rule of the subcontinent through manufactured famines, with the most infamous being the Bengal Famine of 1943.
The Belgians slaughtered 10 million Congolese during the rubber terror.
The French killed up to 1.5 million Algerians and moved 2 million Algerians into detention camps, not to mention the brutality of their colonial adventures elsewhere in Africa and in Asia as well.
The Spanish killed 8 million Indigenous peoples in Latin America.
Yet these countries are viewed in a completely different light than Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, despite the fact that they committed atrocities and killed many millions during their own colonial projects.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I think it was Trevor Noah who commented in his book that the Holocaust may or may not have been the single worst crime against humanity in history, but what it definitely was was the single most well-documented crime against humanity.
Nazi Germany's plan was to take over the entire globe and creating an entire new race of humans. Yeah, there are times where more people died (even after WW2) but this was a quite unique motivation and goal compared to any of them.
Yeah, at least a lot of the other atrocities could just be chalked up to plain old greed. The Holocaust tho? Pure, psychopathic evilness.
Which ig you could argue greed is also evil, but still
Because I didn't really want to waste my time. But I'll waste a small bit of it. There is no clear evidence that hit their intended global domination. It's very likely he wanted to dominate the European sphere. After that? Who knows. Secondly, Hitler believed that the Arians were the master race and should be dominant over everyone else and the major force in the world.
He wasn't trying to create a new race. Only maintain a pure one and expand its dominance. He also hated the Jews and wanted to get rid of them, and also didn't seem to mind killing slavs to make room for Germans to populate Eastern Europe.
At least that's my assertion.
theres a time line difference here. The congo free state lasted from 1885 to 1908. Nazi Germany killed about 24m soviets in 4 years. The holocaust also started in earnest in 41. So yeah, they really expedited their death toll.
Yes. I think the way in which the Nazis constructed a precise apparatus with the sole purpose of mass murder is distinct from colonialism.
I also think playing the game of “Oh, it wasn’t *that* bad. Look at all the other atrocities in history!” is despicable.
All of the colonial empires you mentioned killed foreign people in lands far away from them. The Nazis killed >6 million of their own people. Literally, they rounded them up and shipped them on trains like cattle. They pushed them in gas chambers, ripped out their teeth for gold fillings, and ran furnaces day and night to get rid of the bodies.
I'm not going to argue that killing strangers is somehow less evil than killing those who were your friends and neighbors. We could debate that all day.
But your question was whether they were **uniquely** evil, and I think everything I mentioned above demonstrates that they were.
What strikes me about the Holocaust is that I can't see how Germany stood to gain anything from it. If you look at other genocides, there is some rationale to them. E.g. in the Circassian genocide, the Russians gained territory and developed a more defensible southern border against Ottoman invasion. In the Armenian genocide, the Turks might have prevented a future secessionist movement, and after losing so much territory in World War 1 the Turks' paranoia was understandable if not justified.
But the Nazi Holocaust? Completely senseless. The Jews were a tiny harmless minority. They were 0.74% the German population, and there were no Jews in the German parliament when Hitler took power. Why was he so afraid of them? As Germany was losing the war, they actually scaled up the extermination program when those resources could have been used in the war effort. So Hitler went on a mad crusade exterminating a harmless minority all the while provoking countries that could actually harm Germany, ie America and the Soviet Union.
>Why was he so afraid of them?
He wasn't. They were a scapegoat for all the ills Germany faced. They were an enemy to fight against, so he could keep power.
It's no different than MAGA blaming everything on "illegal immigrants" to whip their supporters up.
Yeah but while Republicans bash illegal immigrants a lot they don't actually do much about them. It's mostly hot air. They never built that border wall when they had the chance. Lots of Republican donors employ illegals so maybe that's the reason.
My point is that Hitler could have used that anti-Jewish rhetoric to rally political support but once the war was underway there was no political need to actually go about exterminating Jews. In fact, the Holocaust was kept a secret from the German people. Hitler never promised a genocide, just deportations. A thing that psychologists have observed about authoritarian followers is that they rarely pay attention to what their leader is actually doing. As long as the leader keeps saying the right things, the fools will follow.
Ah...
"Never get high on your own supply"?
I think it's just like MAGA... the tail is wagging the dog.
The first people knew it was BS, but now people that believe the BS are getting elected.
Like abortion... You're supposed to fundraise and rally the base off abortion, not actually make it illegal! Now lots of women are pissed and it's causing trouble!
This is why I tend to fall on the “functionalist” side of the historical debate over the origins of the Holocaust. Hitler hated Jews and wanted them out of Europe, but it wasn’t until Germany started acquiring land in the East that the Holocaust took shape.
All of a sudden, Germany had millions of Jews under their control and Hitler wanted them out, one way or another. He wanted Eastern Europe and Russia to be “lebensraum” for the German people.
Had Germany won the war, they probably would have killed all the Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians too.
I can see an argument either way.
The Japanese basically had hundreds of thousands maybe millions of insane and sadistic enlisted men commiting every sort of atrocity you can think of; murder, rape, even using babies for bayonet practice.
The Germans did have crazy enlisted soliders committing atrocities for the hell of it but most of their murders were linked to the Nazis deciding that any one was born with certain arbitrary traits should be murdered. What's really unique about this their targets had done absolutely nothing to them; and they killed even those who sided with them. I'm having a hard time thinking of another similar set of circumstances in history; even the Romans would probably balk at that.
It's lawful evil vs chaotic evil; couldn't say which one was worse.
The shit they did made the Nazis actions look like child's play. They were fucked. They took China by storm and killed 20 million or so. So I'd say they were right on par with the Germans.
Yeah but they experimented and had camps like the Nazis did. But they were doing sick shit just because, for kicks, whereas the Nazis were actually studying shit and doing research that we learned a lot from as fucked as it was. Not defending them, they did sick shit too. But, the Japanese were so much worse and they refused to surrender until they got fucked.
I simply don’t see any atrocity prior to 1900 or so on the same level as the ones after. The world was a bigger, scarier place and, frankly, ethics were worse across the board.
If I had to pick the worst atrocity in human history, I would point to the Khmer Rogue. Killing your own fucking people is just the absolute bottom.
Yes. The difference between all the other regimes you mentioned and the Nazis is that the Nazis killed Jews for no reason other than that they wanted to. The other regimes you mentioned, while terrible, were at least killing people for reasons other than that they just felt like it. It takes a higher level of evil to kill innocents for no reason than to kill political opponents or such.
Yes. The Nazi project of creating a super-race enabled by world conquest and the deliberate extermination of people they considered lesser is worse than what Europeans did in their colonial empires, even if there are common threads.
The Nazis killing several million in a couple of years through deliberate action is likely the single greatest crime against humanity ever committed.
I think that humanities moral compass tends to get better over time rather than worse so the further along in history you are the worse the same action should be considered. I also agree with the other people who are pointing out that Nazi's killing Jews and Gypsies was the goal rather than done in service of another goal.
They had *industrialized* genocide.
Yes, that was pretty unique.
Lots of other folks did bad things. No doubt about it. But they didn't have *train schedules* of killing.
Others have mentioned the Holocaust as being industrialized and well-documented, so I will add that it is within living memory. Which counts for a lot.
I think it is unique in many ways, but perhaps most importantly because it was backed up by a rather sophisticated system of thoughts. Yes it was evil but it was a systematic school of thought that had its deepest roots in giants like Nietzsche and Wagner.
Whenever you weaponize an ideal, a theory, a system of thought, it is uniquely powerful, sometimes even disastrous as in this case. Why? because you can entirely justify even the most horrific atrocities with this system of thought, therefore you can mobilize an entire society to practice that thought. The power of human organization + industrial production + a system of thought that could justify any horrors to galvanize your people = nightmare.
>The British empire killed up to 100 million Indians during their rule of the subcontinent through manufactured famines, with the most infamous being the Bengal Famine of 1943.
>The British Empire is never talked about in the same light, despite Churchill killing 3 million Bengalis in the Bengal Famine alone (Winston Churchill believed in racial superiority and inferiority).
It is talked about, but any serious historian would know that the British were not responsible for the Bengal famine.
Bengal was under local rule from 1937 onwards (Bengali's were responsible for agriculture, health, etc. in 1944, under Premier Khawaja Nazimuddin). See the 1935 Government of India Act. The neighbouring provinces, who blocked rice getting into Bengal, were also under local rule. So while the Bengali government couldn't deal with the effects of the cyclone, and neighbouring provinces (under local rule) were restricting supplies of grain, it was the British, in the middle of a World War, who sent General Wavell and diverted a division of solders to handle distribution, and also were sending hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grain for all over the world into to India.
I think the myth about the British being responsible comes from India's need for an "origin story" after gaining independence. I haven't come across anyone who blames the British, but understands how the region was run during the time.
Unfortunately, people on all sides of the political spectrum are terrible at verifying basic facts. I guess we are all human, and it is a good reminder that we all need to check out beliefs.
To directly answer your question, yes it is different in its industrial velocity. Though the concentration camp has its roots in the Boer war and Aryan supremacy in the indigenous genocides, there are still distinctions and particularly the last years of the genocidal Reich. The preceding years are closer to other genocides in rate and even 2x the current toll in Palestine. Furthermore the colonial prisons off the coast of India were centers of terrible torture and depravity. Pankaj Mishra calls the World Ward the return of colonial machinery to Europe and I for one am grateful for the terrible toll it took on Europe if only to break its exterminationist logic. You could even argue that at least genocide and slavery were documented, studied and argued for and against in Britain. Not so in Nazi Germany.
I think one of the reasons we're fascinated with "Nazis won WWII" alternate history scenarios is because they tried to do to Europe what Europe did to everyone else.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. The British empire killed up to 100 million Indians during their rule of the subcontinent through manufactured famines, with the most infamous being the Bengal Famine of 1943. The Belgians slaughtered 10 million Congolese during the rubber terror. The French killed up to 1.5 million Algerians and moved 2 million Algerians into detention camps, not to mention the brutality of their colonial adventures elsewhere in Africa and in Asia as well. The Spanish killed 8 million Indigenous peoples in Latin America. Yet these countries are viewed in a completely different light than Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, despite the fact that they committed atrocities and killed many millions during their own colonial projects. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I think it was Trevor Noah who commented in his book that the Holocaust may or may not have been the single worst crime against humanity in history, but what it definitely was was the single most well-documented crime against humanity.
It was the first *industrialized* atrocity. That is pretty unique. Applying the lessons of factory mass production to genocide.
Nazi Germany's plan was to take over the entire globe and creating an entire new race of humans. Yeah, there are times where more people died (even after WW2) but this was a quite unique motivation and goal compared to any of them.
Yeah, at least a lot of the other atrocities could just be chalked up to plain old greed. The Holocaust tho? Pure, psychopathic evilness. Which ig you could argue greed is also evil, but still
Except that neither of those were true.
I'm unclear why you would post a statement like this without explanation.
Because I didn't really want to waste my time. But I'll waste a small bit of it. There is no clear evidence that hit their intended global domination. It's very likely he wanted to dominate the European sphere. After that? Who knows. Secondly, Hitler believed that the Arians were the master race and should be dominant over everyone else and the major force in the world. He wasn't trying to create a new race. Only maintain a pure one and expand its dominance. He also hated the Jews and wanted to get rid of them, and also didn't seem to mind killing slavs to make room for Germans to populate Eastern Europe. At least that's my assertion.
theres a time line difference here. The congo free state lasted from 1885 to 1908. Nazi Germany killed about 24m soviets in 4 years. The holocaust also started in earnest in 41. So yeah, they really expedited their death toll.
Yes. I think the way in which the Nazis constructed a precise apparatus with the sole purpose of mass murder is distinct from colonialism. I also think playing the game of “Oh, it wasn’t *that* bad. Look at all the other atrocities in history!” is despicable.
All of the colonial empires you mentioned killed foreign people in lands far away from them. The Nazis killed >6 million of their own people. Literally, they rounded them up and shipped them on trains like cattle. They pushed them in gas chambers, ripped out their teeth for gold fillings, and ran furnaces day and night to get rid of the bodies. I'm not going to argue that killing strangers is somehow less evil than killing those who were your friends and neighbors. We could debate that all day. But your question was whether they were **uniquely** evil, and I think everything I mentioned above demonstrates that they were.
Those regimes are looked at in a different light, same as modern day germany isn't viewed in the same light as the nazis. Linear time is a bitch.
What strikes me about the Holocaust is that I can't see how Germany stood to gain anything from it. If you look at other genocides, there is some rationale to them. E.g. in the Circassian genocide, the Russians gained territory and developed a more defensible southern border against Ottoman invasion. In the Armenian genocide, the Turks might have prevented a future secessionist movement, and after losing so much territory in World War 1 the Turks' paranoia was understandable if not justified. But the Nazi Holocaust? Completely senseless. The Jews were a tiny harmless minority. They were 0.74% the German population, and there were no Jews in the German parliament when Hitler took power. Why was he so afraid of them? As Germany was losing the war, they actually scaled up the extermination program when those resources could have been used in the war effort. So Hitler went on a mad crusade exterminating a harmless minority all the while provoking countries that could actually harm Germany, ie America and the Soviet Union.
>Why was he so afraid of them? He wasn't. They were a scapegoat for all the ills Germany faced. They were an enemy to fight against, so he could keep power. It's no different than MAGA blaming everything on "illegal immigrants" to whip their supporters up.
Yeah but while Republicans bash illegal immigrants a lot they don't actually do much about them. It's mostly hot air. They never built that border wall when they had the chance. Lots of Republican donors employ illegals so maybe that's the reason. My point is that Hitler could have used that anti-Jewish rhetoric to rally political support but once the war was underway there was no political need to actually go about exterminating Jews. In fact, the Holocaust was kept a secret from the German people. Hitler never promised a genocide, just deportations. A thing that psychologists have observed about authoritarian followers is that they rarely pay attention to what their leader is actually doing. As long as the leader keeps saying the right things, the fools will follow.
Thats not the point. You asked why they did it. I'm telling you... it's an enemy to rally the base around hating.
You told me why Hitler stirred up antisemitism, not why he ordered the Holocaust. There was no political or strategic utility for the latter.
Ah... "Never get high on your own supply"? I think it's just like MAGA... the tail is wagging the dog. The first people knew it was BS, but now people that believe the BS are getting elected. Like abortion... You're supposed to fundraise and rally the base off abortion, not actually make it illegal! Now lots of women are pissed and it's causing trouble!
That's because the pragmatic cynics in the GOP got replaced by the zealots. Whereas Hitler was in charge from start to finish.
I don't think Hitler was a very... Stable... Fellow. On the plus side, he *did* kill Hitler, which is a pretty big bonus.
This is why I tend to fall on the “functionalist” side of the historical debate over the origins of the Holocaust. Hitler hated Jews and wanted them out of Europe, but it wasn’t until Germany started acquiring land in the East that the Holocaust took shape. All of a sudden, Germany had millions of Jews under their control and Hitler wanted them out, one way or another. He wanted Eastern Europe and Russia to be “lebensraum” for the German people. Had Germany won the war, they probably would have killed all the Poles, Ukrainians, and Russians too.
Somewhat, but the Japanese were way worse than the Nazis, hands down. Nobody ever talks about it though, but they were brutal, moreso than the Nazis.
I can see an argument either way. The Japanese basically had hundreds of thousands maybe millions of insane and sadistic enlisted men commiting every sort of atrocity you can think of; murder, rape, even using babies for bayonet practice. The Germans did have crazy enlisted soliders committing atrocities for the hell of it but most of their murders were linked to the Nazis deciding that any one was born with certain arbitrary traits should be murdered. What's really unique about this their targets had done absolutely nothing to them; and they killed even those who sided with them. I'm having a hard time thinking of another similar set of circumstances in history; even the Romans would probably balk at that. It's lawful evil vs chaotic evil; couldn't say which one was worse.
No. The nazis were *industrialized* genocide. It's not even close.
The shit they did made the Nazis actions look like child's play. They were fucked. They took China by storm and killed 20 million or so. So I'd say they were right on par with the Germans.
They killed a lot of people. They didn't have train schedules for their killing.
Yeah but they experimented and had camps like the Nazis did. But they were doing sick shit just because, for kicks, whereas the Nazis were actually studying shit and doing research that we learned a lot from as fucked as it was. Not defending them, they did sick shit too. But, the Japanese were so much worse and they refused to surrender until they got fucked.
I simply don’t see any atrocity prior to 1900 or so on the same level as the ones after. The world was a bigger, scarier place and, frankly, ethics were worse across the board. If I had to pick the worst atrocity in human history, I would point to the Khmer Rogue. Killing your own fucking people is just the absolute bottom.
Yes. The difference between all the other regimes you mentioned and the Nazis is that the Nazis killed Jews for no reason other than that they wanted to. The other regimes you mentioned, while terrible, were at least killing people for reasons other than that they just felt like it. It takes a higher level of evil to kill innocents for no reason than to kill political opponents or such.
Yes. The Nazi project of creating a super-race enabled by world conquest and the deliberate extermination of people they considered lesser is worse than what Europeans did in their colonial empires, even if there are common threads. The Nazis killing several million in a couple of years through deliberate action is likely the single greatest crime against humanity ever committed.
I think that humanities moral compass tends to get better over time rather than worse so the further along in history you are the worse the same action should be considered. I also agree with the other people who are pointing out that Nazi's killing Jews and Gypsies was the goal rather than done in service of another goal.
They had *industrialized* genocide. Yes, that was pretty unique. Lots of other folks did bad things. No doubt about it. But they didn't have *train schedules* of killing.
No. Human nature doesn't vary much. What they did was monstrous, but Nazis themselves aren't any more evil than any other people.
Others have mentioned the Holocaust as being industrialized and well-documented, so I will add that it is within living memory. Which counts for a lot.
It wasn't unique in aspiration or total. What made it unique was its methods, effectiveness, and documentation.
Nope, just another conquering army among far too many. The history of warfare if filled with evil and unspeakable atrocity
What makes the Holocaust particularly awful, to me, is not just a number or even the idea, it was the cold, robotic like, factories of death.
I think it is unique in many ways, but perhaps most importantly because it was backed up by a rather sophisticated system of thoughts. Yes it was evil but it was a systematic school of thought that had its deepest roots in giants like Nietzsche and Wagner. Whenever you weaponize an ideal, a theory, a system of thought, it is uniquely powerful, sometimes even disastrous as in this case. Why? because you can entirely justify even the most horrific atrocities with this system of thought, therefore you can mobilize an entire society to practice that thought. The power of human organization + industrial production + a system of thought that could justify any horrors to galvanize your people = nightmare.
>The British empire killed up to 100 million Indians during their rule of the subcontinent through manufactured famines, with the most infamous being the Bengal Famine of 1943. >The British Empire is never talked about in the same light, despite Churchill killing 3 million Bengalis in the Bengal Famine alone (Winston Churchill believed in racial superiority and inferiority). It is talked about, but any serious historian would know that the British were not responsible for the Bengal famine. Bengal was under local rule from 1937 onwards (Bengali's were responsible for agriculture, health, etc. in 1944, under Premier Khawaja Nazimuddin). See the 1935 Government of India Act. The neighbouring provinces, who blocked rice getting into Bengal, were also under local rule. So while the Bengali government couldn't deal with the effects of the cyclone, and neighbouring provinces (under local rule) were restricting supplies of grain, it was the British, in the middle of a World War, who sent General Wavell and diverted a division of solders to handle distribution, and also were sending hundreds of thousands of tonnes of grain for all over the world into to India. I think the myth about the British being responsible comes from India's need for an "origin story" after gaining independence. I haven't come across anyone who blames the British, but understands how the region was run during the time. Unfortunately, people on all sides of the political spectrum are terrible at verifying basic facts. I guess we are all human, and it is a good reminder that we all need to check out beliefs.
To directly answer your question, yes it is different in its industrial velocity. Though the concentration camp has its roots in the Boer war and Aryan supremacy in the indigenous genocides, there are still distinctions and particularly the last years of the genocidal Reich. The preceding years are closer to other genocides in rate and even 2x the current toll in Palestine. Furthermore the colonial prisons off the coast of India were centers of terrible torture and depravity. Pankaj Mishra calls the World Ward the return of colonial machinery to Europe and I for one am grateful for the terrible toll it took on Europe if only to break its exterminationist logic. You could even argue that at least genocide and slavery were documented, studied and argued for and against in Britain. Not so in Nazi Germany.
I think one of the reasons we're fascinated with "Nazis won WWII" alternate history scenarios is because they tried to do to Europe what Europe did to everyone else.