The reason that the German Holocaust shocked the conscience was that it happened to Europeans on European soil. But similar things had happened other times (i.e. during colonialism) too, it just happened outside of Europe.
NOTE: In comparing other atrocities to the Holocaust, this document does not seek to downplay the horrors of the Holocaust. The details of the Holocaust should be known far and wide, so those problems won't be repeated again. But the other atrocities held their own horrors that also shouldn't be minimized. Each atrocity stands on its own, and none should be used to minimize another.
| name | people involved | dates |
|---|---|---|
| Holocaust | 6 million Jews, and millions of others, killed | 1941 - 1945 |
| Congo Free State | ~12 million killed | 1885 - 1908 |
| Japanese Empire atrocities | ||
| Atlantic slave trade | 12 - 12.8 million enslaved, 1.2 - 2.4 million died | 15th - 19th centuries |
TODO: process this list
TODO: process đź“–Colonialism and genocide and đź“–Genocide of indigenous peoples
Search terms for finding academic journal articles: 🔎Holocaust singularity, 🔎Holocaust uniqueness, 🔎"Holocaust exceptionalism".
"In the 1980s and 1990s, a set of scholars, including Emil Fackenheim, Lucy Dawidowicz, Saul Friedländer, Yehuda Bauer, Steven Katz, Deborah Lipstadt, and Daniel Goldhagen—mostly from the field of Jewish studies—authored various studies to prove the Holocaust's uniqueness. They were challenged by another set of scholars from a wide diversity of viewpoints that rejected the uniqueness of the Holocaust and compared it to other events, which was then met with an angry backlash from uniqueness supporters. Around the turn of the twenty-first century, polemical approaches for the debate were exchanged for analytical ones relating to claims of uniqueness in Holocaust memory. By 2021 there were few scholars who were still making the uniqueness argument.
...
"In the twenty first century, an increasing body of scholarship challenged the claims of uniqueness proponents. While Holocaust scholars have largely moved beyond the uniqueness debate, belief that the Holocaust is unique continues to be entrenched in public consciousness and moral pedagogy in the West. In 2021, A. Dirk Moses initiated the catechism debate, challenging the uniqueness of the Holocaust in German Holocaust memory."
"The debate centered on four questions: 1) Were the crimes of Nazi Germany uniquely evil or were other crimes, such as those of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, comparably so? Were other genocides comparable to the Holocaust? Many scholars believed that such comparisons trivialized the Holocaust. Others maintained that the Holocaust could best be understood in the context of other crimes."
"[A]ccording to Moses' argument, this way of situating the Nazi Final Solution in relation to other genocides and mass-violence has become an impediment to thinking and investing in global justice and security because it makes slippery distinctions between what happened in the death camps and what happened in—for example—the colonies of the Global South during the period of European and American imperialism, what happened to Native Americans under the regime of manifest destiny, and can be an impediment to thinking clearly about the problems which now confront us in the Israel-Palestine conflict."