Six Out of Seven: How to talk about the Shoah

Eighty years later, we still don't know how to talk about the Shoah. The key figure is not that six million Jews died, the key figure is that six million died OUT OF SEVEN MILLION. THAT's what makes the Holocaust unique in recorded history. Other numbers are larger, and you'll have to excuse me for mentioning some ghoulish figures, for they all defy belief, but six out of seven is the ratio that makes the suffering of Jews unique among all groups of human beings.

On the intersectional side of things, you often hear that ten million died in the Belgian Congo under King Leopold. What's not said is that it was ten million out of twenty, and ten is an extremely high estimate that's sometimes put as low as two. In Russia you hear that Russians suffered as much or more in World War II, and that's true in some ways, something like 27 million Russians died in what they call The Great Patriotic War, but of the USSR's population that was one in six. In China under Mao, somewhere between 40 and 120 million died. It's enough to make you wash your hands of humanity forever, but China in 1950 was about 550 million people, so that's somewhere percentage-wise between 8 and the low twenties. It's true, the genocide of Native Americans wiped out 95% of the population, but it was conducted over 400 years, facilitated in large parts by accidental incursions of disease rather than deliberate murder. The closest modern approximation is the Armenians, and again, we don't have very reliable figures. The percentage may in fact be close to the Jews, as high as 1.2 million out of 1.5 - 80%, but that's only a high estimate. The low estimate is 664,000 out of 2.4 million, roughly 27%.

The horror of it all is unspeakable, and how can we wonder why genocide keeps happening when people don't even know these figures which should be on the standardized tests of every high school student?

What makes the Holocaust unique is its almost complete success. For the suffering of the Shoah, we have, relatively speaking, extremely reliable records - the Germans were, as ever, quite punctilious. It is the only genocide in modern history for which the goal was the complete annihilation of a scattered peoplehood. It is the only genocide in which the victims were chased around a continent from country to country in the effort to end them. It is the only genocide whose effort spanned almost an entire continent all at once; and the vast majority of it took place over just two years.

And if that's not horrific enough, ample evidence exists that Stalin was getting ready to finish in Europe what Hitler started, and only his death prevented his murderous plans. Counting Soviet Russia, before the Holocaust were nine million Jews in Europe. Had Stalin lived just a few years longer, all but a few hundred thousand would be gone.

Jews don't have a monopoly on suffering or genocide, but the Shoah has no parallel in man's inhumanity to other human beings, and those who insist that other groups endured what Jews endured are no friend to the Jews.

The worst fight anyone ever got into on this once very loud wall (much louder than now if you can believe it) was when I insisted on exactly that sentiment. All sorts of left friends and acquaintances I haven't heard from in years recoiled in disgust: 'horror is horror' they exclaimed, 'how can you quantify it?', they brought up imperialism, they brought up the suffering of nearby in Baltimore, they brought up how the Holocaust is always used as a cudgel to minimize other people's suffering.

Stalin is supposed to have uttered two quotes that put all that in perspective. One is the relatively famous: 'the death of a single person is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic.' The other? 'Death solves all problems. No man, no problem.' You can't quantify horror, but you can quantify murder.

There are other forms of horror in the world that are arguably as bad, but Jewish history is unique in how frequently it contains the widespread profusion of nearly all those other forms of horror in addition to the worst of murder. It is also unique in how it prioritizes life over all things. So long as one is alive, there is hope for improvement, all that can cease hope is death.

The point is this: there are ideologies proliferating these days which tell us the suffering of the Jews is held on a pedestal to minimize the suffering of others.

Fuck them.

The purpose of showing the Shoah as the unique crime of history is not to minimize other people's suffering but to prevent anything on a scale nearly so vast - whether inflicted on Jews or on anybody else, by mapping out all the symptoms and signposts. Records are meant to be broken, and the Shoah is there as a lesson for exactly how these events can happen again.

There may be another post later tonight.