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Comment by immibis | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting we always talked about the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials when talking about accountability, as if similar atrocities aren't currently happening. It's because breaking an accountability sink of people who are long dead doesn't have any impact other than the explanation itself. Breaking an accountability sink of currently living people and currently active wars is much more dangerous.

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It’s often debated whether the public at the time was aware of the scale of the atrocities committed, whether they were accountable, and whether they could—or should—have done something. But only now am I realizing how much a certain part of the population actually does the propagandists’ dirty work by defending and whitewashing such atrocities.

The public was well-aware. They had stickers on shops. Your Jewish neighbors were paraded through the streets for deportation. Once they were gone, people took the furniture, the businesses, or simply moved into their apartments. On the country side, there were various land reforms where people who joined the NSDAP party were given fields from famers who were either simply deported as being Jewish or political opposition.

Of course people always had the feel-good lie "oh they're just being relocated to XYZ" but in those times you'd never leave your furniture and other valuables behind when moving if you were not forced to. For German people it was a win-win situation: More work for everyone (either as a party soldier or in the construction), steal some valuables from your neighbors who just got taken away, and feel good about your noble aryan genes.

Sorry for rambling on this topic but there are books for every mid-size Germany city which detail the unfathomable amount of looting, stealing and "M&A business" that was done by everyday "normal" German citizens during these times.

And most of these crimes were not prosecuted because of political decisions after the war.

Debated by whom? I'm from Slovakia which had voluntarily copied laws and process for deporting Jews verbatim from Nazi Germany and here is overwhelming amount of evidence that everyone knew something very bad is going to happen to them. Also the "arizácia/aryanization" dispossessing of Jew property made it doubly clear they weren't going to return.

Did you imply that there is another Holocaust currently ongoing?

There are numerous conflicts worldwide where one side is trying to systematically destroy the other population, civilians and all. Whether they are exactly the same or how you define that is pretty secondary to that fact.

Whatever. Since my last Wikipedia spree on that topic i feel such comparisons are highly inappropriate.

That way of saying that the holocaust is a thing of its own, that can be compared to nothing else is simply a way of separating genocide victims into first-class and second-class victims. The only outcome would be to weaken the collective "Never again" outcry against barbary.

That's what they do in Germany. They teach it as a unique thing that can never happen again... which leads people to never question whether it could happen again... which may lead to it happening again, because any sign that it was happening again would be dismissed, because "it can't happen again" is drilled into people.

The default attitude of any human is to support the status quo, but you'd think Germany in particular would do a better job of changing that default with education. It seems like it doesn't.

Obviously, if someone was doing another holocaust, it would be in their best interests to make you think the very notion of more holocausts was prima facie completely absurd.

I went through German school, did the mandatory trip to Buchenwald, met Pavel Kohn in person and i think you are making shit up.

What if US people are less hesitant to make those comparisons because they know less about it?

In Germany it's illegal to compare things to the Holocaust, even if they are like the Holocaust, even if they are literally a second Holocaust. A politician couldn't run on a platform of "we'll do another Holocaust" (they'd be arrested) but could run on a less specific statement like "we'll eliminate the useless eaters to make Germany strong, sending them Aut to Schwitzerland" and you would be arrested for pointing out how Hitlery that implication was. You might get cleared of charges by the court... six months later.

You know i can check §130 StGB and see you are just making shit up?

You know I can just watch which signs get the people holding them arrested, and conclude what they're enforcing isn't what's written in 130 StGB?

From the perspective of the victims, it was not special, indeed. My "research" focused on the other perspective to learn social patterns.

Here are a few other genocides of the 20th century: the Armenian genocide [1], Porajmos [2], the Rwandan genocide [3].

Please enlighten us on how pointing similarities in the administrative involvement, the systemic nature of the targetting, the harnessing of technology, or the way individuals perpetrating it are made to feel less accountable is, in your words, "highly inappropriate".

I honestly don't see how you could make such a claim for all these examples without negationism.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_genocide [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romani_Holocaust [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

Unfortunately this is one of those times where Wikipedia is not useful. Any page related to an ongoing conflict is under constant attack from bad actors on all sides. Go read some books or visit in person if you want to know the truth.

Israel is actively committing atrocities similar to the holocaust and the comparison is fitting. If German jews fought back it would have looked just like Gaza.

Look at what's happening in the US right now. People getting snatched off the streets. This is how it starts.

And a large part of the population are cheering it on.

There are proceeding at the ICC against at least two countries on the accusations of genocide right now.

Whether it's worse or better than Holocaust is debatable and you can bring up a metric. Did Gaza reach 10% of the Holocaust? At what rate we count abducted children against murdered adults? Do we count deaths or suffering too? Do the circumstances of death with genocidal intent contribute to the metric?

What can we learn from the quantitative comparison of one with another?

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