agip wrote:
a civilized people turned evil wrote:The scale and the systematic insane cruelty of Holocaust makes it the darkest moment in humanity.
that's the easy answer, but I don't think it is true. the holocaust was relatively small and came in the midst of ww2, which was far worse. It also ignores all the asians and soviets killed in much larger numbers.
You're saying the nature of it was particularly nasty b/c of its efficiency and systematic nature. good points, but the starvations in china and Ukraine/russia really were worse.
I agree that the consequences of Mao's and Stalin's actions were worse than those of Hitler. Communism has caused tens of millions more deaths than national socialism.
The reason Holocaust is even more evil is that it was a targeted mass murder by educated, civilized and modern human beings. There were no excuses, no promises of a better society, no justification for the killings, no evil oppressors or enemies. It was a clean and pure extermination of Jews picked out from every country in Europe only because they were Jewish. There was no way the Jews could "convert" to save themselves. In that respect, even the pedophile warlord Mohammad was better.
It's all about intensity vs scale.