Much of what I would want to say about Holocaust Memorial day, and the view of certain Muslim advisers to the government that the event should be abolished in favour of something less 'exclusive', I have already said in two posts back in January about the MCB's boycotting of the occasion. I don't intend to repeat myself here. But there is an issue that hovers over the present discussion without for the most part being addressed head-on, and that is the issue of whether there was anything exceptional about the Holocaust. Was it, in some significant moral sense, singular or unique in the long catalogue of calamities that human beings have inflicted upon one another? If not, the complaint of exclusivity might be thought to have some force. On the other hand, if so, if there was something morally singular about the Nazi genocide, that might help to explain our preoccupation with it and the sense of there being a need to mark it in some emphatic way.
The question of the singularity or otherwise of the Holocaust looms large within the academic literature on the subject and across all conventional disciplinary boundaries. Scholars of every sort - historians, theologians, sociologists, literary critics, philosophers and more - have devoted much energy and passion to debating it. I cannot summarize either the extent or the details of this long-running discussion within the limits of a blog-post. But I will try to deal with one or two aspects of it that are especially pertinent to the contemporary argument.
I start by forestalling certain misconceptions (as I judge them to be). First, because there is a version of the Holocaust-uniqueness thesis that relies on the claim of its having been an utterly incomprehensible event, a mystery, standing 'outside' history, some critics of the idea dismiss it as inherently mystical and as defying the proper demands of historical comparison with other terrible events. The criticism is perfectly valid - but only against that (metaphysical) version of the uniqueness thesis. Scholars and others of entirely secular outlook, including historians, have been amongst those who have argued for the singularity of the Holocaust, and they have done so, not by refusing any comparison between it and other calamities, but precisely through such comparison.
Second, it is sometimes said that the singularity claim, for the Holocaust or for anything else, is a trivial one. Every event is unique; no event is ever exactly like another. The short answer to this objection is that a serious claim of uniqueness is a claim to a difference of some significance, not just any old difference. Thus, by analogy, all cricketers are of course unique. No one else is quite like Derek Pringle or Jonathan Agnew was. Nonetheless, people don't generally say of either of them that he was unique, in the way that they say it about Bradman, or Sobers, or Warne - for each of whom there are stand-out qualities thought to radically distinguish them. So with the Holocaust: the claim that there was something unique about it is intended to convey a difference of some import.
Third, the argument against the uniqueness claim is sometimes conducted as if, for it to be true, there must be one identifiable feature of the Nazi genocide that clearly and unambiguously differentiates it from all other genocides or comparable disasters. As there isn't any such single clear and unambiguous feature - and I have here simply to assert this without argument; I have argued it at length in academic work - the claim, it is said, must fall. But the assumption is incorrect. Just as - adapting an argument from Wittgenstein - there is no single feature that all tables have in common, no one characteristic shared by all games (and which defines them as games), so an event could reasonably be considered singular in a morally significant sense, not for any single feature of it, but because of a combination of features which together mark it out.
With those preliminaries dealt with, we can come to the question itself. Was there something singular about the Holocaust in a morally significant sense? George Steiner once wrote that he found the question repellent, although himself going on to address it after a fashion; and many others who have discussed the same question have confessed their discomfort with it. It's not difficult to see why. The worry is that to claim a singularity for the Holocaust must commit one to privileging the suffering of its victims over the suffering of the victims of other terrible crimes. This worry is well-founded. At the levels of atrocity and human suffering we are considering when we compare the Holocaust with other genocides or comparable episodes of blood-letting, enslavement and oppression, any exercise in competitive victimhood is indecent. Most of us will feel that all such situations are about as bad as the human predicament can get; or in any case that they are all quite bad enough that we might be spared the insistence that something else in the way of human suffering was worse.
However, the consciouness that developed in Nazi-occupied Europe and in the decades after the Second World War that what the Nazis perpetrated was something historically new and exceptional was not based on any historical computation of the suffering of the victims in relation to other groups of victims. It was a judgement about the nature of the crime. So, at any rate, I propose. It was not some particularity of Jewish suffering, or of the suffering of the other targets of Nazi barbarism - gypsies, Russian prisoners of war (of whom some 3 million died in German captivity), gay people, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, Poles, and so on - but a particularity of the Nazi offence, an offence against humanity itself, that stood out.
This particularity is not fully captured by any one feature of that vast reality of daily murder, torture and slavery over which the Nazis presided. But there is a group of features standardly invoked by writers who have argued for the uniqueness of the Holocaust. The three most prominent are these.
(1) The industrialization and bureaucratization of death. This is part of a wider thesis about modernity and the Holocaust - associated with the name of Zygmunt Bauman among others - and it focuses on the way a modern state brought all the resources of modern organization, industry, science, medicine and so forth to bear on a project of systematic murder.
(2) Comprehensiveness of intent. With respect to the Jews, what emerged as the genocide began to unfold was the aim of wiping out an entire people, every man, woman and child, and without any ulterior purpose: not for economic gain or as a means or a byproduct of political or territorial conflict; but merely on the basis of a definition of the victim group as unfit to inhabit the world.
(3) Spiritual murder. I take this term from Gitta Sereny. Others, including Primo Levi, have expressed it differently - as 'useless violence' and 'surplus cruelty'. These terms express a widely-shared sense that beyond the physically exterminatory impulse that motivated the Nazi killers and functionaries, they also displayed an extraordinary ingenuity and thoroughness in trying to reduce and destroy the humanity of their victims even before killing them, seeking to deprive them of everything, material, intellectual or moral, that a human being needs in order to affirm him or herself.
It is this combination of features and the terrible images they have left with us that support the notion of something morally singular here in the history of humankind: as near as I can formulate it, the idea of a permanent universe of death; not at the margins of social life, and not just at the point of conflict between two societies, and not because of social breakdown. No, the orderly, 'civilized', systematic production of death - the production of death as a (sub)system of social order.
There are reasons enough, as I wrote in January, to remember the particular victims (and the centrality to Nazi aims of the Jewish victims) of Hitler's Reich, and to memorialize their suffering. But if the Holocaust has a claim on our memory beyond this, it is not to do with the victims, it is because of what the perpetrators and their crime have taught us about the potential scope of human depravity. That should be worthy of note without sectionalist carping.
[The above post draws on an essay by me which appears in this volume.]