On another topic ... I don't know how the Nazi Holocaust came up ... I certainly didn't raise it. The extermination of the Jews of Europe was a horrible thing. The Slave trade was a horrible thing of greater magnitude. Perhaps the Holocaust is given greater emphasis because it was more recent, or perhaps because as you mentioned nobody before then believed there could be assembly-line mass murder in the 20th Century, or maybe because of an ethnocentric bias (as in "How could 'civilized' Europeans do such a thing?"), and yes maybe because the victims, while Jews, were white.
Getting back to horrors. The Cambodian genocide was horrible. The genocide in Rwanda was horrible. What is taking place in Africa today is horrible. As to this latter example, Jewish organizations and Jews in leadership positions of non-Jewish organizations are far more active in condemning the genocide in Africa today, and in trying to alleviate the suffering, than any other ethnic group in America, bar none. Jews have traditionally been "over-represented" (vis a vis our % of the population) in movements fighting for social justice, combating genocide, and alleviation of global suffering.
Part of the reason may be because of our own cultural "memory" of the Holocaust. Many Jews, even American Jews, lost family and friends. Many Jews in America today are the children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. If the memory of the Holocaust as spurred American Jews to fight for justice and work to help the oppressed elsewhere, that is something to praise, not to minimize.
Mike, have you ever heard of Gerhart Reigner?
[Remarkable Nonsense about the Holocaust
Gerhart Riegner Recalls Attempts to Alert World to Holocaust
GENEVA (AP) -- In August 1942, he tried to alert the West about the Nazi plan to annihilate Europe's Jews. No one responded.
Now, more than half a century later, Gerhart Riegner says the world is still unwilling to accept reports of brutality and mass killings. And worse, he says, the world is still reluctant to act.
"News of the extermination of Jews was so awful that people didn't believe it. Even people who did know were very reluctant to do anything.
"It's the same today," Riegner said, in reference to recent horrors like the 1994 genocide in Rwanda in which an estimated half million people were killed. Riegner, 87, spoke to a small group of journalists recently about his newly published memoirs, which he wrote to show how difficult it was to get the public to accept the truth.
The 680-page book, "Ne Jamais Desperer," (Never Give Up Hope), describes his life as a World Jewish Congress official, including the dispatch of the now-famous "Riegner cable," which contained his early account of the systematic killing that became known as the Holocaust.
He maintains that many of the 6 million Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps could have been saved if the United States and Britain had acted when he sounded the alarm.
Although there had been earlier reports of deportations and slayings of Jews, Riegner's telegram was the first authoritative word that the Nazis actually had a coordinated extermination plan.
"Never did I feel so strongly the sense of abandonment, powerlessness and loneliness as when I sent messages of disaster and horror to the free world and no one believed me," Riegner wrote.]
http://www.historiography-project.org/nonsense/19990111Riegner.htmlThe "Holocaust": white germans attempted to exterminate white Jews, other groups of "undesirables" who were white as well. No doubt that had hitler been successful to the point of nazi world domination, he would have turned his murderous ambitions to the Black peoples of the world. Asiatic Japanese did essentially the same thing to their Asiatic cousins, the Chinese, that the white Germans did to the white Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals, infirm, mentally deficient, POW and whomever else fell into their clutches.
The Rwandan Genocide, a black majority's massacre of a black minority and those moderates within the oppressive majority who attempted to assist the persecuted black minority. Today as a brilliant young black American born of a Kenyan father and a white American mother runs an historical campaign for the Presidency of the U.S., in Kenya itself, there is brutal fighting born of political strife between the Kikuyu tribe and the Luo minority leading to extreme violence and death. Blacks killing blacks. A ruthless majority murdering a hapless minority. People with power to destroy, destroying the people without the means to protect themselves.
The Jews "white skin" didn't help them much when they sought safe refuge from the nazis in this country and other western European nations. There are many white people today who will tell you to your face that the holocaust never happened. Why? I would venture a guess that their hatred of Jews and the others who perished alongside them would be among those reasons why they would deny the event.
Jews founded the NAACP. Some white people have said the Jews did so to advance a program of encouraging racial interaction and race mixing intended to dilute the "pure white" majority. Some black people have said the Jews did so to exploit black people, to impede our progress for justice and equality and if necessary, to use blacks as human shields in the event hostilities once again threaten their group. Nobody's perfect. There are good Jews; there are bad Jews, just as there exists the good and the bad in all races and creeds of mankind.
Someone said, we shouldn't get into the whose persecution is worse discussion because it is counterproductive. The person was correct. It is when human beings stop being limited by skin color, culture, nationality, class and the other societal constructs dividing us and begin to respond to each other as fellow citizens of the world, that true progress toward a better world for all can be made. This time may never come. It certainly won't come if too many of us cling to the "my suffering was/is worse than your suffering so you need to get in line behind me" attitude.
I could say more because as Clubber Lang told Rocky Balboa; "I gotta lotta mo!" "I gotta lotta mo!"

In the interests of keeping this thread on topic, this post will see my final words regarding this issue.