Holocausto - Uniqueness

Uniqueness

Dr. Shimon Samuels, director for International Liaison of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, describes the acrimonious debate that exists between "specifists" and "universalists". The former fear debasement of the Holocaust by invidious comparisons, while the latter places the Holocaust alongside non-Jewish experiences of mass extermination as part and parcel of the global context of genocide. Dr. Samuels considers the debate, ipso facto, to dishonour the memory of the respective victims of each genocide. In his words, "Each case is specific as a threshold phenomenon, while each also adds its unique memory as signposts along an incremental continuum of horror." Peter Novick argued: "A moment's reflection makes clear that the notion of uniqueness is quite vacuous . . ., in practice, deeply offensive. What else can all of this possibly mean except 'your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary'."

Adam Jones, professor at the University of British Columbia Okanagan (Canada), believes that claims of uniqueness for the Holocaust have become less common since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In 1997, the publication of The Black Book of Communism led to further debate on the comparison between Soviet and Nazi crimes; the book argued that Nazi crimes were not very different from the Soviet ones, and that Nazi methods were to a significant extent adopted from Soviet methods; in the course of the debate, the term "Red Holocaust" appeared in discourse. In The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein writes that the uniqueness theory first appeared in public discourse in 1967, but that it does not figure in scholarship of the Nazi Holocaust. Steven Katz of Boston University has argued that the Holocaust is the only genocide that has occurred in history, and defines "Holocaust" to include only "the travail of European Jewry" and not other victims of the Nazis.