Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Benjamin A. Valentino. 2004. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London
This exceptional book is a perfect antidote to Holocaust dominance. It gives balanced treatment to the many events of mass murder and genocide in recent history, and soundly debunks the chief arguments that are constantly being repeated for the exceptionality of the Holocaust.
MAMMOTH HOLOCAUST SPECIALNESS MYTHS DECONSTRUCTED: THE JEWS’ HOLOCAUST WAS UNEXCEPTIONAL
Valentino makes the issue clear, “Contrary to popular belief, the Holocaust was not unique in the massive number of innocent lives it took, nor in the high percentage of the victim population it left dead. Between five and six million Jews perished in the Holocaust, a death toll representing between 57 and 67 percent of Jews in occupied Europe [note that Hitler killed far from all the Jews that he had access to] and between 30 and 36 percent of the world’s Jewish population. Other episodes of mass killing have surpassed this staggering toll in both absolute and proportional terms. If even a fraction of those who perished in the massive famines under Stalin and Mao are included, each of these tyrants is responsible for a greater absolute toll than Hitler, perhaps several times higher. In proportional terms, the Holocaust was surpassed by Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, in which at least 75 percent of the Rwandan Tutsi population was murdered. Likewise, if the higher estimates of the dead in the Armenian genocide are accepted, roughly three-quarters of the Turkish Armenian population perished in the genocide of 1915-18.” (pp. 177-178).
So two more myths about the Holocaust bite the dust. Keep it up.
MAMMOTH HOLOCAUST SPECIALNESS MYTHS DECONSTRUCTED: “THE NAZIS SOUGHT THE DEATH OF ALL THE WORLD’S JEWS” IS NOT ONLY FALSE. IT IS MEANINGLESS
Valentino writes, “The Nazis may well have wished to kill American Jews, but for obvious reasons they took no concrete steps to do so. If such unactualized ambitions were sufficient to establish genocide, the term would be stretched beyond all meaning. Members of numerous racist groups around the world undoubtedly harbor similar, and similarly unrealizable, desires today.” (p. 257. Emphasis in original).
As a further irony, as late as at least 1942, after Wannsee, Hitler still imagined the Jews existing on Earth centuries in the future! See:
MAMMOTH HOLOCAUST SPECIALNESS MYTHS DECONSTRUCTED: MURDEROUS GERMAN POLICIES, AND NOT ANTISEMITISM, CAUSED THE HOLOCAUST
Valentino speaks the unvarnished truth, “As noted above, the willingness of Germans to murder millions of non-Jewish victims casts doubt onto whether anti-Semitism, at least unusually severe antisemitism, was even a necessary condition for the Holocaust.” (p. 271). Heresy!
The author endorses the no-Hitler no-Holocaust position, as he comments, “Scholars have long struggled, for example, to imagine the Great Terror without Stalin, the Holocaust without Hitler, or the Cultural Revolution without Mao.” (p. 2).
So much for the myth that the Holocaust could not have happened without the centuries of past Christian thinking about Jews!
MAMMOTH HOLOCAUST SPECIALINESS MYTHS DECONSTRUCTED: DO NOT BLAME NATIONALISM FOR THE HOLOCAUST
Leftists nowadays lump all forms of nationalism together, and equate it with German Nazism. This will not do, even in the case of hateful forms of nationalism. Valentino writes, “Despite the extraordinary violent record of these states, most racist and nationalist societies have not experienced mass killing.” (p. 153).
MAMMOTH HOLOCAUST SPECIALNESS MYTHS DECONSTRUCTED: “DON’T EQUATE THE HOLOCAUST WITH OTHER VICTIMS” DEBUNKED
Jews consistently oppose the Jewish victims of the Holocaust being commemorated alongside the other victims. In doing so, Jews raise a big stink about “important distinctions” becoming obscured. This guarantees that the Holocaust, as a stand-alone event, gets the lion’s share of the attention, while other genocides, as stand-alone events commemorated separately, get very little. Jews are clever.
This “don’t amalgamate victims” pretext for Holocaust supremacism is exposed by Valentino, “While the causes of events such as the Holocaust and the strategic bombings of the Second World War are surely distinct, this fact alone does not mandate that a separate term be used to describe each of them. Scholars regularly use the same term to describe phenomena with multiple causes. ‘War’, for example, is often defined very broadly by scholars…Few scholars suggest that all wars have the same cause.” (p. 15).
Finally, some common sense in place of Judeocentric orthodoxies!
