Word: holocaust
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Furthermore, they argue, we must be wary of crying wolf with "Never Again." Steven Katz, former director of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, travels around the country emphasizing the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Though ethnic cleansing in Bosnia may be a tragedy, he says, a Holocaust it isn't. Making such comparisons only cheapens the value of the Jewish tragedy...
What is at the heart of this cruelty? The desire to wipe out a people. A calculated strategy to exterminate human beings because of their religious beliefs and supposed racial inferiority. And the world's silence in the face of this strategy. But how does the Holocaust fit into history? Is it a unique event like none that came before it and like none that will come after? Or is it an appalling tragedy whose lessons are not meant merely to be pontificated on but applied? In short, can it be used as an historical analogue...
Many would agree, but the isolationists take the argument one step further. They then conclude that the Holocaust has no real applied lessons. Since no other situations in history are compatible with the Holocaust model, we cannot look to it for practical advice on confronting evil in the world today...
...isolationists are prepared to relegate the Holocaust to the category of historical curiosity and condemn all use of analogy as misguided and dangerous to the power of the Holocaust itself. Yet they themselves sap the Holocaust of meaning by making it inapplicable to modern problems. The vivid images of evil and the world's deafening silence that this tragedy conjures up are rendered irrelevant when it singularity is emphasized above all else...
Trivial comparisons are possible, and we must watch out for them. The problems of abortion and urban poverty are not the tragedy of the Holocaust. But ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and tribal murder in Rwanda are comparable. At their essence is a desire to eradicate people because of their ancestry and their beliefs...