After reading the first chapter of Elie Wiesel's book Night, I found a speech he made in New York in 2004 about the current situation in the Darfur region of Sudan. In his speech, he brings up the Jewish Holocaust to call attention to the severity of the human rights situation in Sudan.
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&Moduleld=10007205
I was interested in his remark about "not comparing any event to the Holocaust". Although he was commenting on how awful the situation in Darfur is, I do not agree with this aspect of his reasoning. Approximately six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. This is a relatively small part of the more than fifty million deaths for which World War II is responsible. As for the prejudice against the Jews, there have been other genocides around the World that held their victims with the same regard as that with which the Nazis held the Jews. In the Rwandan genocide, as much as 20% of the country's population may have been exterminated. In the Armenian genocide, approximately 1.5 million of the 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were exterminated. I disagree with his reasoning about the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust both with regard to the total number of deaths and to the specific hatred directed at one ethnic group.
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Leo, I completely agree with your argument. While the holocaust is the most famous genocide in western culture, there have been other mass killings that were much worse. Approximately 27 million russians died at the hands of Stalin and 100 million chinese at the hand of Mao Zedong. The Holocaust, while it was of a group persecuted for thousands of years wasn't close to the worst genocide. I believe that it is the most remembered because it was part of World War II, committed by one of the most evil human beings, and it is the latest genocide that most of the world had a connection to, whether it be fighting with or against the Nazis. Not many other nations got involved with the Armenian and Rwandan genocides or massacres of Russians and Chinese so for that reason the Jewish Holocaust is unique, but it is not at all unique in the number of deaths or racism involved.
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