Holocaust: can it happen again?

I just watched a documentary about nazi death camps, and i was genuinely frightened and nearly to cry at the testimonies and the reveal that if about 7000 german officers worked only in Auschwitz-Bikernau,they just looked like everyone else and were in most case perfectly average german citizens and loving parents without a trace of cruelty on their daily lives (out of the massacre stuff). Could people nowadays being induced into a similar rampage of death and cruelty? are we just learned the lesson? Was Rousseau Right or Humans are bastards?

edited 1st Jan '12 12:18:32 PM by MrsRatched

It's not so much humans are bastards but the way human psychology can work for people to ignore or be ignorant of the cruelty they cause. That is to say, it doesn't require all humans to be bastards, just a select few in the correct ("incorrect" if you're at the receiving end of the abuse) places.

It certainly seems like it can happen again because the populace of the west seems to only care about talking about human rights abuse when it's not in their own backyard (or in their allies' backyard). The thing is that people can wilfully ignore a lot of things happening so long as it is not happening to them. Additionally, people can rationalise their actions quite a bit. And lastly, when given an order, very few people are capable of refusing to carry it out, psychologically speaking.

edited 1st Jan '12 12:22:18 PM by breadloaf

Just say, nowadays there's almost unanimity about how bad Nazi Germany was, but many people who rejects Holocaust can still don't want his neighbor to be a Jew or trash their sons within inches of their lives just for being gay. In fact, homophobia and mysogyny are two gruesome examples about how western societies can still be extremely cruel, but, you know, civilizated cruelty. Racism is still around

Indeed, though I think muslims are the most likely target for any kind of widespread government assault. Then anybody connected to muslims, or people who are not muslim but from muslim dominated countries and then it can extend out from there. During the Cold War the governments of the west killed lots and lots of homosexual individuals.

Probably the most debilitating loss in terms of scientific setbacks (in my field) was probably Alan Turing, one of the fathers of computer science. He was murdered or driven to suicide (which is still murder imo) by the British government. Imagine all the things he could have discovered and advanced in the field if they hadn't killed him.

edited 1st Jan '12 12:30:10 PM by breadloaf

In a word, yes, it could very well happen in the modern day.

Rwanda, Yugoslavia and a lot of other ethnic violence spring to mind. Perhaps it couldn't happen on such a large scale as it did during ww2, but smaller genocides still happen.

edited 1st Jan '12 1:05:40 PM by honorius

Do you think that gendercide-themed holocaust would be possible? Is there any fiction about it?

Gendercide as in, men killing women/women killing men?

Gendercide? I think you could call this to Domestic Violence

Yeah that's pretty ridiculous.

Seriously though, we are definitely capable of a big genocide, people make smaller ones all the time.

Yeah, but this thread isn't about small scale genocides, but about holocausts.

I think violence towards women is harsh but never cant become an actual genocide, as most of the killings are accidental, just cause you bein a wife beater prick doesn't meant you want your wife dead...You want your wife being an empty shell but nothing more than a sex toy and completely surrogate to you, as you understand love like that...or something

Can it? It's been happening again many times since then. Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and Africa, campaigns of oppression in Indochina, the supplanting of native populations in China by the state-endorsed Han, yeah it's happening again and again and again.

Problem is, it's never called a holocaust.

The question is can a really, really big genocide happen again, and the answer is yes. The smaller ones given as examples might not be as big, but that is only for lack of capability, and they demonstrate that people very much do have the capability of killing each other in mass.

edited 1st Jan '12 2:09:48 PM by stripesthezebra

Though your average Johann Q Antisemite didn't want to literally exterminate jews either, a smaller group of leaders telling them what to do was enough for that.

Spousal abuse isn't the worst of sexism, it's just plain, unsystematic cruelty. But there are also systematic, ideological misogynists and misandrists, believing that their gender is biologically superior, and would wish to fight against the other gender.

It would be interesing if for once, when the shit hits the fan, the "blame the minority" extremists to take the helm wouldn't be the usual racists, but misogynist or misandrist groups.

And of course, by "interesting", I mean "horrifying".

edited 1st Jan '12 2:11:51 PM by Ever9

You're fantasizing about stuff that could potentially be put in book, "gendercide" or whatever you call won't happen, ESPECIALLY not on Holocaust levels. Genocide has been a frequent occurence throughout history, "gendercide" hasn't. There will never be societally induced mass movements against a certain gender, simply because roughly half of society IS that gender. Nowhere are men or women a minority.

edit:Mysognists and Mysandrists never advocate mass killing, just other idiotic things.

edited 1st Jan '12 2:15:56 PM by stripesthezebra

I have aknowledged genocides in the Balkans and Africa, but as long as these racial tensions has been an unfinished business for those areas, specially the Balkans, wich racism roots are the same to that in nazi Germany, thus, obviously, didn't ended at the same...

But the question i have is, would it be possible a big genocide in, let's say, the US or Western Europe? And moreover, would it be possible a rise of a totalitarian regime such as the Nazi in those countries?

Yeah, I don't see why the US or Europe would be exempt. All that it needs is hysteria and someone that's charismatic enough.

Also, the majority of Germans during WWII didn't know that the concentration camps existed. They just knew that the "undesirable" citizens were being moved to the ghettos. Even when the trains came by to take them off to the concentration camps, they were told that they were just being moved to another ghetto elsewhere.

Yes. People everywhere are the same, as much as they like to deny it, usually making racist claims in the process. If Germans, Serbs, Hutus, Croats and Tutsis can do it, so can Americans and the denizens of the EU.

edited 1st Jan '12 2:40:06 PM by stripesthezebra

I don't think so. Nowadays, old-fashioned racism is too discredited in the western world. It's not that we are so nice people now, but we are heavily indoctrinated against it's specific elements. That's why I was theorizing a gendercide instead. Not because I would consider it such a splendid idea, or anything like that, but because it seems logical, that when angry mobs need someone to kill, and racism will be too much of a taboo to tuch it, that might be the next one.

Or maybe gerontocide. Or who knows. There is still a whole, horrifying world of -cides ahead of us.

edited 1st Jan '12 2:45:31 PM by Ever9

Well, it could be argued that the Holocaust was more than just racism, considering that they went after the Roma and homosexuals as well as the Jews.

In a way, it was at least partially based in culture and nationalism, since they were pretty dead-set against anyone that wasn't the ideal. They viewed "Aryan" as the supreme race, much in the same way that they viewed Germany as the supreme nation. Much of the propaganda was more about rebuilding a glorious "mother country" too.

It's been a while since I read Maria Mies' book on gender violence, but as I recall, dowry murders and infanticide of female children are pretty much a pandemic in India. Perhaps they're not killed because of misogyny, but misogyny is hands down what facilitates these murders.

edited 1st Jan '12 2:51:36 PM by Gwirion

If I've learned anything from studying history at what would be the equivalent of a high school level, is that history is a wheel, a cycle. It repeats itself, over and over, just under different names, locations, guises. Could the Holocaust happen again? I think it already has. As was already mentioned, the ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe, the genocides in Rwanda, the slaughter of Asian ethnicities by the Japanese during the war. The characteristics and circumstances are always similar. I'm not worried if it'll happen again, but when, why and where.

Maybe not to the extent of wholesale slaughtering a minority group you don't like. Ordinarily, only landless peasants get that treatment (In fact, the hostility toward peasants who are self-sustaining and grow their own food is downright unseemly). The German Jews had property. So the only way to turn the public against them was to spread rumors of Jewish monopolies, gentiles forced to go down on a Jewish employer for a job, etc. After all, the first solution (prior to Final) was just to reduce the number of professional Jews to their proportion in the overall population.

edited 1st Jan '12 3:04:22 PM by johnnyfog

@Gwirion

Pandemic is one thing, gendercide is another. There has always been domestic violence, never mass killing with the goal of eradicating a gender. If any society truely underwent mass murder of one gender by another, that society would quickly undergo population collapse.

@ever 9

I wish I lived in the same western world as you, because in this one, racism is very prevalent.

For example:

"http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/19/france-begins-roma-deportations"