Slavery and Segregation vs. Holocaust

kim ryeowook.:

Or, there's the Holocaust of German South-West Africa that combines the two.
It's sad to know how people who vacation there & camp out are on the graves of thousands of dead Herero people & have no clue. Imagine people doing this at Buchenwald or Auschwitz? Or, really, how most people don't know about the Herero wars at all & don't know how un-unique Nazi policies truly were.

Meh, people actually do this in Central / Eastern Europe - not in places as famous as Buchenwald or Auschwitz, but the Holocaust was not carried out just in a few camps, it happened everywhere and the signs of its destruction are everywhere. I always say that whenever you see an 'idyllic' picture of a place in Romania, you should assume that some kind of horrible mass murder happened there in the last 70 years because more often than not, you're right - this applies to all the countries in the region that suffered first from the Nazi invasion then the Communist occupation. People outside don't really understand that during WWII and right afterwards Nazi-occupied countries were pretty much raised to the ground - by Nazi and Allies forces alike - almost every major urban centre that is now visited by foreign tourists because of its picturesque Baroque architecture had Jewish ghettos and massacres (of both the Jewish and the non-Jewish population) and was occupied repeatedly and bombed and the population dropped by 1/4 - 1/2 from 1939 to 1945. Before the war, all the countries in the region were extremely ethnically diverse, by the 50s they had all become relatively uniform with some exceptions - there are places in southern Ukraine, for example, in which Ukrainians used to be a negligible minority, while most of the population was German, Romanian and Jewish - now they're all Ukrainian and Russian - all those people, thousands and thousands of people, were either killed or forced to move to other countries. The destruction wrought by WWII is just omnipresent in the histories and landscapes of Central / Eastern Europe - although a lot of people don't notice it - I'm not trying to suggest that it's just foreign tourists, though, a lot of natives choose not to notice it because living your whole life aware of the fact that your life and the place where you live have been tainted and mutilated by this astonishingly destructive series of events is not easy. There are still many people who remember the war and the subsequent Soviet occupation - who knows what will happen when they all die - perhaps we'll forget it entirely, or become able to remember better - hopefully the latter.

I think both are equally horrible, but I do believe that the attempted eradication of an entire race of people is worse than the enslavement of a group. While I'm certainly not trying to downplay slavery (and I know a lot of people died from it), they weren't trying to eradicate them entirely.

They're two different kinds of crazy. There's very few ways to compare them. While slavery and segregation was cruel, it wasn't the white man's plan to wipe out every black person in their region. There were a million different white supremacy organizations like the KKK who went about killing people, but it wasn't something that people didn't look down upon. Sure, it lasted longer and people did die from it, but it wasn't the same. People knew about it, and there were many civil rights movements against it. The holocaust, however, was all done in secret. Six million people died in secret, and that's probably what hurts the most about it. It's kind of all on the time frame of each one, in my opinion. You really can't compare them.

so the holocaust was worst because it was done in secret? PLEASE... The holocaust was done in the shadows of the world war. It wasn't done in secret. By everyone being engaged in the world war the jews could not get help so became casualties of the war. The difference is though we all accept that the jews were dehumanised but to then go on and claim it was not the white mans plan to wipe out every black person definately shows a lack of understanding of what the slave trade was. Those people during slavery were considered as cargo. They were captured and then chained together then locked up on top of each other then shipped away to some place away from their familiar surroundings then sold into slavery. Thus they were not slaves but enslaved. We all know the atrocities so let us not exhaust that list but they were not considered as people as the laws of the european states that captured them demonised and dehumanised as well as hid behind their churches and propaganda. They did this for 400 years. This has created a people that dont know where they are from and as a consequence do not know where they are going. And as such the majority remain second class and are still experiencing racism and self hate. The white man's plan was not to wipe out all blacks but to work them to death and it didnt matter because unlike oil they saw them as an unlimited supply to the point they started breeding their own. It is not a competition to see who had the worst experiences but it is ironic that we have special dates and mention continuously regarding the holocaust but in the same breathe belittle the African Holocaust. Estimates of the blacks killed far outstretch the 6 million jews that died.

The thing with the Holocaust was not the amount of people killed, but the method. Jews, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, political opponents, and prisoners of war were all systematically destroyed. The Nazi Commandants ran more than just concentration camps - they were like farms of corpses. And slavery, let us not forget, was not unique to whites and Africans. Romans enslaved Britons. Arabs enslaved Britons. Africans captured and sold Africans onto white merchants. Slavery was never intended for the slow destruction of a race: after all, slavery was a business. What's the point of a business where-in you are systematically destroying your goods? Death was a side-effect of slavery - it was never the planned fate of black slaves that they would be killed. But the Holocaust planned exactly that: mass destruction of those who were not in-keeping with the Nazi ideal. Slavery is, of course, a terrible fact of history. It is inescapable that black people suffered at the hands of slave merchants and the slavery business. But, in my opinion, the intended, planned, and swift destruction of several races and peoples outweighs the enslavement of one.

@ junior Trouble
It's estimated 10-11 million people were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust. More groups were targeted than just Jews.

I don't know why this is even a discussion.

It should never be a question of "Which Crime Against Humanity Was Most Heinous?" They were both terrible, horrifying things that operated under the same ridiculous, appalling idea: One race of people is better than another.

When people try to compare scars, it just gets messy and, honestly, pointless. The fact is, both groups experienced deplorable and harrowing tragedies and were dehumanized to the point of being treated as animals. That is the only thing that matters, not who had it worse.

ur_best_nightmare:

I don't know why this is even a discussion.

It should never be a question of "Which Crime Against Humanity Was Most Heinous?" They were both terrible, horrifying things that operated under the same ridiculous, appalling idea: One race of people is better than another.

When people try to compare scars, it just gets messy and, honestly, pointless. The fact is, both groups experienced deplorable and harrowing tragedies and were dehumanized to the point of being treated as animals. That is the only thing that matters, not who had it worse.

Amen.

ur_best_nightmare:

I don't know why this is even a discussion.

It should never be a question of "Which Crime Against Humanity Was Most Heinous?" They were both terrible, horrifying things that operated under the same ridiculous, appalling idea: One race of people is better than another.

When people try to compare scars, it just gets messy and, honestly, pointless. The fact is, both groups experienced deplorable and harrowing tragedies and were dehumanized to the point of being treated as animals. That is the only thing that matters, not who had it worse.

Amen.

ur_best_nightmare:

I don't know why this is even a discussion.

It should never be a question of "Which Crime Against Humanity Was Most Heinous?" They were both terrible, horrifying things that operated under the same ridiculous, appalling idea: One race of people is better than another.

When people try to compare scars, it just gets messy and, honestly, pointless. The fact is, both groups experienced deplorable and harrowing tragedies and were dehumanized to the point of being treated as animals. That is the only thing that matters, not who had it worse.

I fullheartedly agree with this. I think it's pretty messed up to compare two devastating things as if we can actually rate events that were both absolutely horrible and effected real people.

@ AHLICE
Whoa, this thread is so old, haha. I don't even know what to think about it anymore, honestly. I can't really think about it anymore because my thoughts will automatically be biased.