Reddit reviews The Cunning of History

EDIT: I want to put in a plug here for The Cunning of History. I read it as a first year in college. That was nearly ten years ago and it still makes me shudder when I think about it. It takes Rubenstein all of about 100 pages to show so how deep the rabbit hole goes on what makes the Holocaust "special". It goes through the actions of the corporations like Ford and IG Farben, the bureaucracy of Germany (one notable story is of a woman who was a lifelong bureaucrat, and was not anti-Semitic, was signing off on 6 figures of "deportations" - it was her job and it was just numbers on a spreadsheet), and the history of the land of Luther, Marx, and Weber all comes together. It is mind blowing in the worst possible way.

I appreciate your answer a lot here. I will echo other people saying that it isn't easy to answer this question by the standards of this sub but it comes up all the time here, so the best thread we can get on this topic to point people to the better.

My experience in the American education system mirrors what you have said about Canada. World War II is such a huge event and has to be covered in adolescent education because of the impact it had on American society, and you can't teach WWII without discussing the Holocaust.

I am mostly just speculating based on my own personal experience but I also think that, especially in places like the USA and Canada, there are really good reasons to give a greater account of the Holocaust than other genocides to all schoolchildren.

As a society we don't just need to learn about events where staggering amounts of people died to point at it and say "that's bad". It shouldn't (and hopefully doesn't) need to be "proven" to anyone that things like the Great Leap Forward, Stalin's Gulags, and the Holocaust are all significant atrocities that don't deserve to be judged against each other for their severity or some other made up rubric.

We need to learn this stuff so it doesn't happen again. We owe it to ourselves to tailor the way we teach our children in such a way that as a society we will not commit genocide. To that end an example such as Germany's Holocaust is a much better instruction tool than say, Rwanda.

Germany was a democratic country that saw an enterprising politician democratically rise through the ranks using the rhetoric of nationalism and hate before gathering enough power to take over the country completely. He then dragged the entire world into war and turned the full force of an industrial country to the purpose of killing as many of a certain kind of people as possible. Had Hitler been more successful militarily we would probably associate Slavs and other ethnic groups with the Holocaust just as much as the Jews. However hatred for the Slavs also wasn't literally in his party platform that got him elected. Also a full account of the Holocaust is necessary because it wasn't just Hitler and psychopathic SS that made the Holocaust happen. They weren't going out with machetes and massacring people in the streets in a country where the vast majority of the population was two groups. It was a giant chunk of the society. Normal people, just doing their jobs. At the end of the day not that different from you and I. Many corporations willing took part and exploited the situation for slave labor. Were a country like the USA ever to commit a genocide it would in all likelihood look far more like Germany's than Rwanda's.

The same goes for collectivization and the Great Leap Forward. Staggering tragedies no less worthy to be remembered and studied, but also don't carry a legacy that necessitates every member of our particular society has knowledge of it, because it is far less likely we could literally reproduce those events. If I were a Russian or Chinese citizen I might feel differently about what should be learned, but that's my answer for the Holocaust's "pride of place" in American education.

Hey /u/Trevor_Roll, if you have a chance you should read Richard Rubenstein's The Cunning of History. It expounds about the idea embodied within this quote, and is a thorough but relatively short read.