Off the cuff

As I was watching the presentation of the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest American Movies, I found myself oddly troubled by something Steven Spielberg said. When discussing Schindler's List, a great film which made the Top 10, he stated that the Holocaust was the greatest crime in recorded history.

To begin with, let me state flat out that I am not one of those whacky Holocaust deniers. The kind that go to pretzel like bending of the facts to deny it ever happened, and then vote for Pat Buchanan for president. Those that deny the Holocaust are not only denying recorded history (the Germans were meticulous in their documentation, so the truth is plain for all to see), but they are denying the unspeakable grief and angst experienced by millions of survivors and relatives. My issue is simply as follows. I don't think it right or desirable to compare historical atrocities, at least from a barbarity standard. If you want to argue that the Nazis systematically killed more human beings just for the sake of their ethnic or cultural identity than anybody else in human history, fine. But I think when you compare one atrocity to another in terms of the barbarity, then in my view you start down a road of "My suffering was worse than yours because mine was part of the greatest atrocity ever" etc. In effect you create a "gold standard" of suffering. And then you begin to lessen the suffering of those who were victims of a "lesser" atrocity. Does it help an Armenian or a Cambodian that somehow their suffering was part of something "less"? Did they somehow suffer less because their numbers were less? Did they lose less in the process? If you were a Gypsy in a Nazi camp, you had a greater chance of being killed statistically than if you were Jewish; does the fact that less Gypsies died (because they had a smaller population to begin with) make their pain any less significant? The genocide in Rwanda was done with gruesome barbarity; a majority were hacked to death with machetes; many women were raped. In terms of butchery, it might not have the same number of dead as the Holocaust, but the savagery is possibly worse, if physical mutilation is your criterion.

Also, please do not take this as some sort of anti-Semitic rant. I do not mean it that way at all, and certainly do not want to imply the converse, that somehow victims of the Holocaust somehow suffered less. The unfortunate effect of all this seems to me to be like a child looking for the biggest roller coaster at the amusement park; only the biggest is worth his or her attention. Unfortunately we are not talking about children's amusement here, but sobering facets of our history as a species that should give pause to any idea of innate human goodness. These are ugly aspects to our shared humanity which we must come to grips with if we are to evolve into something better as a species. It doesn't help when we indirectly tell someone that their suffering doesn't hold the same validity as someone else's, because somehow it wasn't up to the gold standard of suffering.