Risk and Extortiion LXIII: On the Prohibition of Holocaust Comparisons

Policing Language and Cancel Culture

In a “conversation with” ChatGPT, I was told that I “needed to be careful with invoking comparisions between the Shoah and other genocides without collapsing moral, historical, or political distinctions.” I have heard this argument being made before. I would like to explain this in more detail, bearing in mind the following: comparing the Shoah and other genocides cannot be forbidden on the basis of definitions of genocide. The Shoah was a Genocide. The definition of genocide does not depend on either numbers of victims or methods used. Bombs and starvation are not less genocidal than chemicals, they are just not as fast and effective in killing. What stands out is that the Shoah was a genocide specifically performed on (white) Europeans (Césaire). Is there anything else that justifies the generic prohibition of comparing the Shoah to other genocides?

What I am naming here is not just a reversal, but an inversion of ethical gravity. The prohibition against comparing the Shoah doesn’t protect historical truth, it preserves a mythology: that genocide is an aberration, that “we” are past it, that civilization is essentially redemptive. In reality, it is the normalcy of atrocity of particularly genocidal violence within the framework of so-called civilization, that the prohibition obscures. This a dialectical process.

The prohibition against comparing the Holocaust to other genocides—often justified by the risk of “trivialization”—operates dialectically to produce the very effect it claims to prevent. By insisting on the Holocaust’s absolute uniqueness, this discourse elevates one atrocity to an untouchable moral height while implicitly relegating all others to lesser significance. The outcome is a structural trivialization of every other genocide: the Armenian, Rwandan, Congolese, Indigenous, and now Palestinian catastrophes become “comparably incomparable,” never rising to the level of the Shoah in moral gravity or memorial legitimacy. This prohibition often disguises a civilizational anxiety—a desire to preserve the illusion that genocide is anomalous rather than constitutive of modern history. In this way, the injunction against analogy protects the ideological foundations of Western self-perception: if the Holocaust is a singular rupture, then civilization itself remains fundamentally innocent, only interrupted by a singular horror. But if genocidal violence is recurrent, systemic, and entangled with imperial modernity, then the very idea of “civilization” must be re-evaluated. Thus, the dialectic completes itself: by insisting on a singular horror to avoid trivialization, the prohibition installs a hierarchy of suffering that trivializes ongoing atrocities and immunizes the civilizational order that repeatedly births them.

This reverse trivialization – the more we elevate one genocide into an untouchable exception, the more we implicitly relegate all other genocides to second-tier status – creates (a) a sacrificial hierarchy of suffering, where only certain events deserve full moral recognition, (b) a discursive monopoly, where the Shoah becomes the benchmark, and everything else becomes” not quite genocide”, and (c) a structure of disavowal, where acts of mass violence, particularly those committed by or in alliance with Western states cannot possibly rise to the level of real genocide. This explains perfectly, why nations such as Germany, Austria and Hungary, that have actively participated in the Shoah, are most violently opposed to making such comparisons. This is in sharp contrast to nations which were not explicitly complicit in the Shoah, such as the UK and the USA, who prefer to use anti-terrorism legislation to immunize themselves against exposure as accomplices in genocide. It also explains why Israel engages in both at the same time.

The time has come not simply to defend oneself against criticisms of antisemitism but to expose the critique itself as ant-Semitic and racist. It is not difficult to understand why every utterance in support of Zionism bears the traces of racism, because such an utterance justifies the violence that Zionism deployed to territorialize a state on foreign lands through acts of invasion and conquest, while at the same time reinforcing the racist-anti-Semitic position that Jews are a race, rather than, say, belonging to the lands where their ancestors were born and where they had lived for generations. The statement “Israel has a right to defend itself” completely ignores the inaugural and racist violence with which that state had been created.

It is important to stress again, that genocide-denial is not the crime of the comparativist, it is the very effect of the prohibition itself.  What the prohibition sustains is the fantasy that the Holocaust was an extraordinary rupture, something modernity had to pass through to reach moral maturity. This ignores (a) the genocidal prehistory of the Shoah: colonial massacres, slavery, Indigenous extermination, eugenics – all of which laid the groundwork for techniques, rationalities, and ideologies later used by the Nazis; (b) the genocidal afterlife of the Shoah: from Vietnam to Indonesia, from the Middle East to Africa, which deployed the same logics of racial dehumanization, militarized cleansing, and resource dispossession continued, often with direct Western backing; and (c) the genocidal present: Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, and others, which are real, contemporary atrocities that are only rarely recognized in the moral-political grammar that the Shoah established. What appears as reverence is actually a defense mechanism: not to prevent repetition, but to deny that repetition is already ongoing and indeed endemic to the geopolitical order of globalized modernity.

The false binary is between civilization and genocide. As Aimé Césaire’s devastating line from Discourse on Colonialism reveals: “What he [e.g. the enlightened western liberal, JvL] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime itself, the crime against man: it is not the humiliation of man as such; it is the crime against the white man… Europe is morally, spiritually indefensible.” The Holocaust appears unique not because of its method or scale, but because it happened within Europe, to Europeans, using tools developed for colonial domination but turned inward. Its exceptionalism becomes a narcissistic injury to the idea of civilization itself. To compare it to colonial genocides would be to admit that “civilization” is not the opposite of genocide, but one of its enabling frames.

Thus, the prohibition functions as a ritual of moral containment, one that performs the following: (a) it contains grief and responsibility within manageable bounds; (b) it sanctifies the liberal world order as having learned from its mistakes; c) it protects current state actors (especially Western ones) from being accused of genocidal conduct; and (d) it delegitimizes solidarity with currently persecuted peoples by denying them moral equivalence. This is why, for example, when Palestinians or their allies invoke the language of genocide, they’re accused of antisemitism or Holocaust denial, exactly because to admit the comparison is to break the spell.

Genocidal acts are far more common, far more frequent, and far more regular than we would like to admit. The denial of the comparability of the Shoah is a cover for the unbearable truth: that genocide is not a break from civilization, but its dark companion. That the global order is founded not just on trade and treaties, but on dispossession, mass death, and ecological annihilation. That genocide is not the past, we live inside its ongoing conditions. The claim of Shoah exceptionalism, far from preventing the trivialization of genocide, perpetuates a moral illusion: that the world after 1945 is fundamentally safer, wiser, more human. In truth, the grammar of violence, racialized, extractive and necropolitical, remains intact. Our duty as thinkers, readers and writers is to trace the recurrence of genocide not as an anomaly, but as a system, a rhythm, a structure. And only then, perhaps, might we begin the work of interrupting it