People resist genocide lessons by exoticizing the event as untypical

Evidence

Understandably, resistance to accepting this lesson of the Holocaust is widespread. It manifests itself primarily in the manifold attempts to exoticize or marginalize the Holocaust as an episode confined to peculiar circumstances, marginal and untypical as far as modern society in general is concerned, and so of little or no consequence for the opinions held of the nature of modern living. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 367

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth pursuing: what social-psychological mechanisms drive the need to marginalize genocides as exceptions rather than indictments of the present order?