The Holocaust’s industrial exceptionalism is not unique among genocides

Evidence

There are many well-known arguments for why the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis was different. It was higher tech. Death came faster. It was industrial in its scale. All true. But it’s also true that every holocaust is different. Every genocide has its own particular characteristics, and every hated group is hated in its own special way. By sheer numbers of dead, the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas surpasses all others. In terms of modern technologies, the transatlantic trade in kidnapped and enslaved Africans, and the plantations the trade served in the antebellum South and the Caribbean, were highly modern for their times. So cutting-edge, scholars have shown, that the systems developed to transport, insure, depreciate, track, control, and extract maximum wealth from this coerced labor shaped many aspects of modern accounting and human resources management. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 892

Categorization

• XREF: Extends Klein’s diagonalism method — refusing exceptionalism lets her connect German antisemitism to settler-colonial logics, the same move she makes between wellness culture and far right. — connects to: The Holocaust’s uniqueness does not make it incomparable to other genocides — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 516