The Holocaust’s singularity framing obscured its colonial continuity

Evidence

This analysis destabilizes pretty much all the stories that I grew up with, which taught us that the Holocaust was a singular event without precedent, so far outside the bounds of human history that it was essentially impossible to comprehend. We learned, in myriad ways, that there was something sacrilegious about even speaking of the Nazi Holocaust in the same breath as any other crime, that to do so made it less horrific, less shocking, somehow ordinary. But what if ordinary is horrific? What if that’s the point: that Nazism is not an aberration from an otherwise uplifting story of enlightenment and modernity, but its not-so-distant double, its other face? — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 890

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: ‘What if ordinary is horrific?’ reframes the entire moral-panic structure Klein examines: the taboo on comparison isn’t protecting memory but shielding modernity’s self-image — a genuinely paradigm-bending move for how we hold past atrocity.
• XREF: connects to: Holocaust memorialization lets Europe deny its colonial racial past — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 826; Europe’s Holocaust focus erases its colonial race history — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 823; 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