As bad as the Holocaust?

This keeps coming up. People say, “X is as bad as the Holocaust”.

The Holocaust was not uniquely evil. There are many comparable horrors. But it was extraordinary enough that one should make comparisons judiciously.

Often I answer, “X is indeed very very bad. But I don’t think you understand the Holocaust. Can you explain why they fed the inmates at Auschwitz?”

“What?”

“You have seen the photos of the gaunt people at Auschwitz. They were starving. But the place was a murder factory, so why feed them at all? Why have gas chambers?”

“Huh. It doesn’t make sense.”

“But it does. The bottleneck was disposing of dead bodies. Where do you put them? Someone had to sit down with a pencil and paper and figure out the exact minimum they could feed people, in order to warehouse them before killing them. The only reason that anyone survived was that the Nazis could not solve the logistics of killing faster.”

More commentaries

This post started as a Bluesky thread inspired by a thread by Nome Da Barbarian:

Rebel Against Hate says:

Trump originally thought there would be one single day when all of his authority would be brought to bear and all of [the] “undesirables” would be removed.

He said this multiple times. He wanted a show of force that would have, had it materialized, been the beginning of the Second Civil War.

The right craves “The Day of the Rope”, and have for years — because they fantasize about having power, not any of the work that using it even for evil ends by definition requires.

Part of their fantasy is that problems are simple, and that wielding power is easy.

They buy their own myth — the myth, for instance, of “German Efficiency” turning the German economy around, as opposed to slave labor, taking loans they never intended to pay back from countries they were going to annex, and putting everyone on amphetamines.

The fascists have never “made the trains run on time,” because trains are a complex system that requires expertise, compromise, and concession — with reality if nothing else; no matter how competent you are as an administrator, you can't simply order that there will be no delays.

Systems take work.

Vance put out a tweet recently about “what process is due,” and part of that was suggesting that in order for “due process” to be valid, we’d have to deport “a few million” people per year.

Our entire federal court system doesn’t see a million cases filed in a year. Filed, mind you — not heard.

The bane of anyone with a disability, “why don’t you just—” is the whole mindset. You must assume:

1. Problems have solutions
2. These solutions are easy to implement
3. These solutions will not create their own problems
4. Reality will cooperate
5. Nobody until you has thought of these solutions

When Hitler began programs of mass death, the Nazis immediately ran into problems of implementation.

It took years to build the infrastructure, and they only started once they realized that they physically could not just shoot every person they wanted dead.

Even if they had enough bullets, even if they had enough executioners, even if every single person went to their death without a fight, the industrial scale of the murder involved was outside of human capacity.

They tried. And they ran into hard limits of the bodies and minds of their executioners.

That’s the problem with reality — it tells you no, sometimes.

Fascists aren’t good at hearing that word. If they were, they wouldn’t be fascists.

It makes them furious, that anything or anyone would defy their will. Cnute’s advisors, sure that their king can give orders to the tide.

But that’s the whole point of the Cnute story, after all — the point they miss. He knows, and is demonstrating as if for children, that there are thing outside of his control. He is making a point to his court.

Because he was an actual king. A ruler, who did the work of ruling.

You may know that I hate the concept of time zones. I’ve shitposted about that before, but my hate is genuine. I think it’s a bad system, made with 19^th century technology to solve a 19^th century problem, and that it persists only due to inertia, causing constant problems.

It’s bad. I hate it.

I will never sincerely advocate that we should change it — that we should abolish time zones, and run the world off of UTC — because the implementation of that is a nightmare of logistics beyond the scope of mortal understanding.

I don’t even know how to get the US on Metric, for fuck’s sakes.

But as long as we’re talking about impossible systems we should implement, how about this one:

You can’t be a dictator unless you manage to have a D&D group of six adults successfully meet once a week for a year.

I live with my D&D group, and we haven’t played since at least November.

Clear that hurdle, and maybe we have you manage a local non-profit that relies on volunteers.

Work your way up the administrative ladder.

Much like “everyone should work a service industry job,” doing the actual work of managing a system more complex than a household leisure activity (without the power or money to avoid ever hearing the word “no”) will disabuse you of the thought that you can order the tides to stop.

God save us all from “Idea Guys.”

My little thread inspired a telling little thread by Pashawasha:

In her memoir about her time in Auschwitz Dr. Gisella Perl writes about how incomprehensible it is that an entire block of pre-teen and teen boys were made to do calisthenics every day until they dropped from exhaustion, injury, and weakness. Guards said it was to make them “beautiful” but one day the entire block was sent to the crematory while their mothers in the neighboring block watched and screamed. Dr. Perl wonders why the guards had done all this and I have two thoughts.

1. To maximize the cruelty.
2. The leaner the bodies are the faster and more completely they burn.

Nazis were good at exactly one thing and that was turning every stumbling block and every victory into a chance to inflict the most cruelty they possibly could on the people they were exterminating.

The inventiveness of Nazi cruelty is another way in which they were notably extraordinary, though not unique.

Which brings us to another thread, by Sunny Moraine:

Yeah, like … speaking as someone who did a doctoral dissertation heavily focused on extermination / death camps, those are highly specific things and moral clarity is not served by muddying the waters.

This isn’t even saying “well some things aren’t so bad”, it’s literally just “words have meaning”.

I think it’s also not pedantry, although it can be that.

When a state transitions from things like slave labor camps and concentration camps to camps that exist solely and entirely to kill people it’s in a new phase and it’s worth being clear about that.

And again, this is not to say that “well as long as they aren’t building death camps we’re okay”, because I don’t trust people on here to not fucking read that even though I did not say it.

Once you’re building concentration camps, death camps aren’t that big a leap. It’s already very bad.

Which is to say that we as a county have always been much closer to death camps than any of us would like to realize.

(A crucial component to this is the government establishing zones of statelessness within those spaces, which would in fact be something new in this context and which the regime would clearly like to do. Dr. Timothy Snyder writes about this in his book Black Earth and it’s worth a read.)

Why this came up

Moraine’s thread has one more post:

CECOT is the test case for this, a place over which the regime undeniably has massive influence but where it claims anyone it sends there is in that kind of stateless condition.

Dr. Snyder’s essay State Terror addresses this directly.

A simple way to escape from law is to move people bodily into a physical zone of exception in which the law (it is claimed) does not apply. Other methods take more time. It is possible to pass laws that deprive people of their rights in their own country. It is possible to carve out spaces on one's own territory where the law does not function. These spaces are concentration camps. In the end, authorities can choose, as in Nazi Germany, to physically remove their citizens into zones beyond their own countries in which they can simply declare that the law does not matter.

CECOT is a concentration camp, not a death camp.

A cruelty factory, rather than a murder factory.

But.

It is the kind of emphatically dehumanizing concentration camp that becomes a death camp. Like the Nazis built outside Germany to avoid the complications of German law. It is easy to recognize.

The day after I posted this, we also got pictures of Trump visiting “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida. I wouldn’t choose Alcatraz as the metaphor which starts with A.

We know where this leads.