“Genocide,” began the professor, “was not new nor did it originate in Nazi Germany. If one reads the Old Testament one easily finds evidence that the Hebrews engaged in it, often on the orders of Yahweh, and frequently quite proudly. In Judges you can read of the Israeli leader, Jephthah, calling together the men of Gilead to murder tens of thousands of people using the pronunciation of a word as the sole test for life or death.
What the Nazi regime did was bring genocide into the industrial age. Previous to the rise in Germany, even in World War I, if a tribe, a government, or a political party, wanted to execute an entire people, they had to do it in person, one by one, often by hand.
What the Nazis did was invent ways of killing people, en masse, that had never been seen before, industrializing it through means of production that previously had been used to create rather than murder.”
The professor paused, looking out at his audience of blue-eyed, blonde students. After a moment he ordered, “Discuss.”
See the author’s published work here.
Related Posts
The American: Chapter 39 Next Post:
The American: Chapter 40
