Genocide? This is in fact what genocide looks like:

[jaxexpat]

36. It's troubling how the outrageousness of Nazi extremes has redefined an important term.

The first time I ever heard the term Genocide used beyond the Holocaust reference was reading about the Boer war. People of that era had no qualms about describing the concentration camp campaign on civilians there as genocide. There was the European war against the American natives which, though longer term, was possibly even more racially destructive than Hitler's obsession. Armenians are not, even today, allowed to reference their roaring twenties history with the "Young Turks". The African slave trade was, in every category, a racial genocide. The results of that outrageous injustice haunt EVERY aspect of South and North American societies today and into the foreseeable future.

The list of tribal misery is endless and not a single entry is insignificant. I think a most remarkable element of the Nazi Holocaust, aside from the sheer documented numbers of victims, is that Germany has, for nearly 80 years, sustained its look-in-the-mirror moment. Its people, their society and Europe in general have benefitted in, what must have seemed to the survivors in 1945, unimaginable ways. That is a truly unprecedented and memorable legacy of the Holocaust. It would certainly be detrimental to those victims' memory if their legacy was to be a source of conversation-stopping pride and a benchmark against which the significance of all other atrocities would be summarily dismissed.

Let's pick our arguments carefully. There is plenty of misery to go around.