I'm looking for a situation in history similar to the Holocaust

Thanks, anyone could have ordered and payed the add from Germany and so blamed it on the Germans.

i know, you couldn't have been picking on me, because i have said that it was the only organized mass killing machine.

I noticed how the above was avoided; no subsequent replies to the above?

Please define "similar to".

You know, like how mice and elephants are similar . . . four legs, a head, a tail . . . you know . . . similar.

The carnage, the destruction, the annihilation, the pain, and the horror caused by qassam rockets

There was at least one other "organized mass killing machine" that was vastly bigger, with considerably more victims, and that lasted much longer - but numerical accuracy has never been your strong suit; I'm surprised to see Setanta join you in this error, though, as he at least knows history.


http://www.gendercide.org/case_stalin.html

I've no idea what plan(s) you're talking about (or who might be the "us" you're referring to) but if you're looking for data on genocides, forced labor camps, and the like, the previous link has some lists as does this center in a British university:
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide.htm

The gulag apparatus, in the person of its responsible people, certainly did not care if the inmates lived or died, but that is not say that it was an organization the purpose of which was to commit targeted genocide.

You make the same error as those who list other genocides which were not extra-territorial, nor organized as an agency of government; and those who refer to something like Pol Pot's Cambodia, which wasn't a case of conscientious genocide--which is that none of them are comparable the NSDAP's "final solution." The Soviet gulag doesn't count because it was not an apparatus of government with the same objective as that established at the Wannsee conference.

Setanta - your comments, which I of course respect, since I know no history and you do, strike me as unrelated to my own comment, which was quantitative rather than legalistic, as yours appears to be. The Russian government came out after the fall of communism and said its best estimate of deaths in its predecessor governments' Gulag ("archipelago" in Solzhenytsin's term) was 60 million. That's SIXTY MILLION DEAD PEOPLE IN THE GULAG.

Whether that includes the Ukrainians who starved after their lands were treated about like those of Carthage, the Chechens whose wells were poisoned (and who had to surrender after they and their animals - to their eternal credit, in that order, as evidenced in the surrender documents of the early 19th century to the then Russian general in chargen - started dying in large numbers of thirst) or even the German prisoners taken after the collapse of the Eastern front in WWII, I haven't been able to figure out from their statistics - Russian / Soviet statistics were always iffy, though their mathematicians are superb.

Occupied lands aren't "extraterritorial"; the fact that the old Sovs or their predecessors / successors Russians were nowhere near as good in logistics as the Germans has been known at least as far back as Tannenberg (where the Russians kept transmitting en clair) and also long before that; and Pol Pot, whatever his stated aims, strategy or logistics, managed to kill off a THIRD of his own nation's population isn't in doubt.

You served in Vietnam, for which all of us alive then who didn't serve are grateful, and it's incredible to me that you would whitewash mass murders of such orders of magnitude by specious legalistic arguments - or at least so I understood what you say, and apologize in advance if I'm mistaken.

I seriously doubt that anyone can come up with reliable evidence that as many as 60 millions died in the Gulag. The system of "internal exile" goes back about 400 years in Russia. Alexei Mikhailovitch Romanov was the second Romanov Tsar, and his close friend and adviser was Artemon Matveyev. Matveyev was married to a westerner, and just as Mikhail Feodorovitch had encouraged westerners to settle in Russia, so did his son Alexei--and Matveyev was married to a Scots woman, Eudoxia Hamilton (the given name was obviously changed when she married). Matveyev introduced Alexei to Natalya Kirillovna Narishkina after Alexei's first wife, Maria Ilyinichna Miloslavskaya had died (Natalya was the mother of Peter the Great). After Alexei's death, he was succeeded by his son Feodor III, a son of Maria Miloslaskaya, and the Miloslavskys were back in the saddle. Artemon Matveyev was exiled to Siberia.

When Feodor died, the Patriarch convinced the boyars to name Peter the Tsar, because Feodor's younger brother, Ivan, was in such poor health. The Miloslavskys were out again, and the Narishkins were back in. Artemon Matveyev was brought back from exile to advise Natalia and Peter, but he had been in Moscow less than a week when the Miloslavsky faction fomented a rebellion among the streltsy (a strelets was a military colonist), who attacked the Kremlin, slaughtering many Nariskins and Narishkin supporters, and hacking Matveyev to death.

This was followed by the regency of Sophia Alexeevna, acting for the two minors, Peter and Ivan V. Her principle political advisor, the commander of two disasterous military expeditions against the Crimean Tatars, and probably her lover, was Vasily Vasilievitch Golitsyn. When the Petrine faction overthrew Sophia in 1689, when Peter was 17, Golitsyn was stripped of his estates, and exiled.

Those are just prominent examples--for at least 350 years, and probably longer, internal exile was a tool of policy of Russian governments. Feodor Dosteyevsky was similarly exiled. Therefore, Stalin's exile of the "Kulaks" was not an historically extraordinary move. The elaboration of the gulag apparatus may have increased the scale of the system, but it was not an innovation. That people starved to death as a result of the Kulak exile and starved, worked to death or murdered out of hand by the Stalinist gulag (reasonable esimates put the number at around 20- to 25,000,000) should hardly be a surprise, given that the Kulaks, the peasant farmers, were those who had been responsible for Russia being a net exporter of grain before the Great War. Combined with the upheaval of that war and the civil war between the Red Army and the "Whites," no one should wonder that by 1925 Russian had lost the ability to feed itself with its own resources.

So, to review, Stalin exiled the Kulaks for political reasons. The other socialist parties in Russia at the time of the two revolutions had advocated, and to a certain extent, succeeded in handing out land to the peasants. Stalin understood that peasants with land are done with revolutions, and will become politically reactionary. Therefore, he made up the entire "Kulak" propaganda (kulak means a miser, and comes from the word for fist--meaning they hoarded wealth in their tightly closed fists). The term kulak was not original to him (just about none of the tools employed by dictatorial megalomaniacs is original to them), and the landed peasants had emerged during the reforms after the disastrous Russo-Japanese war and the Menshevik uprising in 1905. The Socialist Revolutionaries, of whom Alexander Kerensky was a founding member, in particular called for the seizure of all land and its re-distribution to peasants. When the Tsar abdicated, Kerensky formed the government which would be overthrown by the Bolshevik revolution, by an alliance with the Mensheviks. The Socialist Revolutionaries expanded the plan to redistribute land to the peasants, and they continue to confiscate land and hand it out even after Kerensky's government fell to Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

Stalin was smart enough to know that the landed peasants would never support the programs of the Bolsheviks, and so he settled on a plan using and old, tried and true method in Russia--internal exile. Declaring the so-called Kulaks class enemies of the landless peasants and the factory workers, he launched his program in 1930. Somewhat under 2,000,000 were sent into internal exile, of whom about 1,300,000 arrived at their destinations. The roughly half million left unaccounted for either died on the way, escaped or were murdered out of hand. Soviet records (and these types 0f lunatics love to keep accurate records) show that just under 400,000 died in exile.

The important factor here is that the reason for the exile was political, not racist.

The Chechens were exiled because thy collaborated with the Germans during the Second World War. Chechen and Russian hatred goes back a long way. When Peter the Great marched on the Persian border in a show of force to cow the Persians in the early 18th century (1720?), he sent a delegation to the Chechens, who promptly murdered every member. Overrun by Russians who took the lowland villages, they retreated to the mountains, and when the Emperor Nicholas I was embroiled in the Russo-Turkish war of 1853 (the "Crimean War"), they rebelled in 1854. The rebellion was put down ruthlessly, of course. Nicholas I made most Russian emperors look like pansies, and only has his match in Russian history with Peter the Great and old Joe Stalin. He died before the Chechens were subdued--not that that did them any good. It is small wonder that they sided with the Germans in 1943.

The important factor here is that the reason for the exile was political, not racist. The entire reason for the device of internal exile, going back to the early 17th century, at least, was political, not racist.

The horrors of the Kulak exile have been grossly exaggerated--at least in terms of the number who died. The Chechens got off pretty good, given that they were exiled to Muslim territories, and not slaughtered out of hand, an incredible leniency for the Stalin regime. As i've said, i don't for a moment believe that 60,000,000 died in the gulag--maybe a number like that in the four centuries of internal exile, but not in the Stalinist camps.

The gulag, the Kulak exile, the Chechen exile--none of them were a concerted, ethnically targeted attempt at genocide. The NSDAP's "final solution" was.

Occupied lands are estraterritorial, because they do not form a part of the territory of the nation which invades and occupies them.

I'm not whitewashing any mass murders, and i resent such a claim. The question is whether or not there is a situation in history similar to the holocaust. Since the term "the holocaust" commonly refers to the organized, targeted slaughter of millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals and disabled people by the apparatus of the NSDAP, and since it is obvious that this member was asking about that (and some totally bizarre digression about telephones), the answer is, "No, there has never been a situation in history similar to the holocaust."

That there have been horrendous slaughters neither i nor anyone i see in this thread is denying. To the single, specific question of the thread, however, the answer is no.

See, this illustrates nicely why I asked about the "similar to". To me, none of your distinctions here makes any important difference, because they don't make any practical difference to the victims. Accordingly, I don't think it's an error to group the Holocaust with the Gulag and other instances of genocide.

The answer is no; the crusaders were an entirely justifiable defensive reaction to the slammite takeover of what had been a peaceful Christian world.

Try this:

http://www.holodomor.org/

That was Stalin's (Uncle Joe to demokkkrats) great purge of the peasant farming classes in the Ukraine. Estimates of the toll vary from around two million to around ten or twelve million.

The Turkish destruction of Kurds in the early 1900s also qualifies. To find anything comparable in past ages you have to go back several centuries. The Mongol destructions of several antique nations including the Tangut kingdom and the Eastern Bulgar kingdom likely qualify.

Even by a really ignorant and dull-witted exaggeration of the death toll from the Kulak exile, you still haven't got a case of an organized, ethnically-targeted mass murder. The Soviet examples don't qualify as a situation similar to the holocaust.

The distinctions are the only important aspect of the question. Otherwise, as i've already mentioned, the Iceni rebellion in Britannia in the first century qualifies, because of the proportion of the population killed. The slaughter of Saxons by the Franks before and during the reign of Charlemagne would qualify. The slaughter of Cathars in the Albigensian crusade would qualify.

In fact, any number of huge slaughters of humans by humans in history, from ancient times right up to the present would qualify. I have not ignored such slaughters, nor have i whitewashed them. The holocaust by the NSDAP is a distinct historical event precisely because it was organized as a function of government, and was motivated by racist hatred.

In nothing have i even remotely suggested that such a circumstance would mitigate the horror for the victims or the survivors of other mass murders. I'm simply making the point, which is valid, that there is not another similar situation in history.

And that is a problem because ... ?

I believe literarypoland is correct. The plan was to turn eastern Europe into one big colonial breadbasket for Germany. Huge plantations with Slavic peoples doing the labor. Slavic peoples would be utilized in factories also. You see the Third Reich believed in slave labor, just like the old pagan Romans.