Comment Re:OK, but... (Score 1) 89
This isn't really right. The concept of "white" we understand now wasn't what was understood then, and that wasn't what alarmed anyone who wasn't a victim at the time. What set the nazis apart (and may still do in times since) is the clean, industrial approach to destroying peoples and cultures that they employed. It terrified people not for the brutality, but for the complete divorce from human emotion.
Empires have grown and fallen by doing exactly, morally, what the nazis did. But never mechanically what they did. We've destroyed peoples, but not with the efficiency and clarity of the Holocaust. The uniqueness of nazism isn't morality, it's the emotional impact of encountering a distilled rendering of the faults of civilization.
The backwoods also-rans of America and Russia couldn't hope to rise to that level of clarity. Our inefficiencies and flaws are our cover. The same is true of all of the "great empires", which were basically just hicks with guns running the world. Yeah, mostly "white". But bear in mind they were at war with each other most of that time as well. And they employed the same sorts of tactics against each other as they did in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
If you want to be the face of evil, start an assembly line. Everything else is mere humanity.