Holocaust Museum thoughts

A group of us went through the Holocaust museum today following our tour of the White House. I'd previously been to the newest addition there about Propaganda and how the Nazi leaders were able to basically plant into the minds of the people these ideas that Jews (and other 'lesser' beings) were evil and should be swept away and nearly carried it out (Inception!!!). Super interesting and down right scary really.. how by degrees and by many small means they were able to be lead away until they were desensitized to the truth of the atrocities which were taking place, a part of which many of them took part in.

We were talking in our comparative economics course yesterday about the structure of the socialist economy, the struggles they had, and also some of the more political aspects of it all. Stalin killled millions more than Hitler. "Hitler was small cookies compared to Stalin", our teacher said. Why is that in our schools etc. Hitler and the Nazi regime are the more infamous and diabolical and Stalin is really barely even mentioned?

The topic of in-group vs out-group arose. Stalin killed his closest friends, as well as millions of others. His was different than Hitler's technique. Hitler was trying to create the perfect Germany. Stalin was simply striving to advance and maintain his own political regime and did so through instilling fear into the minds of the governed. While many of the Jews that were killed were German, they had a label: the out-group. 

The unknown. 

All of us have experienced fear. Many times this fear is a result of the thing being feared being unknown or unfamiliar. Bugs, snakes, other crawly things.. we know some of them can be poisonous and can cause harm but being unable to tell the difference tend to generalize and to fear them.. in American culture at least.. That's something I learned in one of my courses last semester at NCSU, 'Bugs and People'. Much of the fear concerning bugs is a learned or conditioned fear. Alot of times you'll find kids playing with bugs and having a good ole time until we teach them that they're dangerous or gross. We condition them to fear, to avoid, to hate. Anyways, we place labels on things all the time. As a result we have conflict. Segregation arises. Expelling residents who are not like us occurs. Rarely, although occasionally, this is brought to a large-scale massacre and sometimes evolves into World Wars. 

I think Hitler is more talked about and more infamous because he was able to abuse his power and influence in manipulating something that is rather normal in our human condition, separating between the known and the unknown, fear-mongering that unknown, spurning that mounting fear into action, until his means of erasing an ethnicity was nearly accomplished. 

He is more infamous and more remembered because it is not improbable that this could happen again if we do not learn from it, to learn what we are capable of as humans, that we have the ability to destroy ourselves.