ABSTRACT
People who regard critically the genocide that was carried out in America's past, Christopher Hitchens continued, are simply reactionary, since such grossly inhuman atrocities "happen to be the way history is made". The Holocaust, it is said by proponents of this standard, "was unique in quantitive terms" because it destroyed more innocent people "per unit of time" than has any other mass killing event. In a discussion of the uniqueness of the Holocaust in contrast to earlier genocides, Zygmunt Bauman sees one aspect of the singularity of "modern" genocide in what he describes as the Nazis' image of the world as a garden in which the Jews were weeds. As Zygmunt Bauman has observed, Israel uses the Holocaust "as the certificate of its political legitimacy, a safe-conduct pass for its past and future policies, and above all as the advance payment for the injustices it might itself commit".
