Not every cultural clash should be compared to the Holocaust. There are plenty of historical examples of societies that got eaten from within when they couldn't maintain their culture in the face of aggressive foreign ones.
Germany in the 30s wasn't the Holocaust. The Holocaust emerged from it. Had people known where things would go, maybe they could have stopped it.
Today we have history to tell us where things could go. If we don't allow comparisons to the early stages, might we unwittingly make later stages more likely?
> There are plenty of historical examples of societies that got eaten from within when they couldn't maintain their culture in the face of aggressive foreign ones.
There's an implicit valuation of culture in this statement. Most cultures throughout history melded and adapted to other cultures, both in little and big ways. Xenophobia about cultural invasion is also throughout history, but the reality is that dominant cultures are never "pure" and diversity of culture was actively censored and/or ignored by some historians for a long time.
You acquire culture through co-mingling and confusion of the elements and ideas of different peoples. Isolate cultures have common roots with others, and evolved in the same way. Drift happens with extended isolation, but if anything this is more of a degenerative process than anything else.
Our precious "British" culture is a Franco-Germanic-Nordic-Celtic-Romano-Pictish-Jutish-Afro-Indian-Sinesian and god only knows what else fusion. They should teach Bayeux, not Carta.
If you truly believe that "culture" is a fixed phenomenon, unable to transform itself, adapt and merge to new mixtures of people in society then I fear for our future.
Agreed that not every cultural clash should be compared to 1930's Germany. Alarmist. There's a long way to go before getting to that state of affairs. Northern Ireland, Israel/Palestine, South Africa, ...
