Holocaust

I've never read something that so succinctly explained what I feel about the Holocaust, and why it just represents the extent to which men can be evil.

"One of the most important outcomes of the experience of World War II is the scale of human atrocity. The most visible, if not morally paralyzing, aspect of the atrocities of this period is capsulated in the term 'the Holocast.' The Holocaust, seen in the context of the World War II experience, provoked serious reappraisal of the adequacy and morality of the forms of human governance on a global basis. The Holocaust was an event involving a self-conscious policy on the part of the Nazi Herrenvolk to use the apparatus of state power to systematically extinguish whole groups of human beings on the basis of group labels of identity. It was a process facilitated by the technological capacity of an industrial state waging an industrial form of total war. Hidden under the veil of political and judicial sovereignty, the Holocaust represented complete denial of people's right to existence, subject to Nazi dominance. A form of governance based on apparently limitless sovereignty it raised a profound question about the fundamental rights of persons caught in the web of sovereign omnipotence."

-Winston P. Nagan & Vivile F. Rodin
Racism, Genocide, and Mass Murder: Toward a Legal Theory About Group Deprivations