from Pre-empting the Holocaust by Lawrence L. Langer

This book, which you may have seen excerpted in a recent issue of Atlantic, argues against various attempts to find redeeming value and meaning in the suffering of the Holocaust, and in particular against picturing the Nazis as just extreme examples of the same kind of evil that we find inside ourselves. After telling some particularly grisly stories of Nazi cruelty, which I have decided to leave to your imagination, Langer writes:

I ask myself, what can we do with such information? ... Where shall we record it in the scroll of human discourse? How can we enroll such atrocities in the human community and identify them as tendencies toward evil inherent in all humankind?

Well, we can’t: we require a scroll of inhuman discourse to contain them, and we need a definition of the inhuman community to coexist with its more sociable partner.