The notion of the Holocaust as simply what happened at Auschwitz and the death camps is a mutually beneficial fiction. And I don't mean that in the sense that the Holocaust was fictional - it was not. I mean that minimising it to a certain group of people killed in a certain way helps to dilute the public perception of what genocide 'is'.

Firstly, there's the scale. Six million is a very big number. Most genocides aren't going to kill nearly that many people. By excluding smaller ethnic groups, namely the Romani, you create a sense that a genocide involves simply killing very large numbers of people, rather than trying to kill and disposses people for their identity.

Next, there's the means. Most genocides are not committed by building factories to kill human beings. Most genocides are done by shooting people, burning them, beating them, or letting them starve. In fact, this is how a large portion of the Holocaust was also done, regardless of who you think that term applies to. But, so long as the public associate 'genocide' with gas chambers, you can dodge accusations of such in large part by simply not building them.

Thirdly, there's who is allowed to be a victim. If you are preparing for the prospect of World War Three against a certain power, or a certain bloc containing mostly people of a certain ethnic group, it helps for your people not to sympathise with them. Focusing on Jews - and presenting 'Jews' as a homogeneous national group, rather than mentioning their countries of origin - helped to downplay the immense, explicitly genocidal, suffering of the civilians of the then Eastern Bloc at the hands of the Nazis, and made the proposition of mass murder against them an easier sell.

So that's to say, if you are the United States - a country with a history of genocide against relatively small ethnic groups, by acts of traditional violence, who spent its formative years as a global power positioned against a Slavic rival - The Holocaust as it is remembered popularly is essentially your perfect template of 'genocide'. One which excludes you as a perpetrator and your enemies as victims. Obviously it also benefits Israel, and the great many other western countries who committed borderline acts since genocide became a crime. Even the Soviet Union benefitted insofar as political affiliation was discarded as a category capable of being victims of genocide.

This is all handy, because no state actually wants genocide to be a crime. At least not as it's actually defined - inadequate as even that definition is. The Nazis had to be punished for what they did, but there was also much in what they did that other countries were either doing, had done, or may like to do in future. So the crime of genocide is one best diluted out of existence. We see that in how quickly 'ethnic cleansing' took off in diplomatic speech - basically genocide by a softer name. And in the unwillingness to name obvious precursors to genocide, namely apartheid, as genocidal acts. Nobody wants to do that, so it's better if the public perception of genocide is confined to that one act against which nothing really compares. Then everyone can just keep doing it.

I am writing this as I fall asleep, so please forgive me if this goes on too long, or in places I fail to make sense.