Most European countries, including the UK, have been observing Holocaust Day on 27 January for about five years, and not before time. That they do so is due in part to the unstinting efforts of a family near Lincoln whose extraordinary work you will find HERE if you are unable to visit their Holocaust museum and research centre.

The family behind this project, are wholly unconnected with the Jewish community. They just thought after visiting Yad Vashem how ridiculous it was that people had to travel to the middle-east to find out about a crime that went on in the heart of Europe. So they put that right in their own home, out in rural countryside, and now world statespeople beat a path to their door. This was well before Shindler's Ark/List, and the exponential growth of the US "Holcaust industry" (as Norman Finkelstein has called it).

Much as I applaud their work, I am uneasy about commemorating the Holocaust specifically - not out of any disrespect to its victims but because it tends to let us off the hook by making genocide a specifically German crime when the reality, as I've said here before, is that we all have blood on our hands.

I could understand Martin's rage if it was about,say, the way 9/11, is seen in relation to far greater crimes, but in relating one genocide to another I think there is a degree of common ground.

Consider Rwanda. This occurred some time after the Smiths had completed their project, with its over-arching aim to help ensure, through education, that "never again" would come to mean just that. How then could they ignore Rwanda? It is a tribute to their tact that they have brought Rwanda and other crimes within their aegis without offending their core supporters (who include just about every Holocaust survivor in the UK).

Don't think that Rwanda wasa spontaneous onslaught. It was preceded by extensive use of "hate radio" to dehumanise the Tutsis (and anyone else unaceptable to the Interahamwe youth movement). Within a day, some 690 road blocks were established in the capital, Kigali. That required serious organisation. And after 100 days nearly a million people had been killed, mostly with machetes. Much as comparisons can be invidious, it is worth noting that this rate of slaughter exceeded nearly five-fold the rate at which the Nazis, with their industrialised processes, exterminated Jews (and others).

Steve, I think it is probably right to count as genocide the crimes of the Ustashe in Croatia and Bosnia, 1941-45.Most historians put Serb deaths then at 700,000 and of course all the Jews (30,000?) and Roma were murdered apart from those the Ustashe paid the Nazis 30 deutchmarks a head to take away.This was a planned process, announced in advance in chilling detail. Thousands who were not murdered were driven out or forcibly converted to catholicism.

It would be stretching a point to class the 1990s crimes in the Balkans as genocide, if that is what you were implying, Steve. All sides were guilty of crimes, and Tudjman (who always counted on much support from the US) is more despised than Milosevic by many Bosnians. The ICTY, largely financed by the US, could hardly be said to have played an even hand. For instance three Croatian officers who admitted their part in serious war crimes, and testified against colleagues, have been largely ignored by successive ICTY prosecutors. Unlike witnesses against Serb crimes, they were put on no protection programme, and at least one of them has since been murdered.

At Srebrenica maybe 4,000 people were murdered out of 40,000 in the region of that enclave - this 40,000 being only a small part of the Muslim population in Bosnia. A crime unqestionably, but it was mindless vengeance, not genocide. (Many from the enclave had been involved in trashing some 117 surrounding Serb villages and their populations.) And is it not a strange form of genocide to separate out women and children and murder only the men of fighting age (who were originally singled out to be vetted for war criminals, which was the practice of all the fighting factions)?

But from the plight of the Armenians onwards the last century and, alas, this one, are littered with examples that should show us that in other circumstances any one of us might be steered into the depravity that makes these things possible. And the easiest way to manipulate us in that direction is to spread fear through the masses.