Yet in Germany no less than the United States, the political meaning of genocide has never been widely understood. Both populations have, for the most part, denounced genocide as a racist act, but neither has recognized that it was also a productive one, whose outcome is the nation-states in which they live. Germans lament the Final Solution without admitting that they live out its success every day in a state where the national majority was effectively severed from the national minority, and the majority elevated as the nation at the expense of the minority. Now that the Jews are gone,
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