Kyle Sandilands has been a very naughty boy. The Australian shock jock got in trouble recently for comparing an actress who has lost a lot of weight to survivors of the holocaust, and implying that those survivors had lost a lot more weight. So I'm going to look at society's perceptions of the Holocaust, and I think that the only way to do this is to pay a massive compliment to the German people and to criticise everyone else.

There were plenty of atrocities in the 20th century. The Holocaust, whichever way you look at it was one of the worst. But also whichever way you look at it, it was not the worst. The Soviet gulags were responsible for more deaths; the Turkish massacre of Armenians was worse in terms of ruthless efficiency of the killing machine; the Rape of Nanking was worse in terms of the soldiers' brutality and indifference to their victims.

But Russia, Turkey and Japan, respectively, have failed to acknowledge their roles. Russian textbooks are written to portray Stalin as a benevolent genius; Turkey adamantly refuses to admit that its soldiers were responsible for massacring Armenians; Japanese textbooks say only that 'Nanking was taken'.

By contrast, in Germany Holocaust denial is illegal, as is the phrase 'Heil Hitler'. Two of Hitler's relatives, even though they are living in the United States, have lived very privately and have promised the world that they will never have children, so that the line may be stopped. Germans and Austrians are truly sorry for the damage that they have caused to so many of the world's people, and acknowledgements of contrition and of the harm done are ubiquitous.

Contrast this to Russia, in which one of Stalin's grandsons has recently been able to claim that the Man of Steel was not responsible for any deaths at all, and has taken to court a newspaper that has claimed otherwise. In Germany, a similar claim from a relative of Hitler would be met with outrage, and I doubt that any media source would be brave enough (for want of a better phrase) to publish it. I can't see the courts giving it much time, either.

Bluff and bluster can get you a long way in international relations. as evinced by - well, by just about everything. American domination of the world press has meant that the default has been the American position, and anyone with opposing viewpoints has to justify those positions. Before the American invasion of Iraq, for example, it became everyone's assumption that an invasion would occur, so this those who opposed it were always on the defensive. Turkey has attacked virulently anyone who has called them to task over their atrocities, as has Japan. Those who criticise Israel for its many inconsistent stances (demanding Irani accountability for nuclear weapons while refusing to ratify the United Nations' nuclear proliferation treaty themselves, claiming the moral high ground when ten times more Palestinians than Israelis are killed in wars, being a religions state that opposes religion and politics mixing, as just a few) are met with a wave of American and Israeli defensiveness.

The reason that the Holocaust is so unpopular is that the Germans have made it so. In accepting responsibility for their own actions and being the first to acknowledge that wrongs have been committed, they have allowed the truth to come out. The vast majority of the dialogue has been going in one direction, and this means that those who pursue the truth find it much easier going, whereas those who pursue the truth about any of those other atrocities find it much harder going and often just give up. What this means is that there is more talk about the Holocaust, and not only that, it's all in the same direction.

So when Kyle Sandilands made his dubious comments recently, the same predictable Jewish groups as ever were up in arms, and said that the incident demonstrated a lack of understanding of the Holocaust amongst the general public. The comment was certainly insensitive, but the Jewish groups missed the mark. People already know about the Holocaust, because there has been so much coverage of it. The problem was not a lack of knowledge. The problem was too much knowledge, because the better known something is, the more likely (rightly or wrongly) it is to become the subject of satire. That's exactly what happened here, and while I don't support what was said, I'm not surprised by it. It might or might not be wrong, but the one thing that it was is inevitable.

I don't object to Jewish groups getting upset. But to claim that more knowledge is needed is looking at the problem totally the wrong way. More knowledge is what we've currently got, and it's what caused the comment in the first place. If you asked these groups whether they thought that everyone should know all about all the atrocities that happened last century, they would strongly agree. Yet if you asked them what their own knowledge was they would admit to none whatsoever. Knowledge is a good thing, but if you want it in everyone else you must be prepared to have a lot yourself.

See also: The Real Villains, Rotten In the State of Israel