Credit phb Whose Suffering Counts? | P.H. Bloecker bloecker.wordpress.com · Essays on Life, Literature & Ideas Whose Suffering Counts? Slavery, the Holocaust, and the dangerous arithmetic of atrocity by P.H. Bloecker Gold Coast QLD Australia, 25 March 2026 The UN General Assembly voted yesterday on a resolution declaring the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity. 123 nations voted in favour. Three voted against: the United States, Israel, and Argentina. 52 abstained — among them all 27 members of the European Union and the United Kingdom. The resolution is non-binding. It is political. And its most dangerous word stands in the superlative: the gravest. Because a superlative implies a ranking. And a ranking of human catastrophes inevitably raises a question that nobody in that chamber spoke aloud — but that everyone present heard: Is the slave trade worse than the Holocaust?And is that even a question we are permitted to ask? I. Frankl and Benjamin Were Jews In recent days I have been writing about Viktor Frankl and Walter Benjamin — two Jewish intellectuals from the German-speaking world, both caught in the machinery of the same annihilation, both witnesses to the absolute limit of human barbarism. Frankl survived Auschwitz. Benjamin died fleeing it, in a hotel room in Port Bou on the Spanish border, on the night of 25 September 1940. Israel voted No yesterday. That is not coincidental. The…