Ethics

What role does our thinking of such atrocities as the holocaust play in forming a political notion of life, and therefore ethical notions of a good life? That is to say, in what way does it follow that the primary aim of the political should be the elimination of suffering (and the often unspoken promotion of 'comfort')? Is it so straightforward to move from a recognition of the horror of genocide to the demand that 'this must never happen again', with this demand entailing a renunciation of violence used for political ends. Must this be so?
And perhaps you say this is all very simplistic - you would be correct. I have not attempted to think the 'fallout' from the holocaust before.
And yet this view seems to be prevalent in popular discourse, in the sense that what was horrific was precisely that, in Nazi Germany particularly, it was people like you or me who were evicted from their homes and sent to their deaths , shorn of their culture, our culture - their books, their music, our thought, our art.
And yet this point doesn't quite express the problematic that interests me (since it might be challenged in very different ways from those which I am eager to explore).
Rather what has captured my imagination is the possible connection between thinking the evil of the holocaust and the trend in western society which might be called 'health fascism'. This will be difficult, I hear you laugh, since I know nothing about either.

Postscript: Alain Badiou's Ethics has provided me with an interesting starting point to an enquiry, though I don't think he would agree with my categorisation of Jews in Germany as Same (ie, their victimhood designates them as Other - thus he might say that I am dining on the "ethical dish" history has served up to me). This work nevertheless resonates with issues I have raised above, eg: "The very idea of a consensual 'ethics', stemming from the general feeling provoked by the sight of atrocities, which replaces the 'old ideological divisions', is a powerful contributor to subjective resignation and acceptance of the status quo. For what every emancipatory project does, what every emergence of hitherto unknown possibilities does, is to put an end to consensus." (Alain Badiou, Ethics p32)