Part of that is the fact that it's hot-blooded violence rather than cold-blooded violence, though.  For some reason the latter is usually more disturbing than the former.  For some reason, the idea of children running around pretending to shoot each other, or dueling with swords, is less disturbing than the idea of children pretending to calmly and systematically execute each other.  I'm not sure why.

  Still, I agree in that I'd imagine that little children dressing up like red Indians who talk in silly voices and get shot by brave cowboys would be less offensive to your average white Briton than it would be to your average Sioux descended from people who died at Wounded Knee.  We can talk about how awful the group in question were from a neutral observer perspective (in terms of deathtolls, etc), but I think it's likely to be quite hard to stop people from reacting differently to tragedies which their culture has a closer connection to.

  I hope Iron Eagle goes well- I would like to see a topic like this get treated seriously.  But I agree that more explicit disclaimers would be a good thing, and I personally would be a bit wary about playing this sort of game with people who I didn't already know well OC. 

  I didn't mean 'close' geographically speaking, I meant it in entirely in terms of perceived closeness.  I think the reason we feel 'closer' to the Holocaust than to other genocides is the fact that the people on both sides were people who we tend to consider ourselves culturally similar to (in the sense that Huntington talks about).  This means that it's harder for us to say "well, the murderers were just crazed barbarians" or "well, maybe it was wrong to kill so many people, but you have to understand that the victims were really very primitive, just crying out for some civilised government to come in and take care of them.  Of course, they were too ignorant to know that this was what they wanted, so they kept trying to fight back, and so we had to be strict, which sometimes meant regrettably large deathcounts, but what can you do?"*

  I think this fact that everyone involved was European and so harder to label as 'uncivilised' is a major reason why we're so fascinated by the topic.  This is coupled by the fact that the Holocaust seems to have a better-funded and organised memorial movement than most other genocides (or indeed the movements to memorialise the deaths of non-Jewish Nazi victims).

  I think it's generally a very good thing that the Holocaust is such an emotive topic in our culture (notwithstanding the fact that some people will manage to exploit that fact- see Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry for accusations that some self-declared Jewish groups have managed to secure extra funding for 'Holocaust victims' and then spent it on themselves, rather than on actual concentration camp survivors).  But I think it's worth noting that most other genocides don't have anywhere near the same level of recognition in our society.  This means that a larp involving Waffen SS members is almost inevitably going to make the average British person more uncomfortable than a larp involving imaginary or less well-known massacres.

  It's already clear that most British larpers feel happy with the concept of entirely fictional genocides in larp (although I must admit I've never heard of a larp which involved fictional concentration camps.  This is possibly partly because that would be difficult to physrep and OC physically uncomfortable for whoever was playing the inmates, but I think it has more to do with the fact that we still tend to be more comfortable with hot-blooded violence than with the cold-blooded kind).  Do we think that many British larpers would feel uncomfortable about the concept of larp games involving other historical genocides- e.g. a game set in 1915, where the PCs are all Turks who are at some point given the opportunity to kick the shit out of some Armenian NPCs?

  I think that most people would only feel seriously uncomfortable about it if it touched on other issues which most modern Britons are more familiar with- for example, I think a game involving British colonials massacring African people would be problematic mostly because it would raise the question of racial physreps, which I don't think people would be comfortable with because it relates to particular kinds of racism which most modern Britons are much more familiar with.

*I'm afraid I made the mistake of watching a documentary on Rider Haggard the other day, and I'm still rather upset about certain views expressed in it.  Sorry for the tangent.

  I think that's a factor, but then some people have living relatives who were involved in some way or another in all the other 20th century genocides.  Some of these people now live in Britain (for example, I have one acquaintance who was personally involved in the Congolese civil war, although I'm not sure if that's technically a genocide or not). Admittedly I don't know what proportion of the British people with a personal tie to mass-death specifically have a personal tie to the Holocaust.  But this still makes me inclined to feel that it's *perceived* cultural closeness which decides what most British larpers will feel most uncomfortable with.