I wrote my reaction to Schindler's List here immediately after seeing it and while still heavily under its immediate influence, and it knocked me for six. So I'm pleased and somewhat relieved to learn that another writer, Mark Steyn, far heavier in weight and more experienced in writing about movies than I, when he saw Schindler's List way back in 1994 when it first came out, was also much impressed. I thought there might be some joking around from him about what I soon learned was a made-up ending, and generally some ironic distancing. But not a bit of it.

Steyn made a particularly good point about the exact nature of the evil that was the Holocaust. I possess one of those little snippet books, which has the bit about the Holocaust in Paul Johnson's History of the Jews, in which Johnson makes the same point. It was the combination of bestiality and bureaucracy, of savagery and system, which made the Holocaust so uniquely hideous.

Gradually, you understand the film’s decision to adjust Thomas Keneally's original title, Schindler's Ark. What separates the Germans from trigger-happy goons in a hundred banana republics is the system: the bureaucracy, 'the paperwork', as a dozen Nazi officials sigh wearily in the course of the film; the grotesque thoroughness of District B and Department W and the Business Compensation Fund regulations. Schindler and his Jewish accountant fight Nazi paperwork with their own list, the names of their factory workers.

I think it was this doggedly official way in which Nazi Germany set about murdering people, making use of all the techniques of civilisation to be barbaric, that goes a long way towards justifying the now conventional Western view that the Holocaust inflicted by the Nazis upon the Jews was uniquely barbaric, and in particular more barbaric than the slaughters of Stalin and Mao. Those Russians and Chinese were, you know, not quite in control of themselves. They weren't quite human, more like wild beasts. They, like their victims, were swept up in an ideological frenzy. But Germans! How could they do such a thing? How could they be so cold-blooded, so thorough, so detached and so organised about it all? They used the very same stuff – paperwork – that they used to create their greatest achievements (music, literature, science) to commit their greatest crime. In this respect, the Holocaust really was unique.

There is of course a big slice of racism in this attitude, and also a big slice of anti-anti-Communism. Murdering millions of people is not so bad if it's in a good cause, blah blah. But let's just say that this time the anti-anti-Communists, scum though they undoubtedly are, have had some genuine truths to work with here, along with all their lies about how uncool it is to keep banging on about Communist holocausts.

Steyn also picks up on another detail from Schindler's List that I'd forgotten – likewise a use of something you normally associate with civilisation at its best – to murder people.

The real face of evil is the German soldiers, after the Cracow massacre, combing the ghetto with the remorseless doggedness of petty officialdom, their stethoscopes pressed to the ceilings just in case there's anyone still breathing up there. A system which transforms the stethoscope into an instrument of death and issues it to its infantrymen: in denying the Jews’ humanity, the Germans killed their own.

I've been brooding lately on anti-Semitism, Hollywood, Christianity, Christianity (apparent collapse of in Britain), and such matters, and it seems to me that one of the Big Events of our time is the replacement of Christ's Crucifixion by The Holocaust as the Central Act of Cruelty and Suffering of our – now post-Christian – civilisation.

Is this act of cultural transformation, like Hollywood, the Crucifixion (Gospel version), etc., some kind of Jewish Plot? If so, well done the Jews, I say.