Why would it? Dresden was not a 'first'.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Actually I'm not sure it doesn't. In America the Dresden bombing is better known than Guernica, perhaps in part due to Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five.  Dresden is far more part of the German consciousness than Guernica is, or for that matter the German destruction of various cities during WWII. In Poland Dresden is also better known than Guernica.  On the other hand it makes sense for Guernica to be a larger part of Spanish collective memory than Dresden - it was the Spanish who were its victims (or Basques I guess if one wishes to quibble)

Poemless, on second thought, I possibly misunderstood what you meant.

However, the Thirty Years' War comparison might still be worth to expound on. That war faced up Christian Europe with the ugliness of romanticised feudal wars and heroised religious wars. In this case, the source of ignorance was not so much the distance of colonies, but (a) the small circle of effect of previous wars and (b) the effectiveness of victors' writing of history. But the Thirty Years' War laid waste to a very large area, included even more countries among the warring parties, and ended in a stalemate. The results included the appearance of rules of war, the rise of diplomacy, the final break of the unity of the Church, thus the spread of secularism, and the rise of the Enlightement.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

Was referring to The United States.  The Trail of Tears was in the early 1800's.  But to be fair, the killing off of Native Americas began as soon as Europeans set foot on the continent, 300 years earlier.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

Are you responding to DoDo?  I'm in agreement with you.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

No one spoke of this or that being more legitimate.

In fact, we were speaking about the very same hypocrisy you protest against. Please read it back.

The Normans killed the Saxons and the who killed the Picts in return for killing the Celts.

Well, neither of those were genocides (nowhere near what was done to Native Americans), as today's English people's DNA shows. But even if true, the modern Western sense of 'civilisation' is of something after the Dark Ages, thus yes time is a factor.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

What's the difference.

Between over 100,000 dead Iraqis and six million dead Jews?

Where do you draw the line?  Does the sentence "What's the difference between three thousand dead New Yorkers and millions of dead Native Americans" strike you as a reasonable statement? If not then again I ask, where should the line be drawn?

You might also notice that I explicitly included the extermination of Native Americans as one of those cases where one can sensibly argue that they are comparable to the Shoah. At the same time the two events played out in a very different manner so one can compare and contrast away. For example, the Native Americans were subject to a centuries long persecution that was much more intense than that suffered by the European Jews prior to the Nazis. Another example - there was no concerted, all encompassing period of extermination of Native Americans comparable to what happened to the Jews in 1941-5.

(A couple commenters seem to have a problem with my use of the term 'Holocaust' in its common colloquial sense of the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis, perhaps a substitution of the term 'Shoah' will placate them)