This “the detention centers on the border are concentration camps” has dragged on. The latest piece of this fray has sunk to new depths.
The US Holocaust Museum released a statement on social media.
The text of that statement:
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary. That position has repeatedly and unambiguously been made clear in the Museum’s official statement on the matter – a statement that is reiterated and reaffirmed now. The link to the Museum’s statement is here.
The Museum further reiterates that a statement ascribed to a Museum staff historian regarding recent attempts to analogize the situation on the United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s does not reflect the position of the Museum.
The Museum deeply regrets any offense to Holocaust survivors and others that may have been engendered by any statement ascribed to a Museum historian in a personal capacity.
I’m pretty sure that the people who manage the Holocaust museum know what they are talking about.
The previous statement linked above is long, but select parts make a very good point.
American politicians from across the ideological spectrum, influential media figures, and ordinary people on social media casually use Holocaust terminology to bash anyone or any policy with which they disagree. The takedown is so common that it’s even earned its own term, reductio ad Hitlerum.
This trend is far from new, but it is escalating at a disturbing rate in increasingly polarized times. The Holocaust has become shorthand for good vs. evil; it is the epithet to end all epithets. And the current environment of rapid fire online communication and viral memes lends itself particularly well to this sort of sloppy analogizing. Worse, it allows it to spread more widely and quickly.
This oversimplified approach to complex history is dangerous. When conducted with integrity and rigor, the study of history raises more questions than answers.
Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize, demean, and intimidate their targets. But there is a cost for all of us because they distract from the real issues challenging our society, because they shut down productive, thoughtful discourse. At a time when our country needs dialogue more than ever, it is especially dangerous to exploit the memory of the Holocaust as a rhetorical cudgel. We owe the survivors more than that. And we owe ourselves more than that.
It is not unacceptable to use the Holocaust as a measure of enormity and to compare other events to it. But it is the obligation of those making the comparison to be honest in their assessment.
A contemporary (sort of) event that would be honest in its comparison was the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi. It was not as mechanized as the Holocaust, which was carried out with German efficiency. But the language that the Hutu’s uses – calling Tutsi “cockroaches” and alike – was equally dehumanizing. The Hutu led military factions whipped the Hutu people into a murderous frenzy, not unlike Kristallnacht, and scapegoated the Tutsi for the economic problems in Rwanda. As a result, almost a million Tutsi were hacked to death by Hutus with machetes.
It was an orchestrated, racially motivated genocide of an ethnic minority.
What is going on, on our southern border does not in any way comparable to that in intent, rhetoric, or action. You can compare it, but an honest, rational person would dismiss it almost instantly.
If you go through the responses to the US Holocaust Museum’s Tweet, they are just about 100% negative, from people defending AOC telling the USHMM how they are wrong, racist, white supremacist, and on the wrong side of history.
If you see nothing but parallels and history repeating itself with Trump being just “Orange Hitler” than of course, you think that the temporary detainment of people crossing illegally into the United States prior to an asylum hearing is a prelude to the genocide of Hispanics.
If you believe that so much that you are willing to tell the US Holocaust Museum that they are a bunch of Nazi bootlickers, the conversation is over.
There is nothing left to say. All the rational arguments in the world fall of these willingly deaf ears.
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