The Holocaust Is Not A Metaphor
The murder of 6 million Jews was a real historical event. Stop using it as a tool for making misplaced political arguments.
I’m Michael A. Cohen, and this is Truth and Consequences: A no-holds-barred look at the absurdities, hypocrisies, and surreality of American politics. If you received this email - or you are a free subscriber - and you’d like to subscribe: you can sign up here.
If you’re looking for the perfect holiday gift, look no further than a gift subscription to Truth and Consequences. Or if you’re still a free subscriber, give yourself a present!
Nixed Metaphors
Fox News’s Lara Logan has some “thoughts” about the public health response to COVID-19.
“What you see on Dr. Fauci — this is what people say to me: that he doesn’t represent science to them. He represents Josef Mengele,” she said. “Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who did experiments on Jews during the Second World War and in the concentration camps. And I am talking about people all across the world are saying this, because the response from covid, what it has done to countries everywhere, what it has done to civil liberties, the suicide rates, the poverty, it has obliterated economies. The level of suffering that has been created because of this disease is now being seen in the cold light of day.”
Josef Mengele, or as he was better known, the “Angel of Death,” performed gruesome experiments on Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz. He amputated healthy limbs, infected patients with typhus and chloroform, performed vivisections on live patients and removed the kidneys of others without anethesia.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has spent his career — and indeed the last 18 months - trying to prevent people from dying during a pandemic. He’s not immune from criticism, but comparing him to Josef Mengele is certifiably insane. And if Fox News were a serious news organization, Logan would already have been fired.
Even if one believes, ludicrously, that public health restrictions to prevent the spread of COVID-19 are onerous, they bear not one single similarity to what the Nazis did during the Holocaust. The goal of the Nazis was to destroy life. The goal of public health professionals is to preserve it.
All Too Routine
Yet, these types of disgusting Holocaust analogies are regularly made. Just weeks ago, anti-vaxxers in Kansas wore yellow stars to symbolize the burden of vaccine mandates and the ostracizing of those who refuse to get vaccinated. Anti-vaxxers have employed yellow stars in Missouri, Washington, and Alaska. In France, vaccine protesters have even put fake tattoos on their arms to symbolize the numbers tattooed on Auschwitz inmates.
In the Georgia Senate race, Republican candidate Herschel Walker canceled a fundraiser after it was discovered that the event’s sponsor used a syringe in the shape of a swastika as his Twitter avatar.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was roundly condemned last summer for comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust, though earlier this month, she used the expression “vaccine Nazis.”
I had my own experience with this a few months ago when I traveled to Las Vegas, which has an indoor mask mandate. Waiting in line for coffee, a man behind me was not wearing a mask, and when asked to put one on, he responded by demanding to know, “is this Germany in the 1930s?” I turned around and politely but firmly told him that the Nazis killed members of my family — and that being asked to wear a mask indoors is not remotely similar.
While I’m focusing on anti-vaxxers today, the misappropriation of the Holocaust is a universal exercise. Several years ago, the animal rights group PETA compared meat production to working in a concentration camp. Human rights outrages and even sectarian conflicts like the one between Israelis and Palestinians are regularly described in terms similar to the Nazi genocide against the Jews. Liberal commentators have, over the past five years, made repeated comparisons between President Trump and the modern Republican Party to the Nazis and the situation in Germany in the 1930s. The horrific treatment of migrants by the Trump administration was described as similar to the treatment of Jews in Nazi concentration camps. On the right, the high school students from Parkland, Florida, who organized gun-control rallies after the murder of their classmates, have been compared to Hitler Youth. None of these analogies are accurate or appropriate.
The Holocaust Was Real — and So Too Were Its Victims
Let’s be very clear on this point: the Holocaust is not a metaphor. It’s not a symbolic totem to be used as justification for your political views.
The Holocaust was a historical event: the systematic and premeditated murder of six million Jews. The Nazis rounded up European Jews from practically every country they invaded and demanded that their allies turn their Jewish populations over to them for extermination. At first, they shot many of them in the back of the head and dumped their bodies in mass graves (in places like Babi Yar in Ukraine, where more than 33,000 Jews were killed). Later they stuffed them in cattle cars, took them to death camps, pulled out those able to work, and murdered the rest in gas chambers before cremating their bodies. They established roving units of killers who hunted down Jews and murdered them. Even as Germany was losing the war on two fronts, the SS continued to run trains to concentration camps to kill as many Jews as possible. There are thousands of books on this topic. The facts are quite well known.
For its unparalleled and unspeakable horror, the Holocaust is a unique event in global history. The only valid modern comparison would be the systematic murder of more than half a million Tutsis in Rwanda by the majority Hutus, which took place over an approximately 100 day period in 1994.
Each of the persons that the Nazis killed was an individual — and their deaths should be remembered as a tragedy. It is fundamentally disrespectful to their memory, to the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors, and to the victims' families — many of whom still live with the pain of their loss — to use them as a tool, 70 years later, for making a political argument. It’s also fundamentally anti-Semitic as it directly minimizes and trivializes the suffering of the Jewish people.
I have no illusions that such inaccurate and disrespectful comparisons will continue to occur, but they still need to be condemned.
As noted on the Auschwitz Memorial Twitter feed (a sobering and necessary reminder of the individual lives lost in the Holocaust) the Holocaust is still treated by so many people — on left and right — as a metaphor, is a sign of moral and intellectual decline.
Tribe Comes First
You almost have to give Republicans credit: they keep coming up with new and creative ways to respond dangerously to a global pandemic. Axios has the goods on their latest move:
Republican officials around the country are testing a creative mechanism to build loyalty with unvaccinated Americans while undermining Biden administration mandates: unemployment benefits.
Driving the news: Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have changed their unemployment insurance rules to allow workers who are fired or quit over vaccine mandates to receive benefits.
The big picture: Extending unemployment benefits to the unvaccinated is just the latest in a series of proposals aligning the GOP with people who won't get a COVID shot.
Republicans see a prime opportunity to rally their base ahead of the midterms. No matter how successful their individual efforts, the campaign is a powerful messaging weapon.
At the outset, let me say this is a craven and deplorable strategy that enables anti-vaxxers and risks undermining vaccination efforts. Beyond the ethical issues, however, there’s a real question of whether this is a smart political strategy. The fact is, 70% of all Americans have currently received at least one vaccination shot. Among those over 18 (i.e., voters), the number is at 83%, with 71% fully vaccinated. Does it make sense to continue catering to a small segment of the population that is making it harder for the majority of vaccinated Americans (which includes a substantial number of Republicans), to move on with their lives?
I strongly suspect this idea is not nearly as dumb as it seems. While many Republican voters have gotten vaccinated, they are likely quite sympathetic to those who claim it is their right not to (and potentially infect others in the process). The increasingly shrinking percentage of the population that is stubbornly refusing to get vaccinated is making a political and ideological stand for “freedom” — and is even willing to lose their jobs in the process. That makes them sympathetic figures for Republican voters, even if these voters may not agree with their decision not to get vaxxed.
Moreover, the unvaxxed are standing up to “Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates,” thus producing even more sympathy for them. After all, only about a third of Republicans support Biden’s call for mandates versus 80 percent of Democrats. Other polling shows that most Republicans believe vaccine mandates won’t reduce the number of COVID cases or help the US economy grow. A plurality doesn’t think it will increase the number of COVID vaccinations (even though it clearly has).
This is yet another example of how partisanship drives everything in American politics. The facts of the matter are irrelevant. Team and tribe come first. For Republican politicians who navigate these waters daily, we should at least give them credit for understanding their voters — even if they are putting their lives in danger.
What’s Going On?
Donald Trump attended the first presidential debate having days earlier tested positive for COVID-19, or so says former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows in a new book. It’s practically a miracle that he didn’t infect Joe Biden. That Trump would do something this horrible and callous is not surprising. That Meadows let him attend the debate and didn’t warn Biden of the danger is disgusting.
Nate Cohn has some thoughts on why Joe Biden remains unpopular.
Biden’s pre-K proposal is not fully funded, which means red-state Republicans now have an excuse and an opportunity to prevent it from being implemented in their state.
There was another school shooting this week in Michigan, which took the lives of three students. I’ll remind you again that a focus on the motive is misplaced. It’s about the gun.
I don't recall where I read it first but someone once wrote:"If you invoke the Holocaust in making an argument about a topic unrelated to the Holocaust, you automatically lose the argument".