The Nazi Delusion
Tasteless comparisons do harm
IN October 1975, the writer and survivor Elie Wiesel wrote these oracular words: “Novelists made free use of it in their work, scholars used it to prove their theories, politicians to win votes. In so doing they cheapened the Holocaust; they drained it of its substance.”
We’ve been witness to the same distressing intellectual trend this week, as prominent Americans ranging from former CIA chief Michael Hayden to the cable-TV showrunner Brian Koppelman and many others have made explicit analogies between what has been going on at the Mexican border with the separation of children from their parents that preceded the gassing and murder at Nazi concentration camps.
As Wiesel’s words remind us, there’s nothing new in deploying the Holocaust as a political or aesthetic cudgel.
What’s different about this week’s events is that expressions of concern about the misuse of the Holocaust analogy have been the occasion for heated, even enraged, criticism: No, it is those who to likening the extremely bad policy of the Trump administration to the worst event in human history who are doing wrong.
In a piece called “Yes, You Should Be Comparing Trump to Hitler,” a self-described “professional journalist” named Adam Roy writes (citing me and Yair Rosenberg of Tablet), “This, to put it mildly, is a load of bunk. We want to believe that the Nazis were a special, exceptional kind of evil, because it’s easier for us. But the reality is that their brutality was just another manifestation of humanity’s worst flaws: our fear of the Other, the unthinking cruelty we unleash upon each other as soon as society gives us license.”
History is awash in cases of the unjust treatment of the Other. In fact, even today, most societies on earth are doing exactly this to some Other. Unpleasant or unfair or problematic treatment of the Other is terrible. It is not, however, an effort to eliminate the Other from the face of the earth, which is what the Holocaust was.
Bad things that happen on earth are not all the same thing. Some are bad. Some are worse. One or two in all of human history were of a scope and size and horror that they cannot be analogized.
Moreover, even those who want to liken the present moment to, let’s say, the rise of Nazi rule in Germany and say they’re doing so to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust are doing something very wrong. By likening the Jews of Germany to the South Americans on the border, they are implicitly accepting the Nazi contention that Jewish Germans were foreign presences rather than German citizens whose very existences on the earth were slowly and systematically being outlawed by the government of the country in which they were born.
Hitler wanted all Jews dead. Trump wants non-Americans who are here in violation of US law out of the United States. Dislike that all you wish. I do. I do not think this is the right policy. But it’s not the systematic elimination of the Other.
When you make such an argument, you are lowering and lessening and making more invisible as time passes the unthinkable and unimaginable scope and size of the Shoah.
After I tweeted about this, “Billions” showrunner Koppelman admonished me as follows: “You. Are. Wrong. And you know it. Which makes you worse things. Come on, man. Put partisan nonsense away now. Trump is Hitlerian in his aims and intention. Or Stalinist, if that’s better. If we don’t call it out, we are conspirators.”
No. I don’t know it. And follow the logic here? In an effort to preserve the proper understanding of the Holocaust, to defend its misuse, I am evidently conspiring with Trump to bring about the Fourth Reich.
In the midst of his novel “Sophie’s Choice,” William Styron stopped for a moment and reflected on what may be the impossibility of the task he has set for himself — and the challenge not to be one of the exploiters of the Holocaust Wiesel was upbraiding.
“I have been haunted, I must confess, by an element of presumption in the sense of being an intruder upon the terrain of an experience so bestial, so inexplicable, so undetachably and rightfully the possession alone of those who suffered and died, or survived it,” Styron wrote.
The effort to appropriate the Holocaust as an analogy to an ill-conceived and horrifying policy that shares maybe .001 percent of its horror shows how right Styron was to be haunted as he wrote “Sophie’s Choice.” His mindfulness and care made it possible for him to produce a remarkable book that succeeds in helping us understand in part the kind of nihilistic evil facing all those in the camps by depicting the death-in-life of a young mother compelled to choose which of her children is to die at Birkenau.
But those who treat the dreadful separation of parents from children at the border over the past months as though we are living through Sophie’s Choice are not expressing righteous anger. They are guilty of the worst kind of selfrighteous preening. As Wiesel said, they are cheapening the Holocaust and draining it of its substance.