A new argument has broken out
over the Holocaust, or more precisely, over references to the Holocaust in
contemporary life. The sequence of events is revealing about politics, but not
especially reliable about history.
In response to the increasing
comparison of right-wing populists in Europe and America to Nazis, last
December Edna Friedberg, a historian in the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum’s William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education, wrote an official statement for the Museum about the dangers of Holocaust analogies. She was
clear about what she condemned: “sloppy analogizing”, “grossly simplified
Holocaust analogies”, “careless Holocaust analogies”. Dr. Friedberg criticized
the political use by left and right of “the memory of the Holocaust as a
rhetorical cudgel”. She urged upon everyone better history, “conducted with
integrity and rigor”.
This was not controversial,
but rather typical of what historians say about the much too common references
to Hitler and Nazis and fascism in our political discourse.
Congresswoman Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez said last month on social media that the U.S. is “running
concentration camps on our southern border”. Many Jewish organizations and
Holocaust institutions condemned her remarks, as well as the usual chorus of
conservative politicians. Although she did not mention the Holocaust, it was
assumed that she was making one of those careless analogies for political
purposes.
This appears to have prompted
the USHMM to issue another brief statement on June 24, that then ignited a wider controversy:
“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,” referring to Dr. Friedberg’s
earlier statement.
In response, an international
list of over 500 historians, many or most of whom write about the Holocaust,
signed an open letter
to Sara J. Bloomfield, the director of the Museum, published in the New York
Review of Books, urging retraction of that recent statement. They criticized
the rejection of all analogies as “fundamentally ahistorical”, “a radical
position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and
genocide.” They argued that “Scholars in the humanities and social sciences
rely on careful and responsible analysis, contextualization, comparison, and
argumentation to answer questions about the past and the present.”
There have been many media
reports about the Museum’s June statement and the historians’ letter
criticizing it. But there has been no discussion of the obvious distinction
between the original statement by Dr. Friedberg and the newer unsigned
“official” statement. Dr. Friedberg had noted that the “current environment of
rapid fire online communication” tended to encourage the “sloppy analogizing”
she condemned. Ironically, the too rapid response by someone at the Museum to
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks ignored the difference between bad historical
analogies for political purposes and the careful use of comparisons by
scholars. Now the stances of the Museum appear contradictory.
The outraged historians also
ignored the difference between the two versions of Museum statements, and
demanded a retraction of the recent version without reference to Dr.
Friedberg’s thoughtful statement.
An easier out for the Museum
is to issue one more statement affirming that Dr. Friedberg’s formulation is
their official position, excusing itself for the poorly worded June statement,
and thanking the historians for defending the proper context in which the Holocaust
ought to be discussed and the proper means for that discussion.
Lost in this furor is the
fact that Ocasio-Cortez did not make a Holocaust analogy when she referred to
concentration camps. Widely accepted definitions of concentration camp are worded
differently but agree in substance. The online Merriam-Webster dictionary defines concentration camp as: “a place where large
numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or
the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under
armed guard.” The Oxford English Dictionary offers some history: “a camp where
non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord
Kitchener during the Boer War (1899–1902); one for the internment of political
prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in
Germany before and during the war of 1939–45.” The Encyclopedia Britannica offers a similar definition: “internment centre for
political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined
for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by
executive decree or military order.”
Perhaps the most significant
definition of the phrase “concentration camp” in this context comes from the USHMM itself, on its web page about Nazi camps: “The term concentration camp refers
to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh
conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that
are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. . . . What distinguishes a
concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions
outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of
any crime by judicial process.”
From what we have learned
recently about the actual conditions in the places where asylum seekers are
being held on our southern border, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the term fits
closely within these definitions. She is supported by people who understand the
realities of concentration camp life. The Japanese American Citizens League, the oldest Asian-American civil rights group, calls
the camps which the US government set up to hold Japanese American citizens
“concentration camps”, and repeated that term in June 2018 to condemn the camps
now used to hold asylum seekers.
Rep. Ocasio-Cortez used
careful and responsible analysis to make a comparison between current American
policy and a century of inhumane policies by many governments against people
who are considered enemies. It will take much more contextualization and
argumentation to tease out the differences and similarities between all the
regrettable situations in which nations have locked up entire categories of
innocent people. But given the emotions which have prompted even the most
thoughtful to leap to briefly expressed one-sided positions, it appears
unlikely that such rational processes will determine our discourse about this
important subject.
Steve Hochstadt
Springbrook WI
July 16, 2019
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