Analogous Agonies

Japanese Internment Camp Manzanar, California

“What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms: in short a sum of human relations which become poetically and rhetorically intensified, metamorphosed, adorned, and after long usage seem to a nation fixed, canonic and binding.” —Nietzsche

What distinguishes a good metaphor from a bad one is its effectiveness. An abstract concept can be likened to a concrete fact, and if the metaphor works, one's understanding of the concept will deepen. Some metaphors are strong and others are weak. A weak metaphor leaves an abstraction where it was found - remote, hard to grasp or beyond the reach even of imagination.

The OED defines the word "analogous" as "1. Comparable in certain respects, typically in a way which makes clearer the nature of the things compared." In the past few weeks, we have become acquainted with a strange and implacable term: "Holocaust analogy." Newly-elected American Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called the refugee detention centers at the U.S./Mexican border "concentration camps," and then invoked the words "never again" - intended as a rebuke to the Trump administration which has, she wants us to infer, resurrected the horrors once carried out by the Nazis on Jews, communists, homosexuals, gypsies, on everyone they defined as "social undesirables."

There were backlashes to Ocasio-Cortez's appropriation of those words from political opponents on the Right, accusing her of "misappropriating" the words in a false comparison of the (mis)treatment of refugees in overcrowded border patrol facilities to the Holocaust. A few days later, there was another response that attracted much greater attention, which came from the director of the U.S. Holocaust Museum that stated (in part):

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary. . . . 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. (1)

The position taken by the USHMM wasn't surprising. In fact, it was consistent with the historical position of many Jewish historians, artists, and cultural critics since 1945 - that the Holocaust was an event (historical/political/cultural) whose provenance, consequence, and sheer scale, was unprecedented in human affairs that simply cannot be likened, to the extent of any human language, to any other event. What is more, its representation by aesthetic means, in metaphoric and mimetic form, is unacceptable and to be strongly discouraged. In other words, the Holocaust should not - since it can not - be represented in any other but the terms of memorials both historical and personal.

However consistent the statement of the USHMM was with past positions on the subject of "Holocaust analogies," it was met with a surprising rebuttal on July 1 in an open letter published in the New York Review of Books from a long list of scholars. Directed to the Museum's director, Sara J. Bloomfield, the statement reads:

By “unequivocally rejecting efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary,” the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is taking a radical position that is far removed from mainstream scholarship on the Holocaust and genocide. And it makes learning from the past almost impossible ... The Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical. It has the potential to inflict severe damage on the Museum’s ability to continue its role as a credible, leading global institution dedicated to Holocaust memory, Holocaust education, and research in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies. The very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task ... Looking beyond the academic context, we are well aware of the many distortions and inaccuracies, intentional or not, that frame contemporary discussions of the Holocaust. We are not only scholars. We are global citizens who participate in public discourse, as does the Museum as an institution, and its staff. We therefore consider it essential that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reverse its position on careful historical analysis and comparison. We hope the Museum continues to help scholars establish the Holocaust’s significance as an event from which the world must continue to learn.(2)

The position taken by the scholars who signed the letter to Bloomfield, while it is quite a welcome one, came as something of a surprise to someone who has dedicated some time to the subject of the various treatments of Holocaust in print and on film. While there are many examples of how the subject has been mishandled, there have been a few that, however controversially, have invited discussion and that have expanded, tenuously, our understanding of the Holocaust, both its victims (mostly) as well as its perpetrators. But there are some people, including filmmakers, who insist that films like Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, whatever its qualities as a film, should never have been made because, they claim, it applies some sort of resolution, a moral uplift, to the implacable story of the Holocaust.

Last December, Edna Friedberg wrote on the USHMM's website about "Why Holocaust Analogies Are Dangerous":

This oversimplified approach to complex history is dangerous. When conducted with integrity and rigor, the study of history raises more questions than answers. And as the most extensively documented crime the world has ever seen, the Holocaust offers an unmatched case study in how societies fall apart, in the immutability of human nature, in the dangers of unchecked state power. It is more than European or Jewish history. It is human history.

But Dr. Friedberg denies the right of just anyone to invoke whatever lesson the Holocaust might teach us and use it as a "rhetorical cudgel". The Holocaust defined our understanding of the depths of human depravity, but also words like "genocide." That term has certainly come in for its share of abuse since 1945. Representative Ocasio-Cortez may not have given sufficient thought to her use of the words "concentration camp," but she must certainly have known how people would respond to them. How exactly U.S. customs and border protection agencies are supposed to deal with the refugee crisis is a matter of controversy today only because of the Trump administration's irresponsible exaggeration of the immigration problem. Their plan is apparently to have no plan, to make the crisis worse by not giving it the attention it deserves - in other words, they are deliberately worsening the crisis by their refusal to find a reasonable and humane solution to it. Whether or not the detention centers are analogous to concentration camps may be arguable, but the total lack of concern about the seriousness of the situation has exacerbated it. Trump evidently wants conditions at the border to be as terrible as possible to reinforce his insistence on the issue of illegal immigration and the building of a wall that is supposed to solve it.


(1) Statement Regarding the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Position on Holocaust Analogies, June 24, 2019.
(2) Open Letter
(3) Edna Friedberg, December 12, 2018.