Let’s Not Analogize the Holocaust

A guest post by David Clemens [1]

A July 3 Chronicle of Higher Education article by Liam Knox [2] recounts how Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) ignited a firestorm when she compared U.S. detention centers for illegal immigrants to (presumably Nazi) concentration camps. The radical wing of the Democrat party applauded while conservatives asserted that the comparison was specious and cynical.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum weighed in, saying it “unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.”

Responding to the museum,  “scholars” launched an open letter which had collected almost 600 signatures by the time of Knox’s article. The signers justified the comparison because “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.”

I find this to be a dubious, arrogant, and disingenuous proposition.

I found myself asking, “Scholars of what?” Law? Gender, Race, and Identity? Music? Social Work? Art? And what sort of a qualification is it to be a “scholar” of something? Holocaust deniers often describe themselves as scholars….

And who exactly decides what is similar? Many of the signers belong to a professoriate that has become notoriously political, overwhelmingly left-wing, frequently anti-Zionist, and increasingly anti-Semitic. That makes me suspicious about their motives. Throughout my 46-year teaching career, I have watched my profession turn steadily leftward. The present state of academia can be illustrated by events I witnessed while serving on the Modern Language Association’s (MLA) policy-making Delegate Assembly (DA).

On its website, the 25,000-member MLA bills itself this way: “The Modern Language Association of America has worked for more than a century to strengthen the study and teaching of languages and literatures.”

However, during my years in the Delegate Assembly, the literature and language scholars wrangled endlessly over resolutions condemning Israel and endorsing the Leftist, anti-Israel, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Academic standards for scholarship once demanded a dispassionate, objective effort to attain expert knowledge. However, such standards have been largely repealed, even inverted, starting in the 1960s. The postmodern mindset of today’s academy holds that passion is what counts, objectivity is impossible, and truth is an illusion, a product of a viewpoint perpetuated by whoever holds power. “Advocacy teaching” has become not only permissible, but desirable. So, what might the scholar signatories be advocating, and why are they so passionate about “historical analogy?”

I would argue that the open letter really has nothing to do with the southern border, detention centers, or the immigration crisis. Rather than being a tool of legitimate scholarship, this historical analogy to the Holocaust is mostly a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that muddies political discourse and promotes misinformation. Here’s why.

The informal fallacy known as “false analogy” belongs to a class of deceptions that pretend to make complex, vexing, or unfamiliar situations understandable by comparing them to more familiar situations. The problem with false analogy is that, almost always, the situations being compared have far more differences than similarities. Analogy is not an “essential” tool or a goal of historical study at all, but rather is a way to obscure the facts of the matter and replace them with a figurative thumbnail that will eventually become, for the listener, a facile substitute for knowledge.

To illustrate, in the congressional debate over whether to launch Operation Desert Storm (1991), proponents argued that the U.S. had to invade or “it will be Pearl Harbor all over again.” (Desired response: “Pearl Harbor was bad; we’d better invade.”). Opponents of the launch warned that the U.S. must not invade or “it will be Vietnam all over again.” (Desired response: “Vietnam was bad; we had better not invade”). Both comparisons, of course, were faulty, involving far more differences than similarities. The listener was expected to attach the emotions of the familiar to the new situation.

More recently, the Left has suggested that President Trump is equivalent to Adolf Hitler and that the Independence Day celebration on the National Mall was “chilling” in its resemblance “to days before Tiananmen Square….” In the space of a few days, a professor called MAGA hat-wearing teens “modern day Hitlerjugend,” U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar compared the BDS movement to America boycotting Nazi Germany, and Democrat presidential candidate Robert “Beto” O’Rourke likened Trump’ s rally in North Carolina to a Nazi rally in Nuremberg.

I would argue that Leftist “scholars” want to keep their grip on “historical analogy” in the case of the Holocaust in order to hijack, minimize, and even normalize the enormity of the catastrophe. Their goal is to erode the moral justification for the existence of the state of Israel (which they endlessly analogize as being equivalent to Nazi Germany and/or apartheid South Africa).

This mystification by analogy has been going on for years. Scholars of “grievance studies” have tried to piggyback on the Holocaust to enhance their own claims of persecution and victimization, while simultaneously reducing the Holocaust to just another massacre. Ethnic Studies courses characterized the African slave trade as “The Black Holocaust,” AIDS was frequently called the “Gay Holocaust,” and Women’s Studies insisted that the persecution of witches amounted to a “Women’s Holocaust.” The slave trade, the AIDS epidemic, and the witch trials were certainly bad things, but they were not at all like the Holocaust (the term “holocaust” itself is so problematic in its connotations that many Jewish scholars prefer to use the word “Shoah,” Hebrew for “calamity” or “catastrophe”).

The Holocaust Museum is right; the Shoah cannot, and should not, be compared to anything else. Any analogy distorts, diminishes, and redistributes the horror. As George Steiner wrote in Language and Silence, “The world of Auschwitz lies outside speech as it lies outside reason.”[3] That is, how can one construct an analogy if language itself is inadequate to the demands of expressing the Shoah? How does one express what is implied by the fact that the Shoah was initiated, developed, and executed by a pinnacle of European cultural modernity, a society richer than most in art, music, literature, science, education, and philosophy? We study arts and humanities because we think that they make us more humane and compassionate, more human, yet that same rich culture produced Hitler, Göebbels, Eichmann, Höss, and Mengele.

Brilliant and accomplished researchers and educators have tried for decades to grasp and reconcile this agonizing contradiction with no success. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman advanced a disturbing theory: perhaps the Holocaust was not a failure of modernity, but rather a product of unrecognized aspects of modernity. In Modernity and the Holocaust, Bauman wrote:

At no point of its long and tortuous execution did the Holocaust come in conflict with the principles of rationality. The “Final Solution” [to the Jewish problem] did not clash at any stage with the rational pursuit of efficient, optimal goal implementation. On the contrary, it arose out of a genuinely rational concern, and it was generated by bureaucracy true to its form and purpose. We know of many massacres, pogroms, mass murders, indeed instances not far removed from genocide, that have been perpetrated without modern bureaucracy, the skills and technologies it commands, the scientific principles of its internal management. The Holocaust, however, was clearly unthinkable without such bureaucracy. The Holocaust was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residues of pre-modern barbarity. It was a legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at home in any other house. [4]

I don’t fully agree with Bauman because even he hints that the Shoah might in fact be comprehensible if we study its links to modernity. I would argue that although the Shoah can be regarded, observed, researched, and detailed, it remains psychologically unassimilable, no matter how inconvenient that is for those would like to inter it in the simplicity of false analogy.

Today, many still ask, what’s so special about the Holocaust of the Jews? In fact, in his controversial novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. George Steiner has Hitler make that defense. Captured by Nazi hunters, Steiner’s imagined Hitler says,

. . . it was, I will allow you that, an ugly time. But I did not create ugliness, and I was not the worst. Far from it. How many wretched little men of the forests did your Belgian friends murder outright or leave to starvation and syphilis when they raped the Congo. Answer me that, gentlemen. Or must I remind you. Some twenty million. That picnic was under way when I was a newborn. What was Rotterdam or Coventry compared with Dresden and Hiroshima? I do not come out worst in that black game of numbers. Did I invent the camps? Ask of the Boers. But let us be serious. Who was it that broke the Reich? To whom did you hand over millions, tens of millions of men and women from Prague to the Baltic? Set them like a bowl of milk before an insatiable cat? I was a man of a murderous time, but a small man compared to [Stalin].”[5]

True enough, if you are just comparing death totals. By Professor Rudy Rummel’s calculations, Mao wins the “black game of numbers” having caused about 80 million civilian deaths, mostly Chinese, and Stalin trails with at least 40 million civilian Russians). But political execution and mass starvation differ from efficient railroads with tracks from cities to barracks near assembly lines of death, mass gas chambers, and crematoria. To compare border detention facilities to Auschwitz is simply obscene.

The urge to find the Holocaust in any large-scale killing is simplistic thinking at best. But we live in simplistic times of analogies, memes, and tweets. Activist teachers are quick to assist the unwary in reaching their preferred conclusions with a genial “I’ll make it easy for you.” Perhaps, Easy Peasy is the future of teaching history. At the MLA annual conference a few years ago, I saw a vision of such a future. Microsoft was a sponsor of the conference, and one exhibit was a huge video screen being developed by Microsoft for classroom use that would eventually display an interactive time line of recorded history. Students would be able to touch the screen and activate audio, video, and re-enactment of historical events.

Astounded, I asked the project director, “But whose version of history will you use?” He seemed surprised to hear that there are conflicting theories and accounts of what happened in the past and how and why. However, historiography has many flavors that produce as many different interpretations of historical events.

You can have Great Man history, Historical Forces History, Marxist History, Feminist History, Radical History, Annales History, History from Below History, Big History, Counterfactual History, Historical Poetics, and many more. Historians select and arrange facts to coincide with their historiographic method’s assumptions. Microsoft’s Bill Gates has been a supporter of the Big History approach, a first cousin of Marxist History. Big History says, “No time for details! Here’s an analogy, a thumbnail, a cartoon, and the big takeaway from the Cold War: morally equivalent superpowers!!! Hurry up now!!!” (A local university offered The History of the Universe in a semester…)

And in Chapter 1 of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels asserted, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Following that simple-minded formula provided the late Marxist historian Howard Zinn with a huge payday for his best-selling A People’s History of the United States. Now imagine Microsoft’s mega-screen in every classroom loaded with Big Marxist History.

I think the Holocaust Museum realizes the conceptual danger in the Shoah being contaminated by analogy or any other reductive scheme. Those scholars who support “historical analogy,” knowingly or unwittingly, support transmuting factual history into rhetorical fiction for current political profit, and, in the process, draining off the enduring, perhaps eternal, questions about humankind raised by Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the European Jews.

[1] David Clemens  is emeritus professor of English at Monterey Peninsula College. He is the founder of the MPC Great Books Program, maintains a MOOC called Introduction to Great Books, and publishes frequently on higher education issues. His teaching of critical thinking explores the conditions that enable Holocaust denial to take root and flourish.

[2] Liam Knox, “Scholars Push Back on Holocaust Museum’s Rejection of Historical Analogy,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 3, 2019.

[3] George Steiner, Language and Silence (London/Boston: Faber and Faber, 1967), 123.

[4] Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity Press, 1991), 17.

[5] Steiner, The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 167-168.