“If you’re Jewish, don’t betray your brethren by cheapening the Holocaust for personal gain or political capital, you kapo.”
Washington, DC, April 21 – Researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the nation’s capital repeated their warning today that casual and overblown comparisons of contemporary events to the horrors of the industrialized dehumanization and murder of millions of Jews make a person literally Hitler.
Department heads at the country’s flagship institution for Holocaust research and education released a statement Tuesday to mark Yom HaShoah, Israel’s annual commemoration of Nazi genocide against Europe’s Jews – and of resistance efforts to it – in which the museum noted what it called the worrisome rhetorical trend of using the Holocaust to describe phenomena that fall far short of the real-world horror the episode involved. The statement declared that such continued appropriation of the Holocaust demonstrates an evil on par with those of its perpetrators.
“One cannot in good conscience make analogies to Nazis for everyday events,” the statement read, in part. “People who do so might as well fire up the crematoria and force marginalized groups to wear yellow six-pointed stars.”
Officials at the museum also spoke individually about the phenomenon. “If you invoke the Holocaust to protest, for example, the consumption of meat, you’re basically Goebbels,” explained Deputy Director of Communications Stephen Kupferwasser. “Bottom line, if you’re Jewish, don’t betray your brethren by cheapening the Holocaust for personal gain or political capital, you kapo.”
Activists and academics have long expressed concern over the use of a singular episode in history – the singling out of one group for systematic isolation, persecution, starvation, deportation, enslavement, and mass-killing – as a rhetorical cudgel in contexts far removed from it. “The use of the Holocaust, a unique event, for meaningful analogies in politics or other activism cheapens the Holocaust,” wrote Deborah Lipstadt, who studies Holocaust denial. “That leads us down a slippery slope toward Holocaust minimization, denial, and outright calling for a new one. You might as well put your own name on the title page of ‘Mein Kampf’.”
Museum officials called on the government and Congress to pass legislation authorizing further funding for education efforts to help stem the tide of Holocaust dilution. “The Department of Education and the Congressional Committees should really take the lead on this,” urged curator Ward Churchill. “Instead they’re bogged down in details of special interests and industry lobbyists, pretending not to notice the impact of their selfish machinations on the nation and the world – braying incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and transactions, each of which translates, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. Might as well be little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the Capitol Building.”
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