I’m not going to explain the reasons why the deaths of innocent standers-by in Gaza is not comparable to the Holocaust, much less why even the most negligent of beef slaughterhouses or the most wanton destruction of the Amazon rainforest aren’t either. Anyone demanding that sort of argument won’t derive anything from my writings in this blog, anyway. I will simply say that the sentiment behind “Never Forget” is violated when one uses the Holocaust for comparative purposes. Far more repugnant than the idea that those 6 million+ cold-blooded executions in Europe are comparable to anything else is the way such a comparison degrades the memory of the dead – who had in life already been more thoroughly stripped of their purportedly inalienable right to humanity and dignity than any human beings in our species’ long, torturous history.
As much as it is our eternal duty to “Never Forget,” it is our obligation to safeguard the memories we fight to keep alive from those who would willfully defile them.
In loving memory of the 6 million+ martyrs who lost their lives at the hands of the most evil empire I pray the world ever knows.
2 comments:
Turning Holocaust remembrance into a religious experience, as if it were nothing but a temporal encounter between atemporal good and evil, neglects what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. That phrase reflects not only her horror for what actually took place at the death camps, the actual acts of unforgivable inhumanity, but for all the background actions, the simple ones like filing papers, driving buses, confiscating properties, dispatching orders-- all the simple, bureaucratic and logistical actions that made the camps and the subsequent atrocities possible in the first place. How normal those carrying out those tasks thought themselves and their missions to be despite the inherent savagery.
I agree with you that Holocaust imagery or comparison for political expediency is cynical, unjustified, and often offensive. However, I hope that refusing such comparisons would not prevent us from collectively reflecting on the cold, detached processes that enabled the Holocaust while obscuring its murderous brutality even from the paper-shuffling henchmen of which the Nazi regime's institutions were composed. Without such reflection, then I do not know how the second part of the mantra can be upheld--Never Again.
Unspeakable though the types of murder that go on in places like Chechnya and the Sudan are, I feel that comparisons to the Holocaust cheapen the memories of those dead on both sides, while also making attempts to speak about those situations less effective. In calling attention to the "cold, detached processes" you rightly pointed out, I believe one would be both better served practically and more justified ethically to simply choose different words - ones that don't carry with them these specific, inherent connotations.
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