Outrage over the Trump administration’s border-control policies, and especially the separation of children from their parents, has led to comparisons with the Third Reich. To John Podhoretz, such comparisons are obscene:
[T]here’s nothing new in deploying the Holocaust as a political or aesthetic cudgel. What’s different about [recent discussions] is that expressions of concern about the misuse of the Holocaust analogy have been the occasion for heated, even enraged, criticism: no, [the critics are saying,] it is those who object to likening the extremely bad policy of the Trump administration to the worst event in human history who are doing wrong. . . .
Bad things that happen on earth are not all the same. Some are bad. Some are worse. One or two in all of human history were of a scope and size and horror that they cannot be analogized.
Moreover, even those who want to liken the present moment to, let’s say, the rise of Nazi rule in Germany and say they’re doing so to prevent a recurrence of the Holocaust are doing something very wrong. By likening the Jews of Germany to the [prospective immigrants] at the border, they are implicitly accepting the Nazi contention that Jewish Germans were foreign presences rather than German citizens whose very existences on the earth were slowly and systematically being outlawed by the government of the country in which they were born. . . . When you make such an argument, you are lowering and lessening and making more invisible as time passes the unthinkable and unimaginable scope and size of the Shoah. . . .
[T]hose who treat the dreadful separation of parents from children at the border over the past months as though we are living through [William Styron’s novel] Sophie’s Choice are not expressing righteous anger. They are guilty of the worst kind of self-righteous preening. To paraphrase Elie Wiesel, they are cheapening the Holocaust and draining it of its substance.
Read more on New York Post: https://nypost.com/2018/06/21/stop-cheapening-the-holocaust-to-score-political-points/