Recently, I have seen a resurgence in the insensitive act of people appropriating the tragedy of the Holocaust as a political metaphor or a point to be carelessly and opportunistically tossed into an unrelated debate on social justice issues. In doing so, they tokenize the suffering of millions, and once again dehumanize Jewish, Roma, and other ethnic minorities into a blanket, trivialized statement.
An example is the recent post by @chelseahandler in which she uses the horrific story of Anne Frank as a comparison to say we shouldn’t complain about quarantine.Was she being deliberately malicious? No. Did she refuse to take the post down, apologise, or acknowledge why what she did was frankly disgusting? Yes. I won’t go into why exactly that post was wrong, as I think it fairly obvious.
Another example is people using pictures from concentration camps or using the Holocaust to make statements about what is currently ocurring with the BLM movement. Yes, black lives do matter. No, the actions of Donald Trump are absolutely nothing like Hitler’s.
To put it in simpler terms, when ‘activists’ that have never stood against antisemitism use the Holocaust in any way, i.e. make comparisons to it, metaphorise it, say ‘well at least it’s not as bad as Hitler/the Holocaust!’, or ‘They’re basically a neo-nazi/Hitler’, it defeats the point they are trying to make, by appropriating the suffering of those who aren’t there to fight against it.
WW2 victims have suffered enough dehumanisation and violence in their time and we have no right to add to it by further reducing them to a point to throw into a political argument. As people who have had family wiped out by the Holocaust, it is painful to see others casually drop them into sentences as if it’s meaningless. 11 million people had their own names, stories, and pain. When you take them out of context, when you use them to win an argument, you reduce them to nothing.
Noah Mitchell
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