From the Business Insider:
"It's offensive and inaccurate to compare the US border tragedy to the Holocaust"
- Separating parents from children at the border is abhorrent and should stop.
- In recent days, however, many commentators have drawn comparisons between what's happening at the border and the Holocaust.
- Those comparisons are inappropriate and offensive.
In 1990, the American attorney Mike Godwin created what became a namesake law that internet users have grown to acknowledge and cite: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1." Godwin wrote that watching this trend unfold "made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer" — the inevitable invoking of Hitler or Nazism. This week, pundits, journalists, celebrities, and politicians on both sides of the political aisle have condemned the Trump administration's actions on the border. All reasonable people agree: Regardless of your specific opinions on immigration, separating parents from their children is immoral. It is a practice in which we should most definitely not engage. Here's another practice we should refrain from: comparing all wrongs, even the ones that Trump carries out, to the evils of Nazi Germany. What's going on at the border is terrible in its own right. We don't need to dress it up in the language and imagery of another (significantly crueler) disaster. Many people have pointed to the glaring similarity: In the Nazi death camps and concentration camps, much like at the US-Mexico border, children were separated from parents. That's true. But in Nazi-occupied Europe, those children were also gassed. Their bodies were carried by other prisoners, sometimes their own parents, into the crematoria, where they were burned. Their ashes are all that remain. Their parents, assuming they were in reasonable shape, were put into forced labor and starved. Many died from the conditions. There's nothing similar about that situation to the one that's happening at the border. In fact, pretending there is essentially conveys the message that what is happening there isn't so horrible on its own, that to fully rouse the sympathies of those around us we need to pretend things are worse than they are. We don't. And doing so will (and should) achieve the opposite effect. Michael Hayden, who previously served as director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, waded into this issue when he tweeted a picture of Auschwitz and wrote, "Other governments have separated mothers and children." The CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer discussed the reactions to the tweet with Hayden, who had explained that he "felt a warning flare was necessary" and was trying to describe "what is happening to us as a people." It's easy to understand why Hayden was disturbed and concerned about the ways American officials are acting. The images of children in cages, the act of separating children from parents, the detention centers with their cramped quarters and barrack-like interiors. But comparisons to Auschwitz are ludicrous and offensive. Blitzer explained to Hayden why so many people were outraged by his tweet. "I speak with some authority on this," Blitzer said. "My grandparents were murdered at Auschwitz. My dad survived, but two of his brothers and two of his sisters were killed at Auschwitz. They weren't separated to go to some other facility. They were separated to die." What's going on at the border is a tragedy. But critics of the administration's actions should be honest, articulate, and accurate. They should refrain from comparisons that will only serve to highlight how Trump and his policies are not quite as bad as they could be.
^ I worked at the USHMM. I saw first-hand what the Germans did during the Holocaust, I have met numerous survivors, I have been to Dachau, I have been inside a gas chamber - - there is no comparison to what the Germans and their collaborators did during the Holocaust and now.
At the USHMM I also learned that the Vichy French (which collaborated with the Germans) begged the Germans to keep the children with their parents and ship them all to the death camps together rather then separate them as the Germans wanted to. That request was made to make it easier for the French and not for those doomed to death.
And to say that modern-Germany has completely overcome their role in the Holocaust is absurd. Until the 1980s convicted Nazi war criminals lived out in the open and worked in every position possible (from the top-down) and in every sphere of influence in German society - even as teachers. The current German Government today even pays government pensions, benefits, etc. to convicted Nazi war criminals and their spouses for their "great" service to the Fatherland. That service was the murder of millions upon millions of innocent men, women and children throughout occupied-Europe. They even get yearly COLA adjustments while the majority of Holocaust survivors throughout the world live at or just below the poverty line. How can a country claim to learn from the mistakes from their past and be sorry for them while at the same time praising the convicted murderers? Answer: they can't.
So to compare the Holocaust with what is happening with the illegal immigrants and their children today is not factual. It is merely a ploy by the less-informed to try and scare people. Whether you agree with the separation of the illegal immigrants from their children or not is not the point. The point is to not compare something so immense and horrendous as the Holocaust was with something that is not on par. ^
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