“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.” This statement, posted on the museum’s Twitter feed last week, was prompted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s description of the immigration detention centers on the southern border as “concentration camps” and the backlash from those who felt that, by using the term, she was cheapening the memory of the Holocaust. It would have been one thing for the museum to just dispute the applicability of the phrase “concentration camps.” (Although, it’s worth noting that experts on concentration camps have weighed in to say that, yes, the term is appropriate and that the abuses at the border fit into the same category of events as German crimes against the Herero in Namibia and French internment of successive “unwanted populations” at Rivesaltes military camp.) But that’s not what the museum did. Instead, it rejected any comparisons to the Holocaust, ever. That’s a problem, and not only because it runs contrary to so much of the museum’s own work. Like most scholars of mass atrocities, I spend approximately 60 percent of my waking hours making comparisons between “the Holocaust and other events.” As an open letter from more than 100 historians, published on Monday, emphasized, the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Never Again” mission requires that we understand past episodes of genocide and other mass atrocities and analogize between them to draw out lessons for the future. This is exactly what historians and social scientists who study atrocities do. That’s why the museum works with so many of us. My own work, for instance, has examined patterns in the way atrocity perpetrators suppress evidence of their crimes, drawing parallels between Sri Lanka, Syria, and Myanmar, and analyzed the effects of international interventions on different types of mass atrocities. Recently, I chaired a session of a conference at the museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. I opened by talking about the link between prevention and historical memory, reflecting on the cognitive dissonance of sitting in a building erected to preserve the memory of one atrocity on land that had been stolen in another largely unremembered atrocity. In the United States, we don’t even give to the genocide of indigenous peoples the lip-service recognition that is increasingly a feature of public life in other settler colonies. We don’t think of this piece of our past as something that needs to be redressed, or even addressed. The absence of comparison to other recognized atrocities is both a symptom and a process of erasure. A Canadian national commission of inquiry recently concluded that Canada has committed genocide against its indigenous peoples. The conclusion met with resistance from many quarters, much of it arguing implicitly or explicitly that decades of abusive policies and official indifferenc
It’s Not Just Appropriate to Compare Modern Atrocities to the Holocaust. It’s Vital.
“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum unequivocally rejects efforts to create analogies between the Holocaust and other events, whether historical or contemporary.” This statement, posted on the museum’s Twitter feed last week, was prompted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s description of the immigration detention centers on the southern border as “concentration camps” and the backlash from those who felt that, by using the term, she was cheapening the memory of the Holocaust. It would have been one thing for the museum to just dispute the applicability of the phrase “concentration camps.” (Although, it’s worth noting that experts on concentration camps have weighed in to say that, yes, the term is appropriate and that the abuses at the border fit into the same category of events as German crimes against the Herero in Namibia and French internment of successive “unwanted populations” at Rivesaltes military camp.) But that’s not what the museum did. Instead, it rejected any comparisons to the Holocaust, ever. That’s a problem, and not only because it runs contrary to so much of the museum’s own work. Like most scholars of mass atrocities, I spend approximately 60 percent of my waking hours making comparisons between “the Holocaust and other events.” As an open letter from more than 100 historians, published on Monday, emphasized, the Holocaust Memorial Museum’s “Never Again” mission requires that we understand past episodes of genocide and other mass atrocities and analogize between them to draw out lessons for the future. This is exactly what historians and social scientists who study atrocities do. That’s why the museum works with so many of us. My own work, for instance, has examined patterns in the way atrocity perpetrators suppress evidence of their crimes, drawing parallels between Sri Lanka, Syria, and Myanmar, and analyzed the effects of international interventions on different types of mass atrocities. Recently, I chaired a session of a conference at the museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. I opened by talking about the link between prevention and historical memory, reflecting on the cognitive dissonance of sitting in a building erected to preserve the memory of one atrocity on land that had been stolen in another largely unremembered atrocity. In the United States, we don’t even give to the genocide of indigenous peoples the lip-service recognition that is increasingly a feature of public life in other settler colonies. We don’t think of this piece of our past as something that needs to be redressed, or even addressed. The absence of comparison to other recognized atrocities is both a symptom and a process of erasure. A Canadian national commission of inquiry recently concluded that Canada has committed genocide against its indigenous peoples. The conclusion met with resistance from many quarters, much of it arguing implicitly or explicitly that decades of abusive policies and official indifferenc
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