Holocaust comparisons

Likening health care reform to the systematic and state-sponsored murder of more than 11 million people is not only completely unfounded, but it also threatens to dilute the Holocaust’s massive historical significance.

In a country that permits freedom of speech and protest, the use of Holocaust comparisons to counter a particular political movement is nothing new.

But with the recent move toward health care reform, these vacuous accusations have reached a deranged zenith.

Now, scribbling a toothbrush mustache on a picture of the president and slapping it onto a poster board has become the replacement for rational and intelligent debate.

It is now the routine for politicians and pundits to equate the Obama administration’s health care plan to Nazi eugenics and mass genocide.

Health care protesters carry signs bearing swastikas and Hitler imagery. I’ve even seen a poster of the carcasses of Holocaust victims piled on top of each other, with the headline: “National Socialist Healthcare — Dachau, Germany 1945.”

These comparisons are harmful because they commit a logical fallacy called “the fallacy of the undistributed middle.” This fallacy reads: if all X’s are Y’s, and Z is a Y, then Z must be an X.

The Holocaust comparisons operate under the belief that because all Nazis were socialists and the supporters of the health care bill are viewed as socialists, then the health care bill supporters are Nazis.

This argument is inherently flawed and lacks any shred of credibility.  

A more appropriate instance for this comparison might be the Rwandan genocide, but by invoking the atrocities of the Holocaust to attack something as comparatively benign as health care, the real lessons of the Holocaust are being pushed aside.

Both the people who are participating in this rhetoric and those who are exposed to it are being desensitized to the true evils of the Holocaust.

When we remember the Holocaust, we must remember the forces that allowed it to exist.

We must remember how the Third Reich’s use of propaganda dehumanized Jews by reducing them to inferior creatures such as rats, which made it easier for the public to support their demise.

We must remember the social conditions that allowed a diffusion of responsibility, enabling people to remain unfazed as millions were slaughtered.

We must remember the abominable evils of which humanity is capable.

These comparisons also do a disservice to those who were actually affected by the Holocaust. I don’t think a Holocaust survivor would be pleased that his experience is being used as a symbol for anti-health care talking points, and I can’t imagine a worse fate for the memories of concentration camp victims than to be used by some misguided protestor to bash health care reform.

This trivializes everything they endured.

There is a widely held belief that “we must never forget the Holocaust,” but is it not just as deplorable to only remember it in terms of its absurd associations with the political movement of the day?

Yes, we must never forget the Holocaust, but we need to remember it in the right context.


E-mail: joskraus@indiana.edu