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The Left’s Metaphorical Holocaust Denial frontpagemag.com/fpm/274110/lef…
Last year, a Los Angeles theater put on a production of Anne Frank with a Latino cast hiding from ICE.
Omar and Ocasio Cortez had their own anti-Semitic moments. By transforming anti-Semitism and the mass murder of Jews from a reality to a metaphor about the oppression of minorities, they become the metaphorical victims and the Jews objecting to them become metaphorical Nazis.
The USSR mastered this technique when having renamed the dead Jews as “victims of fascism”, it was free to work toward the murder of millions of Jews in Israel by denouncing them as “Zionist fascists.”
A typical example was a Pravda article, “Fascism and Zionism” which claimed that Israel, like Nazi Germany, was guilty of capitalism, imperialism and genocide. The article argued that Jews everywhere were a “5th column” while insisting the USSR was anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic
Modern leftists also argue that Jews are the real Nazis. Hating them isn’t anti-Semitism. It’s anti-Zionism, which is really anti-Fascism and anti-Nazism. Killing Jews becomes the real message of the Holocaust.
Turning the Holocaust into a political metaphor makes Nazis out of its victims and its commemorators.
Instead of condemning evil, the transformation of the Holocaust into a metaphor whose protagonists are interchangeable, turns a real event into a blank slate on which any agenda can be superimposed.
If everyone can be Hitler and anyone can be the Jews, then the Holocaust becomes a myth. A fairy tale into which any of us can read our own meaning and offers us no morality we do not already possess.
The Holocaust is not a metaphor. It is not a toolset to apply to every political event to demarcate the borders of the political spectrum. It was not the work of fascists, as the Soviet Union insisted.
The Franco regime in Spain made efforts to save Jews even while the Soviet Union was executing some Jewish refugees as spies. FDR, a progressive hero, blocked the entry of Jewish refugees to the United States.
El Salvador, governed by a fascist dictator, turned a blind eye to thousands of visas given to Jews.
When you study the Holocaust as history, rather than metaphor, it becomes impossible to reduce the events to a simplistic progressive parable about the virtue of tolerant lefties who resist racism.
Bigotry is inherent in human beings and mass murder is how totalitarian regimes implement their utopian visions.
The Nazis and the Communists both imagined an ideal world in which the Jews did not exist.
The Nazis and the Communists both imagined an ideal world in which the Jews did not exist.
They went about implementing it in somewhat different ways because, like all fanatics whose morality comes from ideology, they had different theories to explain their own supremacism and the inferiority of the Jews.
The Nazis believed that they were superior for genetic reasons and viewed the Jews as a racial phenomenon that had to be physically eradicated at the genetic level.
The Communists believed that they were superior for political reasons and the Jews had to be eradicated as a cultural phenomenon. The erasure of Jews from the story of the Holocaust, then and now, is part of that leftist genocide.
Erasing the Jews makes it easier to eliminate these complex realities while leaving only the metaphor. But the danger of reducing people to metaphors is part of the reason why the Holocaust happened.
Lefties universalized the Holocaust, shifting it from a story about Jews to a universal tale about the wickedness of being mean to people, of bigotry, discrimination and general meanness of spirit.
And yet, anti-Semitism has come roaring back and is bigger than it’s been in generations.
The trouble with universal messages is that they’re meaningless.
The trouble with universal messages is that they’re meaningless.
Most people already believe that being mean to others is wrong. They just disagree on the specific implementation of it.
For leftists, the story of Anne Frank or the Holocaust is, at the moment, about the evils of deporting illegal aliens. It has nothing to say about the evils of anti-Semitism or of Islamic terrorists who cheer Hitler and murder Jews.
Learning about the Holocaust hasn’t made them better people, only more self-righteous about their views. They haven’t questioned their beliefs, instead they appropriated the Holocaust to support them.
When you turn history into metaphor, all you’re really doing is manufacturing propaganda.
On the campaign trail, Senator @CoryBooker attacked President Trump’s immigration policies by invoking the Holocaust. “There was a ship that came here during World War II with a bunch of folks trying to escape ..., and we turned it around where they got killed in the Holocaust.”
“The shame of that, you think we would learn our lesson about people coming here to seek asylum escaping terror.”
The “folks” in question were Jews.
The “folks” in question were Jews.
Booker’s anonymization of Jews as “folks” strongly echoed Obama’s dismissal of a Muslim terrorist attack on a Jewish supermarket before the Sabbath, as “randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli.”
The 2020 candidate, who condemned criticism of Rep. Omar as Islamophobia, has announced that he would be okay with meeting with “Minister Farrakhan”, a bigot who has praised Hitler. This was the 2nd time that the NJ senator had good things to say about a man who praised Hitler.
"I am very familiar with Minister Louis Farrakhan and his beliefs and his values," Booker told an audience member in South Carolina.
Those values include calling Hitler, a "very great man".
Those values include calling Hitler, a "very great man".
Previously, Booker had favorably quoted Stokely Carmichael in a Senate speech whose most famous line was, “The only good Zionist is a dead Zionist, we must take a lesson from Hitler.”
Historical revisionism isn’t just denying that the Holocaust happened, it’s also eliminating the history. When you wipe out the context, then before you know it, you can end up next door to Hitler.
