Personally, I’ve been disturbed by the Left’s references to Hitler since the days of George W. Bush.
“He’s Hitler!” signs and bumper stickers would declare.
It’s become the put-down of choice, spreading — in my view — dangerous ignorance to an entire generation. Now, it seems, any Republican leader who comes across as egomaniacal or who leads a war or who merely has conservative leanings may be subject to the Adolf treatment.
In order to compare Trump to Hitler or the border to the Holocaust, one must A) not know what America does, B) not know what Germany did, or C) both A and B.
Apropos, Harvard Law School Professor Alan Dershowitz threw down on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for her claim that America’s running “Never Again”-style concentration camps at the border.
In fact, Alan accused AOC in a radio interview last week of being a “Holocaust denier.”
There is a sort of logic to that.
For more on Alexandria’s Instagram video that ignited a firestorm of criticism from Survivors and Jewish groups among others, please see my coverage here, here, and here.
In her video Monday, she claimed the following:
“The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border, and that is exactly what they are — they are concentration camps. And, um, if that doesn’t bother you, I don’t, I don’t know, I like, we can have, okay whatever. I want to talk to the people that are concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘Never Again’ means something. The fact that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the ‘Home of the Free’ is extraordinarily disturbing, and we need to do something about it.”
Here’s what Alan had to say on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight:
“Let nobody misunderstand what she was saying. When she used the words ‘concentration camps,’ what she meant to invoke was the Holocaust. She didn’t make distinctions between death camps and detention centers, between Dachau and Auschwitz. Even in the concentration camps that may not have been death camps, so many people died because they were forced laborers and everything like that. And of course, ‘Never Again’ is the direct invocation of the Holocaust.”
Alan’s analysis of denial:
“By making that comparison, she becomes a Holocaust denier, because what’s she’s saying is: ‘Gee, if all that Hitler did is what Trump is doing on the southern border,’ then there were no death camps, there were no killing squads, there was no genocide, there was no murder of a million-and-a-half babies, there were no selections where people were picked based on their health and whether they were twins and subjected to the most gruesome form of punishment.'”
As I said, there’s a certain logic to it. But if she can be said to have denied the Holocaust, then the same accusation must be laid at the feet of the media, social media users, and — yes — conservatives who’ve made similar allegations against select left-wingers.
And to be clear, I do not believe Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually believes the Holocaust didn’t occur.
Evil exists in 2019, and I have no doubt government can still be its instrument. But in my opinion, no one should accuse contemporary America or any of its current or past leaders of being genocidal Nazi Germany or Hitler. The 1930’s and 40’s saw an unprecedented evil arise. Millions of men, women, and children were rounded up at gunpoint — solely due to their heritage — and murdered en masse.
The victims of the Holocaust deserve our remembrance, respect, and reverence. And our understanding that there’s no way to understand what they endured. Their suffering should never be diminished by way of reference to lesser deeds.
Delving further, I invite you to read Gene Simmons’s powerful tribute to his mother — Holocaust survivor Flora Klein. She loved America because she knew what it meant.
What do you think of all this? I look forward to learning in the Comments section.
Thank you for reading.
-ALEX
Relevant RedState links in this article: here, here, here, and here.
See 3 more pieces from me:
Female Track Runner Sidelined By Male Competitors Petitions The Department Of Education For Justice
Find all my RedState work here.
And please follow Alex Parker on Twitter and Facebook.
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