Last week we ran Jerry Slater’s post saying that comparisons of Israel’s behavior to Nazi Germany’s conduct, in the documentary The Gatekeepers, are exaggerated. Jerry points out that Israel’s conduct in the occupation does not approach actual Nazi crimes. Well, by coincidence, this Tuesday the New York Times reported that Betty Friedan used the Nazi analogy, and that day I also happened to read Mark Rudd’s use of the analogy in a 2005 paper. Those examples follow.
From the article in the Times reassessing Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique, after 50 years, by Jennifer Schuessler:
Indeed, Friedan was hardly without her critics in the movement, who blasted what they saw as her myopic focus on educated white women or her sometimes over-the-top language, whether she was comparing suburbia to “a comfortable concentration camp” or warning the National Organization for Women, which she help found in 1966, against an encroaching lesbian “menace.”
Some scholars, however, have defended aspects of Friedan’s work that sound most outlandish to contemporary ears. In an essay excerpted in the new Norton critical edition, Kirsten Fermaglich, a historian at Michigan State and the volume’s co-editor, argued that Friedan was hardly the only Jewish thinker of the period to make use of extended Nazi metaphors while saying nothing about Jews. The historian Stanley Elkins, the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton and the psychologist Stanley Milgram, she wrote, all used Nazi concentration camps, much as Friedan did, as a metaphor for mass society’s destruction of the individual.
And below is an excerpt of Mark Rudd’s excellent essay, “Why Were There So Many Jews in the SDS?”
Identifying with the oppressed seemed to me at Columbia and since a natural Jewish value, though one we never spoke of as being Jewish. We were socialists and internationalists first. I myself joined the cult of Che Guevara, putting posters of him on my apartment wall and aching to be a revolutionary hero like him. He wasn’t very Jewish, incidentally.
But World War II and the holocaust were our fixed reference points. This was only twenty years after the end of the war. We often talked about the moral imperative to not be Good Germans. Many of my older comrades had mobilized for the civil rights movement; we were all anti-racists. We saw American racism as akin to German racism toward the Jews. As we learned more about the war, we discovered that killing Vietnamese en masse was of no moral consequence to American war planners. So we started describing the war as racist genocide, reflecting the genocide of the holocaust. American imperialist goals around the world were to us little different from the Nazi goal of global conquest. If you really didn’t like somebody—and we loathed President Lyndon B. Johnson—you might call him a fascist.
P.S. I have often written that visiting Gaza reminded me of what I’d learned about the Warsaw Ghetto as a boy.
As a son of Northampton, Massachusetts, I can say that Friedans comments about the suburbs being a concentration camp, are in fact, indicative of the mindset of most modern “Smithies” – a detestable lot, I hate to say. Somehow I think Slater would find it in himself to defer to Friedan….
You mean Jerry Slater’s piece was not satirical?
In popular culture, nothing even comes close to the suffering of Jews in WWII or the ghetto life in old Europe.
Every year. Every year, a few movies are made about the Holocaust (Don’t forget the capital “H” for copyright purposes). Whether the movies are about a piano player, about a book reader, about a boy in pajamas, about a futuristic time machine in which the protagonist just so happens to go back to 1942 or about some such nonsense, Hollywood will continue to churn them out lest someone on the Military Channel or the Discovery Channel forget what a Nazi was that guy, Hitler. By the way, be sure to click on my username to purchase the 8 part DVD collection about concentration camps in Germany, with rare footage now available in color.
Meanwhile, the atrocities in Rwanda earned two or three movies. The genocides in the former Yugoslavia could only manage four or five movies, and even then two of them were about some downed American pilot or a couple of kidnapped journalists. Ahhh, but wait. Both Nicole Kidman and George Clooney are in abundance if you need them to portray a Moslem from Bosnia as a fanatic suicide bomber who managed to get his hands on a Russian nuke. Wow.
And don’t even get me started about those 1001 Vietnam war movies that make for cheap action-packed thrillers.
Then of course there’s the Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestine which has yet to get one movie to document it in mainstream American culture.
Stalin? Well, he’s only dragged to appear in a movie whenever the West needs to remind itself of the atrocities of Those evil guys over there.
So what do I think about the Nazi comparison? I think the day the State of Israel with its army, its surveillance agencies, and its thuggish paramilitary police ceases to borrow tactics perfected by the SS, then perhaps the analogy would become passé.
Don’t forget, all it takes is one film, one movie, to open the eyes of a willfully blind mainstream journalist like Brian Lehrer and a million others like him.
Phil asked me to comment on this post. Actually, the post he links to above was meant to be a satire, the point of which was that while it is true that Israeli crimes don’t approach those of the Nazis, that is not even slightly comforting.
Actually, I don’t think that the use of Nazi analogies is a good idea, whether applied to American society (Frieden), the Vietnam war (Rudd), or to the Israeli occupation and repression of the Palestinians. (I may be wrong, but I don’t think Phil does either.) First, there is no analogy: even among evils, the Holocaust is in a class by itself, as absolute and unimaginable form of evil as the world has ever known. I don’t say this because its victims were mostly Jewish, like me; it would be just as absolutely and unimaginably evil if the victims of a carefully planned, systematic, and cold-blooded campaign of the literal extermination of millions of people had been any other group. (Needless to say, I trust)
Aside from its inaccuracy–to say the least–the analogy is counterproductive. It’s supposed to shock readers into recognizing that something evil is occurring, but my guess is that most readers will be put off by it–at least, they should be–and it will have the opposite effect. Meaning that those who employ the analogy will be discredited and so the overall message they seek to deliver may be dismissed. (I even think that applies to the Shin Bet director who, amazingly, suggested the analogy)
The central point: the Israel crimes of occupation and repression are sufficiently terrible, and they can be described and condemned without the need of any analogy, let alone to Hitler and the Holocaust. Or, if analogies are irresistible, compare them to something like the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe and the crushing of the anticommunist resistance movements, the Hungarian and Czech uprisings, and the like.
Not allowing the use of the “Nazi”/”Hitler” words is a technique for Zios and of course they also teach Jews (Zios especially) to hate and fear “Nazi”/”Hitler” and to wish to reserve them (as also “holocaust”) for the singlular events of 1940s — making nonsense of the “learn from it” and “never again” if by definition nothing else could ever be sufficiently like the singlular real thing to deserve the name.
There are no words at all whose definitions are as narrow as Zios wish to make “holocaust” et al. The word “chair” doesn’t even denote something with 4 legs any more, and no harm done. “You get the idea” and “and so on” and “etc.” are all well understood, and it is in that way that people use “Nazi” these days to refer to things other than Hitler et al in the 1940s.
Use of the “Nazi” word is not done to belittle the Jewish experience. It is done to convey meaning and feeling. The cebnsorship here, as elsewhere, is harmful.