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David Harris Blog featured in
The Times of Israel
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Dear AJC Friend,
AJC CEO David Harris, in his latest The Times of Israel oped, draws on
his own family and professional experience to challenge those today
who draw analogies with the Nazi and Soviet eras to advance partisan
views or score political points.
Best regards,
Kenneth Bandler
AJC Director of Media Relations
The Abuse of History
The Times of Israel
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By David Harris
August 30, 2020
We live in an increasingly ahistorical world. Nowhere is this more
evident than in the would-be historical references and analogies that
are being thrown into our political discourse with abandon these days.
To describe the degree of anger and alienation of those on the right,
Hitler and the Nazis have been trotted out repeatedly as reference
points to protest official rules for wearing masks, social distancing,
home sheltering, or business shutdowns.
"Arbeit Macht Frei, JB," said the placard protesting
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker's response to COVID-19. Pritzker
is Jewish. The three words in German come from the infamous sign at
the entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, where 1.1 million
women, men and children, 90 percent of whom were Jews, were
slaughtered in the gas chambers and their bodies turned into ashes in
the crematoria.
And among President Trump's foes, seething anger has led to
comparisons with Soviet methods.
Here's a particularly noteworthy example on Twitter from a
former American diplomat:
"I spent my early diplomatic career in the Soviet Union where
the (Communist) Party ruled the State. I look at my home now and see
Trump deploying those same tactics."
Let me be clear. The issue for me here is not about coronavirus
debates or passionate views for or against Donald Trump.
Rather, it's about invoking comparisons to the Nazi and Soviet
eras to make a political point.
Perhaps it's because my entire life has been directly affected
by those two eras.
My mother was a survivor of both Soviet communists and German Nazis.
My father was a survivor of the latter. I grew up surrounded by
survivors of the Nazis (and Bolsheviks), not to mention visiting
dozens of sites of mass atrocities and meeting many eyewitnesses,
rescuers, and liberators.
I have spent a lifetime trying to study both systems. Indeed, I had
the chance to teach in the Soviet Union in the 1970s as part of an
official U.S.-Soviet exchange program, until I was expelled after
several months for my activities with persecuted Soviet Jews. And in
the years that followed, I worked in Vienna and Rome, assisting
thousands of refugees fleeing the Soviet "worker's
paradise."
All of this is to say I cannot accept the analogies I hear today, nor
the implications they suggest for the United States.
Whatever one's thoughts about politics today, America is not
lurching towards Nazism or Bolshevism. To suggest otherwise is to
misunderstand, at a fundamental level, the nature of these
totalitarian ideologies and their legacies.
To claim that an elected official is acting Nazi-like because
he's trying to keep the public safe from a public health
epidemic, based on the available information at the time, is
irresponsible in the extreme.
Does that protester, and her many counterparts across the country,
have a clue who Hitler was; what the Gestapo, SS, and Einsatzgruppen
represented; what happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other death
camps; the genocidal meaning of the Holocaust; the tragic fate of
countless Roma, gays, Slavs, freethinkers, etc.; the scorched-earth
destruction wrought across Europe and North Africa; and the death toll
of literally tens of millions directly resulting from the Nazis'
12-year reign?
And, while I have great respect for our nation's diplomats, a
number of whom I've had the pleasure of meeting over the years,
the Soviet Union I experienced first-hand, not to mention my family,
and engaged with directly for nearly 20 years, has nothing to do with
our current political environment, however heated it may be.
One-party rule, sham elections, denial of basic human rights,
arbitrary arrests, kangaroo courts, forced confessions, internal
exile, Gulag, KGB, militant atheism, sealed borders, abuse of
psychiatry, endemic corruption, censorship, economic stagnation,
occupation of foreign lands, and pervasive fear and paranoia were all
hallmarks of the Soviet system - and I'm only scratching
the surface.
So, by all means, let the political debates rage in our endlessly
challenging - and, yes, democratic - environment. But
let's not misrepresent history, distort and trivialize the Nazi
and Soviet eras in the service of partisan aims, and make facile
comparisons to today's America in the process.
To do otherwise may make for popular sound bites and images, but it
surely makes for bad history. Even more, it dishonors the memories of
the tens of millions who perished at the hands of both tyrannies.
David Harris is CEO of American Jewish Committee (AJC). Please join
66,400 others and follow him on Twitter @DavidHarrisAJC.
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