Hundreds of scholars urge Holocaust Memorial Museum to stop rejecting border camp comparisons

[demmiblue]

More than 300 scholars have signed on to an open letter urging the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to retract its statement that rejects comparisons between migrant detention facilities and concentration camps.

"The Museum’s decision to completely reject drawing any possible analogies to the Holocaust, or to the events leading up to it, is fundamentally ahistorical," the scholars wrote in a letter published in The New York Review of Books. "It has the potential to inflict severe damage on the Museum’s ability to continue its role as a credible, leading global institution dedicated to Holocaust memory, Holocaust education, and research in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies."

The letter, which is addressed to museum director Sara J. Bloomfield, goes on to argue that the "very core of Holocaust education is to alert the public to dangerous developments that facilitate human rights violations and pain and suffering; pointing to similarities across time and space is essential for this task."

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) last month sparked massive pushback after equating migrant detention facilities near the U.S.-Mexico border to concentration camps.

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/451268-hundreds-of-scholars-urge-dc-holocaust-museum-to-stop-rejecting?__twitter_impression=true&__twitter_impression=true

[lapucelle]

1. From the other side.

This oversimplified approach to complex history is dangerous. When conducted with integrity and rigor, the study of history raises more questions than answers. And as the most extensively documented crime the world has ever seen, the Holocaust offers an unmatched case study in how societies fall apart, in the immutability of human nature, in the dangers of unchecked state power. It is more than European or Jewish history. It is human history. Almost 40 years ago, the United States Congress chartered a Holocaust memorial on the National Mall for precisely this reason: The questions raised by the Holocaust transcend all divides.

snip===============================================

Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize, demean, and intimidate their targets. But there is a cost for all of us because they distract from the real issues challenging our society, because they shut down productive, thoughtful discourse. At a time when our country needs dialogue more than ever, it is especially dangerous to exploit the memory of the Holocaust as a rhetorical cudgel. We owe the survivors more than that. And we owe ourselves more than that.

https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/why-holocaust-analogies-are-dangerous

[msongs]

2. first german camps were not death camps, those evolved over time nt

[Liberalhammer]

3. True

And the WW2 holocaust was not the only group to face human rights abuses before genocide.

I say the scholars are wrong on this.