Samuel Rubinstein
UnHerd, Mar. 9, 2023
“The problem with ‘Holocaust-as-civics-lesson’, like the problem of treating the collapse of Weimar Germany as a parable, is that it means that the Holocaust has to be ‘updated’ to reflect present political concerns.”
It’s like clockwork. Every few months the government announces a new plan to tighten immigration policy and then, within seconds, you find ‘1930s Germany’ trending on Twitter. From the moment a picture of the Prime Minister’s flashy ‘Stop the Boats’ podium emerged, it became obvious what the next few days of online discourse would consist of.
It is Match of the Day host Gary Lineker’s belief that the Home Secretary’s language, when setting out her plans for the Government’s asylum policy, was ‘not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s’. Those who make such claims ought to be mocked, aside from anything else, for the apparent shallowness of their arsenal of cultural references.
But why are critics of the government so quick to reach for the rise of Nazism? Such analogies tend to be rooted in what could be described as ‘Holocaust-as-civics-lesson’, as distinct from ‘Holocaust-as-history’. The latter seeks to understand the catastrophes of the twentieth century in their own terms, as complex and contingent historical events, whose underlying causes were specific to their time. ‘Holocaust-as-civics-lesson’, however, reduces the entire point of learning about the Holocaust to ‘Never again’.
According to that view, the story of Hitler is a kind of cautionary tale: one learns about it simply so that one can ‘recognise’ the hallmarks of fascism in one’s everyday life and ‘call them out’. This explains not only why people like Lineker make the analogies they do, but also why they feel so self-satisfied as they do it. In short, there can be no surprise that people use the Holocaust as a blunt rhetorical tool, because they believe that the purpose of learning about the Holocaust is to use it as a blunt rhetorical tool.
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