The other kind of Holocaust denial
Mask mandates, gas chambers...same thing, according to the QAnon Congresswoman.
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Not all Holocaust deniers say the Holocaust didn’t happen.
Just bear with me here for a moment.
When most people think about “Holocaust denial” they imagine brown-shirted neo-Nazis who say Hitler never did anything wrong. Some might picture pseudo-historians like David Irving, who insist that stories of the Nazi genocide against the Jews of Europe were greatly exaggerated - you know how these people are - and here’s a book with footnotes and everything that proves it.
(Irving’s already shaky reputation as a historian was absolutely demolished when he sued Deborah Lipstadt for defamation, only for his serial dishonesty to be exposed during the trial. Accidentally calling the judge “Main Fuhrer” didn’t help. Yes, that actually happened.)
The other kind of Holocaust denial is perhaps more accurately called “Holocaust minimization.” The people who engage in it actually agree that the Nazi Holocaust happened exactly as shown in the historical record. The Nazis carried out the ultimate crime against humanity. Also, these people I don’t agree with in 2021 are exactly the same as the Nazis.
Which brings me to this intellectual titan:
On one hand, I suppose we should be grateful that MTG admits that the Nazis had gas chambers. I’ll take small victories wherever I can get them. But it’s only a small victory, because she later doubled down and expressed disbelief that some Jewish people didn’t agree with her. (There’s been a lot of that kind of thing going around, lately.)
You know my feelings about the last President, but even I refrained from calling him a Nazi. When the IDF and Hamas are fighting, I find it offensive when anti-Israel demonstrators compare the Jewish state to a state that committed industrial-scale genocide against the Jewish people, but at least there’s actual combat going on.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican (of course) Congresswoman from Georgia, thinks wearing a mask during a deadly pandemic is comparable to the Holocaust. I’ve written before about how a feeling of victimhood and persecution can be addictive and intoxicating (Sonny Bunch had an excellent piece about it this past week, too) but takes it to another level.
This is my-parents-are-Nazis-because-they-won’t-let-me-watch-YouTube-all-day level stuff. It’s bad enough when idiot demonstrators do it, and even worse when an elected politician does it.
And will she face any consequences for it? Will any Republican, aside from the few who’ve already publicly burned their bridges, speak up about it? You know the answer to that one.
On Friday I savaged Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other members of “The Squad” for not speaking up about a recent spate of antisemitic hate crimes. (AOC, Rashida Tliab and Ayanna Presley have since tweeted about it, though the latter two all-lives-mattered it.) I disagree with Ocasio-Cortez about a lot, and I am sure I will strongly disagree with her about much more in the future. But whenever Democrats make me angry, I can always count on Republicans to kind of it put it all in perspective.
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With regard to the current government in Israel, while calling them Nazis contributes nothing to anything, it is worthwhile to remember that the Likud, Netanyahu's party, was founded in the 1930s by admirers of Mussolini, who were also fine with collaborating with the SS right up till Kristallnacht on "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." And they only stopped when all the other Jews in Palestine became anti-Nazi from that event. They've maintained the tradition of authoritarianism. Perhaps Mussolini wasn't as bad as Hitler, but he wasn't all that good either.