If done with caution, Holocaust analogies can be useful. Looking at Holocaust history — thoughtfully, carefully — can help us to see the parallels between then and now.
It can also help us to understand when those parallels are not apt, and what that does and doesn’t mean about news as it breaks.
Of course, analogies are imperfect, and every situation has its own nuances and context, but looking at monstrous events of the past can help us understand where we are in ways that can be difficult to see in the day-to-day.
We must remember that the Holocaust didn’t begin with gas chambers, and it’s not business as usual in U.S. right now. We already know that the path to atrocity can be a process, and that the Holocaust began with dehumanizing propaganda, with discriminatory laws, with roundups and deportations, and with internment.
Those things are happening in our country now, and they’re known as some of the stages of genocide first articulated by Genocide Watch in 1996.
The full article is available here
