International Holocaust Remembrance Day, observed on January 27th, the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Union’s Red Army, should remind us that the Holocaust really happened, that other acts of state-sponsored genocide have also been committed, and that those on the left and to the right on the American political spectrum unwittingly make a mockery of the victims of genocide by comparing American public polices to those which prompted genocide. We must have a better understanding of the Holocaust and other genocides to better prevent their recurrence.
Eminent antifascists from President Dwight Eisenhower to filmmaker Steven Spielberg have fought for years to document the Holocaust, the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis, and for good reason: Holocaust denial is a genuine evil, perpetrated by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, to lull us into believing that no such mass extermination took place and that the Nazis really weren’t all that bad. Of course, if one believes that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it,” it makes sense that those who want us to reject the idea that the Holocaust took place may want to spring future atrocities on an ignorant, gullible, unsuspecting, and unprepared public, which may awake only too late to the dangers its ignorance ushered in. The First Amendment may give Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, and other right-wing extremists the right to spew their noxious filth, but it should not prevent more rational observers from questioning their behavior or monitoring their activities to determine whether they’re as evil as the ideas they defend, or simply irredeemably stupid.
And one of the points that the Shoah Foundation, initially established by Steven Spielberg to collect and record the testimony of Jewish Holocaust survivors, is that the Holocaust is not the only act of state-sponsored genocide and that the Jews are not the only victims. In one sense, the Holocaust is unique in that the Nazis employed modern management and industrial techniques to perpetrate one of the most heinous atrocities in history. But the Shoah Foundation has expanded its work to better document other genocides, including the mass murder of Cambodians by dictator Pol Pot, the Armenian genocide perpetrated by Turkey, the Rwandan civil war of the 1990s, the persecution of the Rohingya by the military dictatorship of Myanmar (formerly Burma) today, and the Holodomor, and the Soviet-induced famine of 1932-1933, which killed between 3.5 and 5 million Ukrainians. (Is it any wonder that the Ukrainians are currently fighting so desperately to prevent reconquest by Russia?). These victims, no less than the Jews (and the 5 million Gentiles also murdered in Hitler’s camps) must not be forgotten either. To understand the wide range of genocides, their victims, and the means by which the genocides were conducted is to better understand that the perpetration of genocide remains a real possibility from which nobody is completely immune.
Nor should we trivialize the Holocaust or these other atrocities. Those who compare ICE detention facilities do so when they compare them to concentration camps. The Nazi camps had gas chambers for the efficient murder of Jews and other inmates, ovens for the cremation of their bodies, and slave labor sites and torture chambers for inmates saved from the gas chambers so that they could be worked to death through harsh labor and deliberately induced malnutrition and starvation. Our ICE facilities have no such features. To posit an equivalence between ICE facilities and Auschwitz, Dachau, Treblinka, or other Nazi camps is to deny the exponentially greater evil perpetrated by the Nazis, who used their facilities for mass extermination, and not simply as holding pens for those slated for repatriation to their home countries.
And both Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and Tim Walz have likewise misused the memory of Anne Frank, arguably the Holocaust’s most famous victim. Kennedy fatuously claimed that Americans opposed to Covid vaccine mandates were in greater danger than Jews under Hitler, and that at least Anne Frank could hide out from Nazi forces, thereby minimizing the evil of the Nazis. But in fact, Anne Frank and her family were tracked down by the Nazis, and sent to their deaths—a point also ignored by Tim Walz when he fatuously compared children of illegal immigrants to her.
Unfortunately, people at my end of the political spectrum likewise draw false analogies between government policies and those of socialist countries. There can be no doubt that socialism has been used to justify the mass murder of more millions of people than any other “ism.” (This is not because Nazism is more benign than socialism, but because those who claim to implement socialism to accelerate the evolution and attainment of communism have lasted longer than Hitler, and have therefore had more opportunities to murder more peopl). But too many right-wingers have opposed Social Security, Obamacare, civil rights policies, DEI initiatives, etc. by claiming that these are “socialistic” or “communistic.” Responsible conservatives can raise legitimate questions about the wisdom and dangers of these policies. But to say that those who advocate them are in league with Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot is to forfeit all credibility and right to be taken seriously. Indeed, by making such idiotic and irresponsible arguments, those on the radical right ultimately prove themselves counterproductive and totally ineffective, while actually aiding the implementation of the policies they say they deplore.
No doubt it’s impossible for anyone other than an actual survivor of the Holocaust or related atrocities to completely grasp the pure horror and unmitigated evil of such genocides. But the efforts of documentation made by the Shoah Foundation and other truth seekers remain necessary if we are to have any chance of reducing the likelihood of future genocides.
We may not be able to educate the truly evil holocaust deniers, but perhaps we can change the minds and improve the understanding of the Holocaust held by a Kennedy or Walz. And we certainly can, and must, strengthen our own knowledge to better resist whatever efforts may be made by those on the left or on the right, whether acting out of ignorance or evil, to implement policies which could lead to more genocides in the future.
Malcolm L. Cross has lived in Stephenville since 1987 and taught politics and government at Tarleton for 36 years, retiring in 2023. His political and civic activities include service on the Stephenville City Council (2000-2014) and on the Erath County Republican Executive Committee (1990-2024). He was Mayor pro-tem of Stephenville from 2008 to 2014. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Stephenville
Economic Development Authority since 2018, and as chair of the Erath County Appraisal District’s Appraisal Review Board since 2015. He is also a member of the Stephenville Rotary Club, the Board of Vestry of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, and the Executive Committee of the Boy Scouts’ Pecan Valley District. Views expressed in this column are his and do not reflect those of The Flash as a whole.
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