Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
Print Edition

Pope Francis, meet Sean Spicer

The world without Holocaust survivors is upon us. A few survivors are still with us, but their collective impact is gone.

Last week, we took President Trump’s spokeman Sean Spicer  to task for his drastically ill informed remarks about the Holocaust. Sean, move over. You’ve got company, no less than the Pope.

Spicer launched a Hitler comparison, always an obscene exercise if you’re not dealing with the likes of Stalin or Pol Pot. And what a comparison — Hitler wasn’t as bad as Bashar Assad. Just when we thought it could get no worse, along comes Pope Francis and compares contemporary refugee camps to Nazi concentration camps. In the dubious race to ignorance and disfiguration, it’s tough to know whether Spicer or the Pope gets the blue ribbon.

We need not say that some contemporary refugee camps of which the pope speaks — “cramped makeshift tents plagued by rats, water sources contanimated by [feces] and inhabitants suffering from tuberculosis, scabies and post-traumatic” (in the description of one newspaper reporter) — are blights upon humanity and upon humanity’s conscience, well deserving of denunication by the Pope and of amelioration by all decent people and governments.

But no systematic mass murder is perpetuated in contemporary refugee camps. No poison gas is massively administered. No routine, random murder is unleashed by utterly uncontrolled, conscienceless prison guards. No slave labor is present.  No suffering is imposed out of evaluation of the camp’s inhabitants as no more than dangerous germs requiring extermination.

Symbolic of the distinction between Nazi concentration camps and current refugee camps, reporters have no problem ascertaining what goes on in the contemporary camps, wholly unlike the hermetically sealed, intentionally evil, Nazi camps.

A foolish headline rests over this story in the Denver Post: “‘Concentration camp’ comment upsets Jews.” Here is the evidence of the loss of the collective impact of Holocaust survivors. Ignorance about Nazism should upset not just Jews. Such ignorance helps create these current, reprehensible refugee camps to begin with.

It is not special pleading, not a victimhood competition, that is the spur to condemnation of the Pope’s comparison. To say that it is only Jews whom the Pope hurts is like saying that the only people hurt in the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster were those living in Chernobyl. The radiation killed or deformed people in a lethal circumference hundreds of miles round and plunged Europe into existential fear. The potential evil in ignorance about the Holocaust is virtually unlimited.

The world slides into ignorance of the Holocaust at its own peril. It is just that Jews, with or without a survivor community, have longer memories. Partly because memory is an essential element of Jewish being and theology, and partly because the Holocaust happened to us (us, yes, given Jewish intergenerational identity), we take quicker note of the distortions of the likes of Sean Spicer and Pope Francis.

Discontinuity is not a virtue in collective memory, whether that of the Jews or of humanity. For their own good, all people, from headline writers to presidential spokes-men to international religious leaders, should take take care to learn what happened, 1933-1945, in Germany and then in all of Europe. If they do, the dangerous comparisons to Nazism will end.

Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News




Leave a Reply