“Moses has just been told something that will change his life. The audience knows this is the last time he’ll see his mother. But you know how moms are: no matter how you tell them something is a problem, they don’t really grasp it. Moses looks at her, kind of smiles, and falls into her arms. He realizes that she’s not going to understand what this means to him. She just knows she loves him.”

The Prince of Egypt - A New Vision in Animation

Holocaust Analogies

People frequently invoke the Holocaust when speaking of large-scale discrimination in the modern era, and at first glance, this might even make sense. After all, if people are subject to abuse for an arbitrary aspect of themselves that they cannot change, if they are threatened with death due to these characteristics, surely the comparison is apt? No.

There is only one Holocaust. There will only ever be one Holocaust. It was a specific moment in time that transpired as the result of countless years of oppression and discriminatory practices, coupled with a political climate that bred it like an opportunistic infection.

No one but Holocaust survivors are Holocaust survivors. No one but Jews are Jews. No one but the Rroma are Rroma. No one but the Nazis are Nazis. No one but Hitler is Hitler.

Comparing anything to the Holocaust, no matter how terrible, does nothing but minimize the real, actual human tragedy of the Holocaust. Real, human lives, human stories, human hopes, brutally taken, murdered, ripped apart. Families, gone. Towns, gone. History, culture, gone. Lives, gone.

Millions of real people died in the Holocaust. All you do when you use Holocaust rhetoric to support your faulty arguments is to disservice them and all those who survived them. Stop using dead Jews to support your faulty rhetoric.