Good morning, David, and thank you for your kind response. I'm sorry I didn't reply yesterday, but age is quickly catching up with me, and I felt too unwell most of the day to sit at my laptop and type. Now, I wish I had, because the notification of your reply has disappeared, and without it, I can't find a way to get into fullscreen mode. I find myself limited to a cramped text box and no editorial tools.
In any case, I want to answer your question about why some marginalized groups on the left raise the issue of the Holocaust when talking about oppression.
Let me start with some background about myself. I'm a gay man in my 60s, an Evangelical Christian until the age of 16, and a former member of Act Up NYC, a group that took to the streets to protest lack of government action to to fight/treat HIV. I mention that for a number of reasons, but one reason is that during that decade of my life, my partner and most of my friends were Jewish. In fact, I regularly visited my partner's synagogue and took great comfort in being welcomed by people of faith -- when all my prior life experiences had taught me that faith communities must reject me.
Bear with me, if you don't mind, because I really am going somewhere with this.
My life had also been strongly impacted by a prior, 5-year sojourn in West Berlin, where the Air Force sent me soon after I graduated from college. There, I formed intimate friendships with German young people, some of whom opened up to me about how they struggled to cope with or think about their own family's collaboration or cooperation with the Nazis. I'll never forget the night I had dinner with a friend in his home and came to realize that his grandfather, who was sitting at the kitchen table with us, had been a Nazi official. To say that my stomach twisted into knots and my face turned red is not to say enough.
Later, at a pub and after hours and hours of difficult conversation, my friend said to me, "How do you think I cope? How do you think I deal with our collective guilt? You can get up and walk away and never think about this again if you don't want to. I don't have that luxury. All I can do is work to make sure nothing like that ever happens again. I can watch for the signs and be ready to resist, much more ready than my family were."
A few years later in NYC, my husband's close friend Hilda, very elderly at that point, against raised the point of watching for signs, in the context of ongoing genocides in the Balkans. If you'd like, I've written about Hilda, an Austrian Jew who suffered in unspeakable ways at the hands of the Nazis, in two essays. If you can make the time to read about my relationship with her, that might be helpful. I'll put the links at the bottom of this comment.
So, on to my main point. Why do people on the left sometimes talk about the Holocaust when watching for signs of authoritarian oppression or behavior that might indicate approaching genocidal violence?
Hilda told me that in her opinion, genocide is a tragic consequence of human nature that can only be averted by constant awareness. In my Act Up (largely Jewish) circles, that theme was a constant background discussion. When most of your friends are dying and powerful public figures are saying, essentially, "Good riddance, the more of you who die, the better," how can you avoid wondering if the signs you're supposed to be watching for are right in front of you?
Today, with gay and trans events being firebombed and queer people attacked and beaten while police stand aside and let it happen, how can those signs not be in the front of my mind?
By the way, my friend on Twitter who asked me the question that sparked my thinking about Corrie ten Boom is Jewish. Perhaps I should have written that. His question was rhetorical, obviously, but he asked it (in my view) for the purpose of warning about signs of approaching brutality and possible genocidal-type behavior on the part of governments like in the U.S. or U.K.
I could have chosen to write about genocides targeted against Kurds, genocides in the Balkans or Southeast Asia, or about other points in human history when our nature caused us to lash out at and systematically kill the Other.
I could have written about the Roma or the gay people the Nazis sent to the death camps. Another of my husband's Jewish friends, Richard Plant, wrote "The Pink Triangle," one of the first works of history for the non-specialist that detailed Nazi mass killings of LGBTQ people. Richard could have been sent to the camps for being gay, or for being Jewish, or for both. He escaped that fate only because he emigrated to the U.S. before things got too bad.
Richard died in 1998, but he sat at my dining room table on more than one occasion talking about parallels between Nazi atrocities against Jews and atrocities committed against other marginalized groups. He was not a member of Act Up, but his gay partner was, and they both openly wondered about warning signs of approaching brutality against the queer Other -- I think not despite that they were Jewish but very much BECAUSE they were Jewish.
If I somehow gave the impression in my piece that I think everything today is fine for Jews, I'm quite sorry. In fact, I'm watching signs of growing modern antisemitism with a great deal of fear and anxiety. When my husband died in 1999, I was his only family in the world. As far as he knew, all his extended Jewish family in Poland died in the ghettos or the camps. He tried for years to trace his family tree, but never found another living branch.
Do I think atrocities that claimed all his relatives could not repeat? Of course not. I know they could. I fear signs I see that hatred of Jews is too alive and well today.
In fact, I wrote a long article a couple of years ago about a nauseating dive I took into antisemitism while researching organized transphobia -- because many of the groups that spread hateful lies about trans people also spread hateful lies about Jewish people. (Specifically, one popular trope on the right today is that "transgenderism" is financially supported by cabals of banker Jews who control the world for nefarious purposes. I take some credit, by the way, for organizing a campaign to pressure Amazon to stop selling a book that makes that claim.)
So, long and short, I think we must all, all human beings of good will, watch for signs that brutal persecution of the Other is approaching again. I was formed in important ways by growing up knowing about the horrors of the Holocaust and fearing its return. I fear it today. I think Hilda would want me to keep watching. And here are those links about her that I mentioned:
