Mar-a-Lago is not on the way to Auschwitz

• Published date: 23 January 2023

From Moscow to Mar-a-Lago, public figures this week were inappropriately invoking Nazi-related terms to denounce developments that did not at all resemble those of the Nazi era

Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, declared that the United States and its European allies are attempting to solve "the Russian question" in the same way that "Hitler wanted a 'final solution' to the Jewish question."

Meanwhile, more than five thousand miles away, former president Donald Trump tweeted that the FBI agents who recently removed classified government documents from his Mar-a-Lago residence were "the Gestopo" (as he spelled it).

Before the news cycle was done, a former Israeli attorney general called proposed judicial reforms in that country "a pogrom," and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman described those proposals as a "putsch," the term commonly associated with Adolf Hitler's failed coup attempt in 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch.

Whew!

If such outbursts were an aberration, it would be bad enough. But there have been numerous such remarks flung about in public discourse in recent months—just not all in a single 24-hour period.

Filmmaker Ken Burns, speaking on CNN about Holocaust-era immigration policies, said the decision by Florida's governor to fly fifty migrants to Martha's Vineyard was "straight out of the authoritarian playbook."

Not to be outdone, the Republican nominee for governor of Illinois, Darren Bailey, declared that "the attempted extermination of the Jews of World War II doesn't even compare on a shadow of the life that has been lost with abortion."

And Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last year that America's Covid vaccination policies are even more dangerous than Hitler's policies, since in Nazi Germany there was (he claimed) the option of "hiding in an attic, like Anne Frank did."

At least Kennedy retracted and apologized for his comment. That's rare among those who use Nazi analogies as political weapons.

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