Deborah Lipstat: "It's Not The Holocaust": Separating Children From Parents At The Border

It's not the Holocaust.

It's definitely not the Holocaust.

It bears no significant resemblance to the Holocaust.

If you don't see that, you've likely lost perspective.

Lipstat's right that it's not the Holocaust.

But I'm not wild about half her reasons.

She writes:

I understand [the] outrage. I share it. But something can be horrific without being a genocide or a Holocaust. Defenders of the Trump policy self-righteously pounced on the comparison, denouncing it as hyperbolic. Although there is nothing good that can be said about Trump’s family-separation policy, it is not a genocide. Equating the two is not only historically wrong, it is also strategically wrong. Glib comparisons to the Nazis provide the administration and its supporters with a chance to defend their position, something they do not deserve.

She's right that the comparison isn't true/accurate/apt.

That should be the end of it. 

She may also be right that the comparison is tactically bad--though I'm not so sure. People are suckers for argumentum at Hitlerum / argumentum ad Holocaustium... (In the paleo-PC era, I used to joke that there were only two crimes: rape and genocide. Anything the paleo-PCs didn't like was either a kind of rape or tantamount to genocide. The neo-PCs seem to have deviated from that blueprint, but not by much.) Anyway, maybe the tactic is, overall, rhetorically effective, or maybe it isn't. It shouldn't matter. It's bullshit. Period. That ought to be an end on it.

   I hate counterproductivity arguments. And I especially hate them right now, because they tacitly accept the crazy views of the PC left. Why isn't "That's bullshit" taken to be a good enough reason against something? Because it is a good enough reason. I worry that we are tacitly admitting that we have to signal our anti-Trumpitude with every argument. The Trump administration absolutely does deserve to defend itself...against the comparison to freaking Hitler... Though, for that matter, it deserves the right to defend itself against the other stuff, too: there are decent reasons for the policy in question, though I, myself, don't think it can possibly be the best available alternative. [I wrote this and didn't get around to publishing it; the policy's on the way out the door already.]