A Bad Take

For John, BLUF:  I am embarrassed for my nation that partisanship has led to an unwillingness to accept the results of an election, and thus to lack of cooperation on important issues.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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An Open Letter to the Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum

Here is the sub-headline:

On June 17, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, posted an Instagram live video discussing the detention camps along the southern US border as “concentration camps” in which she used the phrase “Never Again.”  This drew sharp criticism the following day from Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, and others for allegedly misappropriating a slogan associated with the Holocaust.  After several days of heated media and political debate, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum released a statement on June 24 condemning the use of Holocaust analogies.  We received the following open letter addressed to the director of the museum, Sara J. Bloomfield, delivered by the signatories on July 1.

—The Editors

From The New York Review of Books, by Scholars Omer Bartov, Doris Bergen, Andrea Orzoff, Timothy Snyder, and Anika Walke, et al, on, 1 July 2019.

Here is the lede plus one:

We are scholars who strongly support the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Many of us write on the Holocaust and genocide; we have researched in the USHMM’s library and archives or served as fellows or associated scholars; we have been grateful for the Museum’s support and intellectual community. Many of us teach the Holocaust at our universities, and have drawn on the Museum’s online resources. We support the Museum’s programs from workshops to education.

We are deeply concerned about the Museum’s recent “Statement Regarding the Museum’s Position on Holocaust Analogies.” We write this public letter to urge its retraction.

To say it flat out, I am disappointed in this.  This statement shows a total lack of perspective.  For one thing, this is not about people being uprooted and then sent to a camp, being ripped from their home, and then sent to a camp from which they were not expected to return.  No, this is about people who have voluntarily left their homes and illegally passed through other countries to enter ours, where reception facilities are inadequate and resources to improve those facilities have been stingily provides by the Congress, and workers, like those at Wayfarer, have been working to thwart improving said facilities.  And, what is the plan?  Open borders for the 42 odd million people of Central America, plus the people from other parts of the world filtering across our Southern Border.

I do wonder if this would have been published if the signers, and the Editors of The New York Review of Books had realized things were as bad under President Obama?

Regards  —  Cliff