It seems offensive images are a running theme on campus these days. Between aborted fetuses and burning humans, we’ve been hit by some pretty hard stuff to swallow. In PETA’s exhibit, people were offended by the comparsion of racial struggle to the need for animal rights, and now Life & Liberty Ministries has called abortion “The American Holocaust.” Both comparisons caused students much distress, but they were designed to make a point.
Comparisons are hard to avoid when expressing complex and difficult ideas. Jon Stewart of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” for example, once took time out of his show to list the various Hitler comparisons that had been made in Congress over the space of a few months – Richard J. “Dick” Durbin (D), the senior senator from Illinois, had compared the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay to that of Hitler’s prison camps and other repressive regimes. Another Richard, Rick Santorum (R) of Pennsylvania, compared the Democrats’ support of the filibuster to supporting Hitler’s Vichy France.
In listing these comparisons, Stewart offered a solution: no more Hitler comparisons. But comparisons to Hitler seem difficult to avoid, for example, when describing the human rights violations that took place in Saddam Hussein’s prewar Iraq.
When liberal activist group MoveOn.org was once criticized for having a member-submitted advertisement on its site comparing Bush to Hitler, on the other hand, Jewish leaders came forward to denounce the comparison as “diminishing the memory of the Holocaust.”
The same issue is also raised with choosing to term a conflict “genocide,” such as Darfur, Bosnia, Kosovo or Rwanda – does it rise to the same level of suffering?
A blog entry by Swarthmore College Assistant Professor Timothy Burke on the Center for History and New Media’s History News Network offers this solution: “A good analogy in public debate requires a precise sense of the ideas about causality it invokes.” In other words, are the things we are comparing happening for the same reason?
The problem is that we may disagree about the reasons things happen – like animal rights and abortions. But as long as we are stuck with comparisons as a simpler means of communicating complex ideas, we should look at the various reasons behind them before deciding to take offense.
Omar Yacoubi may be reached at yacoubioa@vcu.edu