I am writing in response to Mr. Richmond’s guest commentary which compared The Insurgent publication to Nazi Germany (“Insurgent controversy echoes of Nazi Germany, ODE June 27). This analogy is not only completely unfounded, but is also extremely offensive. Mr. Richmond is certainly not the only person to use the Holocaust, and the conditions of Nazi Germany, in an attempt to gain support for an opinion (i.e. the G.A.P. comparing abortion to the Holocaust), and I think it is time that we all took a moment to consider the facts before attempting to take advantage of the emotional currency inherent in this tragedy.
First of all, to address Mr. Richmond’s point directly, the discriminatory images of Jewish people that were distributed in Germany under Hitler’s government specifically targeted Jewish people for the express purpose of dehumanizing them and better enabling future acts of genocide.
The images depicted in The Insurgent may have been offensive to many people, but they are in no way, neither in scale nor in content, comparable to the propaganda of the Nazi party. Second, according the American Heritage Dictionary genocide is “[t]he systematic and planned extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group.”
In light of this definition, I think it should be clear that Christians, the dominant population in the United States, are not in danger of genocide, and that the images depicted in The Insurgent cannot be construed as an attempt to incite the extermination of the world’s Christians. Furthermore, no matter what our views on abortion may be, out of respect for the millions of Jews and for the thousands of gypsies, homosexuals, political dissenters, and others not acceptable to the Nazi party who died during the Holocaust, and for the countless people that were ruthlessly slaughtered in Rwanda and Darfur, I ask that we reject any comparison of abortion to the Holocaust or any other genocide. There is no element of systematic extermination to abortion, and abortion does not directly or intentionally target any particular ethnic, racial or political group.
The next time we are tempted to use Nazi Germany or the Holocaust as a comparison for anything, I ask that we think about the ramifications of such a choice and consider whether or not its use is appropriate (I would contend that it is rarely, if ever, appropriate). And, the next time you hear someone make an off-handed reference to genocide in the interest of a particular political or personal agenda, stop and ask them if they know what genocide really means.
Sara Jackson is a University Alumna