On comparisons – Masha Gessen in Die Zeit:

‘I’m going to talk about comparisons.
Why do we compare? We compare to learn. This is how we understand the world. A color is a color only among other colors. A shape is a shape only as it is distinct from other shapes. A feeling is a feeling only if you have experienced other feelings.
Comparison is the way we know the world. And yet we make rules about things that cannot be compared to each other. Take apples and oranges. Why wouldn’t you compare them? Both are fruit, both have sweetness, one is usually more sour than the other, one has an inedible part on the outside, the other an inedible part on the inside, both contain calories, nutrients and vitamins, albeit it different ones, and you can make juice out of either, but you need different kinds of machines for each. These seem to me useful ways of getting to know apples and oranges.
Not all comparisons are useful. I have often seen students - young writers - use metaphors, similes, and analogies in ways that obscure rather than clarify. Mostly this happens when they compare something ordinary, familiar - something we know - to something that’s harder to conjure.’

(…)

‘nd yet there is a rule - and it is certainly not unique to Germany - that you don’t compare things to the Holocaust. There is a paradox: we imagine the Holocaust in great detail, but we conceive of it as fundamentally unimaginable. It is the kind of evil that we cannot comprehend. But anything that happens in the present is, by definition, imaginable. We can see it. Even small children separated from their parents at the U.S. border and placed in detention are imaginable once we see pictures of them on our screens and hear their voices in audio recordings. So, when Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez in 2019 used the words "concentration camps" to describe migrant detention facilities, this comparison drew fire, among other reasons, because it placed the imaginable - a regular practice of the U.S. government - next to the unimaginable. Anything that is imaginable by the very fact of being seen, heard, witnessed, strikes us as being incomparable to the Holocaust.’

(…)

‘So I think by now you understand that I didn’t stumble into the comparison of the Gaza Strip to a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. Yesterday a reporter challenged me on this comparison by pointing out some differences: the Jewish ghettos were more densely populated than Gaza; people couldn’t leave the ghetto; and modern weapons couldn’t be smuggled into the ghetto, as they are into Gaza. This exchange reminded me of an off-color joke that I think exists in many cultures. A man offers a woman an astronomical amount of money for sex. She agrees to sleep with him - say, for 10 million dollars. "Will you sleep with me for 10 dollars?" he then asks. Outraged, she responds, "What do you think I am?" - "We already know what you are. We are just haggling over the price." I wish I could find a joke that didn’t stigmatize sex work to illustrate this philosophical construction, which is that things can be substantively, essentially similar and differ in the specifics.

When I made this comparison between Gaza and the ghetto, I thought I was making an original contribution to a discourse dominated by the bad metaphor of an "open-air prison." I have since learned that the comparison has a tradition that goes back at least twenty years.’

(…)
‘We do. We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to needlessly give up our political power and to remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning. But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible.’

Read the article here.

I admire Gessen, but this essay is a bit defensive and clumsy.

You don’t need know an orange, in order to know more about an apple. And even if you do, this is not yet a comparison.

We need other people to get to know ourselves, but that doesn’t mean that we are living metaphors, although some authors would argue that we are just this, living metaphors.

My favorite metaphor is a title by Hemingway ‘Hills Like White Elephants.’ It’s the strangeness, the awkwardness of the metaphor that makes it so compelling.

The Holocaust has become a metaphor decades ago.
Not in the last place because of Israeli politicians. George W. Bush compared Saddam to Hitler, and wherever we see the name Hitler the memory of the Holocaust is invoked. The list is very long. Especially when it comes to Palestine-Israel the list of Nazi-metaphors is so long that it is hard to have missed it. (Much older dan two decades, think of Sabra and Shatila.) Ignorance can be so great that displaying it becomes an act of bravery.

The strangest point Gessen is making is the joke. The ghetto of her greatgrandfather was ten million dollars, Gaza ten? The problems with the Holocaust-metaphor is that it always refers to absolute evil: Nazism. And it’s impossible to negotiate with absolute evil, it must be rooted out.

Also, victims can be perpetrators and vice versa, the conclusion of Gessen’s New Yorker essay. Absolutely, and dogs can bite, some more than others.

The Nazi metaphor, the Holocaust metaphor is so compelling because it suggests always that the Jews victims of the Nazis became Nazis themselves. Titillating and provocative isn’t it?

I suggest Gessen reads ‘The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.’ published in 1981. Displaying ignorance can be an act of bravery, but it should not be overdone.

What we see here, and I wrote about it before, you can read it here, (only in Dutch), is a repetition of the Historikestreit in the 80s. Now the attack is not coming from the right but from the left, the question once again is the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

By all means, let's discuss.

The problem is that most participants don’t know that they are participating in Historikestreit part II. The Palestinians in the meantime are largely cannon fodder, also in this cultural war.