Samantha Power on the limits of ‘Holocaustization’

As a writer, newly-minted nominee for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power is still best known for her 2002 book A Problem From Hell, a blistering indictment of U.S. inaction to confront genocide in the 20th century. But the former reporter has also been a prolific contributor to publications including the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and Foreign Policy.

Looking over her past writing today, I came across an interesting article from 1999, published in the journal Daedalus — Power was at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights at the time — discussing the use of Holocaust analogies in arguing for action to prevent mass atrocities. 

Power writes that while the U.S. public was slower than often realize today to confront the realities of the Holocaust — she cites the theater adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank from 1955 and the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg as playing a major role in waking Americans up to what had happened — the Shoah  came to occupy a singular place in the American conciousness, and not surprisingly was frequently invoked as an analogy for describing events in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and other sites of genocide. Power writes that, "In the face of genocide, supporters of humanitarian intervention have seized upon the Holocaust metaphor as if it might constitute a moral life preserver in a sea of interest-based callousness."

She also suggests that when American presidents start "Holocaustizing," you can start to expect the cavalry: 

American policymakers are the most transparent in their aims. They often begin Holocaustizing as soon as they have decided to act militarily against a foreign foe. They assume that the analogy will add a moral veneer to their policy. In the buildup to the Gulf War, for example, George Bush transformed Saddam Hussein into American "Enemy Number One" less by portraying him as the man who seized Kuwaiti oil fields as by depicting him as "another Hitler" who killed Kuwaiti babies. Bush latched onto the Hitler analogy, first employing it on August 8, 1991, when he announced the dispatch of American troops to the Gulf. Upon deciding to bomb Yugoslavia in March 1999, President Clinton and his cabinet similarly likened the Serb outrages to those perpetrated by Hitler’s henchmen.

For what it’s worth, this has not been the case with Power’s current boss. It’s been over a year since President Obama visited the U.S. Holocaust Museum on Holocaust Remembrance Day with America’s most prominent Holocaust survivor, Elie Weisel, at his side, to announce the creation of a new Atrocities Prevention Board, saying "it’s one more step that we can take toward the day that we know will come — the end of the Assad regime that has brutalized the Syrian people — and allow the Syrian people to chart their own destiny."

If this was a prelude to military action, it’s been an awful long one.

In the end, Power is wary of Holocaustizing contemporary events, noting that it can often simply end in a war of analogies: the Holocaust for interventionists, Vietnams (and now Iraq) for anti-interventionists. There’s also the problem of setting the standard too high: 

Another drawback of the analogy is that, though we have committed ourselves to preventing the Holocaust from happening again, the Holocaust sets a grossly "high" bar for attention or action. Quantitatively, one would hardly want to wait until six million individuals were killed before we concluded that the necessary threshold had been crossed. Qualitatively, the scientific, meticulously plotted plan to kill every single Jew in Europe earns Hitler a special place in history. Rwanda constitutes the only case of genocide since 1945 in which a perpetrator has outline his intentions as explicitly as Heinrich Himmler did when the declared that "all Jews without exception must die."

She concludes:

With American politicians resolutely opposed to intervening to stop these cases of genocide, it is likely that no amount of Holocaustizing would have generated meaningful action. The mass graves in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda offer testimony to the fact that the analogy has not succeeded in overcoming political opposition to intervention.

Some have suggested the appointments of Power and Susan Rice suggest an administration moving ever-so-slightly toward interventionism. If that’s the case, it should be interesting to see how Power — now an "American policymaker" herself — builds her rhetorical case.