Who Is A Nazi? Name Calling and Hair Pulling
In a moment of lovely synchronicity a friend mentioned that she found my name and photograph on a "hit list" of "self-hating" and "anti-Israel" Jews. I'm not special -- there are about 8,000 people listed -- but I'm among the minority of folks who have photos and blurbs posted about them. Part of what's awful about me (in addition to the fact I signed a petition supporting Palestinian rights and a fair peace settlement) is that I'm "bi-sexual, bi-racial and tattooed." You can see my mug shot if you like; I think it's a cute picture and I find myself in pretty good company with other Jewish progressives and folks who don't think that the genocidal campaign against Palestinians is a good thing.
The blurb of course doesn't mention I'm a Holocaust scholar who worked at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum for years. That would sort of undermine their claim that I'm the equivalent of a member of the "Judenrat" -- the Nazi bureaucracy administered by Jews themselves and set up to manage the ghettos and deportations; in other words, a Jewish Uncle Tom.
But it's interesting (if more than a little nauseating) to be called a Nazi collaborator by one group, while at the same time being charged with calling the members of another group Nazis by implication. Certainly it tells us a lot more about the power and traumatic significance of the term "Nazi" than it tells us about my politics or beliefs, since any term that's used so broadly and in such conflicting ways by groups with such different agendas loses any concreteness of meaning it might once have had.
What "Nazi" has really come to mean in U.S. discourse is "unspeakable." It's the ultimate conversation stopper, after which no comment is really possible. Chomsky talked about this a long time ago, when he was describing the radically pro-Israeli response to his critiques of the treatment of Palestinians. Once somebody publicly calls you a Nazi, what do you say? You're damned if you say you're not, because you're put on the defensive and allow yourself to be sidetracked from your original argument. And you're damned if you say, "Go ahead and call me a Nazi" because nobody thinks being a Nazi is okay and rhetorically such a stance is repulsive. And you're damned if you don't say anything, because once somebody has called you a Nazi the burden of proof is apparently on you to clear yourself.
All of this makes it very difficult to talk about Nazism itself -- a real historical phenomenon with a real history, documented by real evidence -- and to make legitimate comparisons between, say, Israeli policy towards Palestinians and Nazi policy towards Jews and other "undesirables." We've lost an important tool for understanding power structures and oppressive regimes if the word "Nazi" is off limits in analyses and comparisons. And who does this benefit? Certainly not people who are oppressed and suffering.
When I look at who is coopting and appropriating the term "Nazi," it's not generally folks who fall into the camp I consider the "good guys." I don't hear people on the left, feminists, those struggling for black liberation, queer activists or others on "our" side of the fence using the term as a pejorative label to describe general behaviors. No, it's conservatives, war-mongers, racists, sexists, and haters of all varieties who are out there both calling people Nazis and claiming to be called Nazis, right and left, to an extent that has left the word practically meaningless.
Posted by kalital at November 30, 2006 4:02 PM
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