Analogizing all oppression to the Holocaust is analytically counterproductive.

Evidence

Overwhelmed by the emotions which even a perfunctory reading of the Holocaust records cannot but arouse, some of the quoted authors are prone to exaggerate. Some of their statements sound incredible – and certainly unduly alarmist. They may be even counterproductive; if everything we know is like Auschwitz, then one can live with Auschwitz, and in many a case live reasonably well. If the principles that ruled over life and death of Auschwitz inmates were like these that rule our own, then what has all this outcry and lamentation been about? Truly, one would be well advised to avoid the temptation to deploy the inhuman imagery of the Holocaust in the service of a partisan stance towards larger or smaller, but on the whole routine and daily human conflicts. Mass destruction was the extreme form of antagonism and oppression, yet not all cases of oppression, communal hatred and injustice are ‘like’ the Holocaust. Overt, and hence superficial similarity is a poor guide to causal analysis. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 249

Categorization

• XREF: Precautions against inflating the Holocaust-analogy — a caution central to later debates about genocide and Islamophobia comparison.
• SEED: An essay angle: when does analogy to mass extermination clarify versus obscure the causal analysis of contemporary exclusionary politics?

Related

• Normalizing the Holocaust as one genocide among many also defuses its challenge to sociology (similarity 0.84)
• The Holocaust must be read as integral to modernity, not as its aberration. (similarity 0.82)
• The Holocaust functions as a laboratory test revealing modernity’s hidden capacities. (similarity 0.81)
• Exceptionalist Holocaust readings let the rest of the world off the hook. (similarity 0.81)
• All Holocaust scholarship is ultimately a debate over modernity’s self-image. (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust resulted from distinctly modern social and political conditions (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust question must keep its full weight and horror (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust was a product of modern civilization, not merely its failure (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust is a by-product of runaway modernist design (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust’s moral categories grew more contested after consensus about the facts settled (similarity 0.80)
• The commonsense antisemitism-explains-Holocaust causal link collapses under scrutiny. (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust is a possibility modernity contains, not its paradigm (similarity 0.80)