On The Fourth

"Those of us who study human atrocity and its aftermath are not in the business of demarcating exceptional evils so that we can pat ourselves on the back every time we don’t quite manage to reach a particular level of violence and horror. A sense of moral responsibility and a heightened awareness of the “trap of exculpatory comparison” explain the outpouring of support in recent days for the open letter from scholars in response to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s puzzling statement that Holocaust analogies are forever inappropriate.

"Detainment facilities that violate the fundamental human rights of a certain population do not need to be run by Nazis to be called concentration camps. Countries that claim a national history of democracy and freedom are not automatically incapable of abusing state power. The words we use matter. The US is currently operating concentration camps. Our only real claim to a history of democracy and freedom rests on the legacy of those who actively fought injustice, including all those now dedicated to eradicating the policies that created the camps.

"It’s the 4th of July. We’re “better than Buchenwald” is no cause for celebration." -- Melissa Byrnes

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"The gravitas of this place also exerts a pull on politicians who want to lay claim to its emotional power and aspirational symbolism. The Mall is appropriate for the quasi-political pomp of inaugurations in part because most inaugurations include some kind of call for national unity. Donald Trump is not the first politician to attempt to intertwine his personal brand with the nation’s most revered brand, Lincoln, and Lincoln’s call for “a lasting peace among ourselves.”
 
"But no president since the Civil War has been more uninterested in the rhetoric of healing and unity than Donald Trump. It is difficult to express how deeply repugnant his effort to politicize this space is to commonly held American ideals. The display of tanks near the Lincoln Memorial is just a bitter and expensive absurdity compared with the co-option of Lincoln’s temple for the personal aggrandizement of a man who celebrates political violence, who proudly calls himself a “counterpuncher,” and who regularly tweets insults calculated for maximum divisiveness. In the long arc of Trump’s public career, there isn’t a shred of evidence that he understands who Lincoln was, what he stood for and how he accomplished it." -- Philip Kennicott