Clyde Haberman: When Pols Use History to Score Points
NEW YORK'S junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, joined quite a group of substance abusers the other day. In this bunch, no one is likely to even try kicking the habit.
The substance is history. The abuse is taking some of its most brutal and shameful chapters - slavery, the Holocaust, the massacre of American Indians - and exploiting them for whatever issue happens to land on the agenda.
Not that Mrs. Clinton invented the technique. She merely followed a well-worn path when she went to Harlem and likened the House of Representatives to a plantation, because, she said, its Republican leaders squelch dissident voices.
Did the senator serve history well (never mind the obvious question of whether not being able to speak up was truly the worst hardship endured by plantation slaves)?
"What she is doing is insulting anybody who suffered" during slavery, said William B. Helmreich, a sociologist at the City College of New York and the City University of New York's Graduate Center.
To John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, "these analogies display a lack of basic human compassion."
"People suffered deeply in order to make our lives possible," said Mr. McWhorter, who is black. "You do not toss these things around just to score points on television."
Mrs. Clinton did not speak in a vacuum. There is a long roster of public figures who seek to call attention to their cause by invoking historic cataclysms.
The Holocaust comes in for its share of abuse.
When the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, visited New York last spring to defend his imminent expulsion of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, Jewish protesters yelled "Nazi" and "Auschwitz."
A campaign by the city's Health Department to warn Jewish parents about the potential hazards of a circumcision ritual prompted some Hasidic leaders to threaten disruptions at the mayor's inauguration ceremony this month. They planned to wear yellow Stars of David, those despised symbols of Nazi persecution. In the end, they did not go that route. But that they even considered it shows how cavalierly some are willing to treat the Holocaust, said Professor Helmreich, who is Jewish. "If everything is a Holocaust, then nothing is a Holocaust because it no longer means anything," he said. Paradoxically, he added, those ready to don yellow stars were "protesting over something intended to save Jewish lives by invoking something that destroyed Jewish lives."
SLAVERY and Jim Crow metaphors abound. Observing the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said it "looks like the hull of a slave ship." In the eyes of Justice Clarence Thomas, opposition to his ascension to the Supreme Court amounted to a "high-tech lynching." Representative Charles B. Rangel unblinkingly labeled President Bush "our Bull Connor" in the wake of Katrina, the reference being to the police chief who once turned attack dogs loose on blacks demonstrating for equal rights in Birmingham, Ala.
American Indians get into the act, too. A few years ago, an Indian leader in California said that opponents of expanded casino gambling were trying to "complete the genocide" of his people.
The list could go on and on....
Read entire article at NYT
The substance is history. The abuse is taking some of its most brutal and shameful chapters - slavery, the Holocaust, the massacre of American Indians - and exploiting them for whatever issue happens to land on the agenda.
Not that Mrs. Clinton invented the technique. She merely followed a well-worn path when she went to Harlem and likened the House of Representatives to a plantation, because, she said, its Republican leaders squelch dissident voices.
Did the senator serve history well (never mind the obvious question of whether not being able to speak up was truly the worst hardship endured by plantation slaves)?
"What she is doing is insulting anybody who suffered" during slavery, said William B. Helmreich, a sociologist at the City College of New York and the City University of New York's Graduate Center.
To John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group, "these analogies display a lack of basic human compassion."
"People suffered deeply in order to make our lives possible," said Mr. McWhorter, who is black. "You do not toss these things around just to score points on television."
Mrs. Clinton did not speak in a vacuum. There is a long roster of public figures who seek to call attention to their cause by invoking historic cataclysms.
The Holocaust comes in for its share of abuse.
When the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, visited New York last spring to defend his imminent expulsion of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, Jewish protesters yelled "Nazi" and "Auschwitz."
A campaign by the city's Health Department to warn Jewish parents about the potential hazards of a circumcision ritual prompted some Hasidic leaders to threaten disruptions at the mayor's inauguration ceremony this month. They planned to wear yellow Stars of David, those despised symbols of Nazi persecution. In the end, they did not go that route. But that they even considered it shows how cavalierly some are willing to treat the Holocaust, said Professor Helmreich, who is Jewish. "If everything is a Holocaust, then nothing is a Holocaust because it no longer means anything," he said. Paradoxically, he added, those ready to don yellow stars were "protesting over something intended to save Jewish lives by invoking something that destroyed Jewish lives."
SLAVERY and Jim Crow metaphors abound. Observing the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said it "looks like the hull of a slave ship." In the eyes of Justice Clarence Thomas, opposition to his ascension to the Supreme Court amounted to a "high-tech lynching." Representative Charles B. Rangel unblinkingly labeled President Bush "our Bull Connor" in the wake of Katrina, the reference being to the police chief who once turned attack dogs loose on blacks demonstrating for equal rights in Birmingham, Ala.
American Indians get into the act, too. A few years ago, an Indian leader in California said that opponents of expanded casino gambling were trying to "complete the genocide" of his people.
The list could go on and on....