© Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved
The Auschwitz Analogy: Holocaust Memory and American Debates over Intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s*
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
This article examines the use of analogies to the Holocaust in debates over the propriety and morality of American intervention in the Balkan crises of the 1990s. Both the proponents and the opponents of intervention invoked the Holocaust precedent, drawing very different conclusions about its applicability to Bosnia and Kosovo. The debates demonstrate how ostensible lessons from the Holocaust experience were deployed to mobilize public opinion behind a humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, they also show how the application of Holocaust analogies to a controversial public policy often resulted in gross simplification of a complex past.
* This article updates an argument made earlier in "Die Auschwitz-Analogie: Die Erinnerungskultur des Holocaust und die Aussenpolitischen Debatten in den USA während der 1990er Jahre," in Deutschland und die USA in der internationalen Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Festschrift für Detlef Junker, ed. Manfred Berg and Phillip Gassert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), pp. 542–58.
1. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).
2. A large literature has recently grown up around this question. Key works include Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Hilene Flanzbaum, ed., The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
3. Detlef Junker, "The Manichean Trap: American Perceptions of the German Empire, 1871–1945," Occasional Paper no. 12, German Historical Institute, Washington, 1995.
4. Samantha Power, "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
12. Novick, Holocaust in American Life, p. 251.
13. Power, Problem from Hell, p. 297.
14. Novick, Holocaust in American Life, p. 252.
18. David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals (New York: Scribner, 2001).
19. Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), chapter 32.
20. Power, Problem from Hell, p. 433.
21. George F. Will, "A Dog in that Fight," Newsweek, June 12, 1995.
22. Power, Problem from Hell, p. 431.
24. Sidney Blumenthal, The Clinton Wars (New York: Viking, 2003), p. 631.
25. Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary (New York: Miramax, 2003), p. 177. See also Thomas W. Lippman, Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy (Boulder: Westview, 2000).
26. President Clinton, Remarks to Veterans of Foreign Wars, Fort McNair, Washington, DC, 13 May 1999, http://www.state.gov/policy_remarks/1999.
27. "From Sighet to Kosovo: The President Clinton-Elie Wiesel Dialogue, April 1999," Jewish Post of New York Online, http://www.jewishpost.com.
28. See most notably Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (London: Verso, 2000).
29. http://www.ushmm.gov/conscience.
30. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, "A New Serbia," The New Republic, May 17, 1999.
31. Michael Berenbaum, "Making Sense of Kosovo," Atlanta Jewish Times, April 2, 1999, http://www.atljewishtimes.com/archives/1999. Notably, it was precisely this fear of a raised tolerance for "non-holocaustal" human rights abuses that was near the core of Peter Novick’s critique of Holocaust consciousness in America, which was in press at the time of the debate over Kosovo.
32. Abe Rosenthal, "On Killing Serbs," New York Times, March 26, 1999.
33. Charles Krauthammer, "The Clinton Doctrine," Time, March 29, 1999.
34. David Horowitz, "Stop this War," Salon Magazine, May 12, 1999, http://www.salon.com.
35. Sam Schulman, "The un-Holocaust," Jewish World Review, November 12, 1999, http://www.jewishworldreview.com.
36. "Remarks by Condoleezza Rice," April 10, 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases.
37. This was not the first time that Saddam Hussein was likened to Hitler. Such comparisons were common during the lead-up to the first Gulf War. See for example the 3 September 1990 issue of The New Republic, the cover of which depicted Saddam in a Hitler-like pose and featured the headline "Furor over Iraq."
38. "Holocaust Survivor Wiesel says Saddam must be confronted," Associated Press, February 27, 2003. See also "Elie Wiesel on Facing Evil," Chicago Jewish News, March 25, 2003, www.chicagojewishnews.com.
39. See, for example, "Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer," February 28, 2003, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases.
40. "For Rabbis, It’s No Coincidence War on Iraq again Linked to Purim," Chicago Jewish News, March 25, 2003, www.chicagojewishnews.com.
41. See for example David G. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
42. Interview with Michael Friedman, Chrismon, June 24, 2003. The original German reads: "Wenn eine Entscheidung richtig ist, dann braucht man nicht Auschwitz um sie richtiger zu machen. Und wenn sie falsch ist, dann wird sie nicht besser, wenn man auf Auschwitz zurückgreift."