Ken Burns Just Made an Historical Analogy

Is this historical diminishment?

Note: sorry for intermittent posting but long Covid has somehow made me even dumber and lazier than usual.

In order to drum up interest in his new documentary blaming America for the Holocaust, Ken Burns has offered a provocative comparison between Ron Desantis shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard and the Holocaust. To be fair, his comparison wasn’t so direct. Instead, Burns invokes lebensphilosophie to state that shipping migrants is “an abstraction of human life”, much as mass extermination of people for political reasons is “an abstraction of human life.” If you treat human life concretely, then you won’t use them as mere political pawns, according to Burns.

So far, the outcry has solely come from the right, with pundits like Tucker Carlson mocking the comparison between the idyllic setting of one of the Obama’s $30M mansions and the horrors of the Holocaust.

We have yet to hear from the chorus of Historical Diminishment critics who were responsible for Whoopi Goldberg being put in timeout after her own Holocaust comments caused an uproar. This may be because Burns is an arch-civil religionist in the mold of Robert Bellah. His life’s work has been dedicated to exposing America’s “primal crimes”, to borrow a phrase from Bellah, the latest of which appears to be the Holocaust.

In February, I wrote an article for American Greatness on the significance of Goldberg’s cancellation in the context of our embattled civil religion. In the article I observed that

Goldberg’s detractors were outraged because for them the moral significance of the Holocaust is not that it demonstrates man’s capacity for inhumanity. For the detractors, contrary to Whoopi’s claim about whites, blacks, Jews, and Italians, the ethnic identities of victims and perpetrators determine the moral significance of a genocide. In this case, the Holocaust is morally significant because Hitler believed Jews were racially inferior (but apparently not because he believed Gypsies and Poles—you forgot about Poland!—were racially inferior).

Burns’s case is similar. He is invoking the Holocaust as a universal archetype for all of humanity. Potential Historical Diminishment critics should allow Burns’s comments and be mindful of the civil religious principles I articulated back in February:

Under the old American civil religion—and most Americans would probably accept this today—we have an obligation to tolerate, even respect, each other’s religious beliefs, including the belief that historical events have special religious significance…But this obligation carries with it a corollary obligation to refrain from affirming the universality of a specific religious belief, because doing so would violate the obligation to tolerate the beliefs of those who do not accept such universality. Accordingly non-Jews like Goldberg have an obligation to respect the belief that the moral significance of the Holocaust is that it victimized Jews. Goldberg also, however, has an obligation to not affirm this interpretation for all Americans. The old civil religion requires us to find a shared moral significance that translates into something intelligible to all Americans, and this is the function performed by the concepts of humanity and inhumanity in Goldberg’s statements [that the Holocaust was about man’s inhumanity to man in the abstract].