On a careless comparison.

I find myself embarking a project to maintain a blog that has come into being as a deranged song of praise to an inspiring university tutor whose blog I stumbled across, read, enjoyed, and now attempt to imitate. 

Presently it strikes me as well intentioned, although rather ambitious: I tend to have rather fleeting obsessions which echo and resurface at occasional and obscure periods in my life, often coinciding with exam/revision/essay writing periods and providing a convenient and quasi-intelligent distraction from what I perhaps should be doing. 

That 'what I perhaps should be doing' presently takes the form of researching and writing two papers: One on 'Representations of the Holocaust' and the other on 'Detective Fiction, Historiography and The Culture of Imperialism'.

The very notion of reading Detective Fiction against Historiography and both in turn against the Nineteenth Century British Imperial Mission sets my thoughts turning about the nature of comparison - It can be a surprisingly risky business:

I recently came across a website which was conducting an anti-abortion campaign by likening/comparing abortion to the holocaust, likening hospitals which offer abortions to concentration camps. I emailed the webmaster my thoughts. 

It is remarkable how much easier confrontation becomes when it is conducted through textual mediums. One immediately thinks Sex and the City: 'Dumped by a post-it note!'

We have been diverted...

I have a number of reservations at the comparison drawn by this website which do not stem from a decision to condemn/condone abortion (I am currently in a state of flux as to my opinion towards the topic - particularly after having just seen a scan of my nephew/niece who is due to arrive in October and already feeling a degree of pride and attachment to him/her/it despite the fact that he/she/it is still merely an embryo) but rather stem from as thorough a comprehension of the nature of the Holocaust as one can perhaps hope to achieve. 

I am troubled by the comparison between an unborn child and a victim of the Holocaust - Primo Levi argues in his excellent, excellent book 'The Drowned and The Saved' that the Holocaust is not as simple as a division between Good and Evil, Jew and Nazi, White and Black, but rather that there exists 'A Grey Zone' between these two opposites - For Levi the most demonic crime of Naziism was that it 'made it's victims like itself' it 'deprived them the sanctuary of innocence' - for instance the Sonderkommandos: Jews who were forced to cremate other Jews, victims yes but also, in a strange way, perpetrators. 

The figure of the child victim in Holocaust representation is very interesting - It certainly emphasizes a sense of innocence against evil, one need not look far beyond the title of one of the most famous representations of the Holocaust (Anne Frank - The Diary of a YOUNG GIRL) to realise the power of setting the figure of the innocent child against naziism. The excellent and poignant poem 'Marie' by Charlotte Delbo has the same effect:

Her father, her mother, her brothers and sisters were all gassed on arrival.

Her parents were too old, the children too young. 

She says: "She was beautiful, my little sister.

You can't imagine how beautiful she was.

They mustn't have looked at her.

If they had, they would never have killed her. 

They couldn't have."

It is certainly beautiful and effective, but I can't help wondering in light of Levi's comments if the figure of the child victim is 'too easy', if by emphasising the innocence of the victim we are somehow being reductive in our understanding of the Holocaust, simplifying it, failing to recognize the ambiguous, muddled, 'Grey Zone' that it continuously throws up. One need only go on to read the remainder of Delbo's book (Auschwitz and After) to get a real sense of the displacement and confusion of her Holocaust experience. 

By suggesting that abortion is a contemporary form of Holocaust experience the aforementioned website seems to do just this, it likens the holocaust victim to the 'tabula rasa', the blank slate, the unborn child and in doing so demonstrates a reductive understanding of the complexity and uniqueness of the Holocaust. 

In turn of course, the question of whether it is justified to liken a parent who makes the difficult decision to abort a child to Hitler is surely not a question at all.

It is interesting, to return briefly to notion of 'confrontation through textual mediums', that I have received no response to the email I sent to the webmaster. Perhaps the artist in me finds a degree of satisfaction in reading his silence as a guilty one.