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“American Holocaust”: The Banality of 9/11 after the Enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act

Legal Communication in Action Since 9/11/01

National Communication Association

New Orleans Marriott, New Orleans LA 22 Nov. 2002

Steven Alan Carr, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Communication, IU – Purdue Fort Wayne and

2002-2003 Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies,
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

If the first casualty when war comes is truth, as Senate isolationist Hiram Johnson opined on the eve of World War I, then a near twin casualty at the onset of war in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries is the incomparable dimension of the Holocaust.  Within days after the hijackings and horrific attacks of 9/11, the popular press began to invoke this memory by recalling the words and works of the Holocaust as well as its survivors.  “This is like the Holocaust,” one bystander told The Toronto Sun the day after (Warmington 2001).  Columnist Richard Cohen had to remind himself of “the people who survived the Holocaust and made a life for themselves” (Cohen 2001). Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning offered a hopeful lesson for post-9/11 survivors: like those interned in concentration camps, Americans could not control what had happened to them, but they could control their response to it (Brett 2001).

Of course both the Holocaust and 9/11 were unparalleled tragedies in their own respect, but they were tragedies of distinctly different meaning and magnitudes.  One must recall that the Holocaust took place over a period of twelve years, during which time the Nazis developed an infrastructure of death that claimed millions of lives, singled out Jews, and included forcible relocations, concentration camps, medical experiments, slave labor, state-sponsored hate speech and widespread abrogation of civil liberties.  In contrast, the attacks of 9/11 used an existing infrastructure of airline jets and skyscrapers to claim thousands of lives within a few hours.  The most gruesome aspect of these attacks was not that they were systematic and enduring, but that they could bring about so much carnage in so short a time, and with readily available resources.

In noting these not insubstantial distinctions between 9/11 and the Holocaust, I do not mean to suggest that one should always refrain from using the Holocaust as a point of comparison. Legitimate scholarship continues to debate the historical context for the Holocaust, and whether such a context even exists.  Lawrence Langer, for example, has consistently argued that the Holocaust represents a “rupture in human values” that has no modern parallel, and that attempting to draw pat homilies – such as the so-called triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity - ultimately abuses the memory of this catastrophe.  By contrast, historians Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt argue in their recent book that the Holocaust was not at all unique, but part of the fabric of Western civilization and history (Dwork 2002).

The danger in drawing explicit as well as implicit comparisons between 9/11 and the Holocaust stems not from making those comparisons, but from the kind of comparisons that get made. In the case of 9/11, American political and popular culture have once again demonstrated a unique capacity to cling to frayed mythologies and reductionist credos when faced with the opportunity to truly reconsider and reshape its own national identity.  While I would like to dismiss as merely misguided conjuring the invocation of appeasement and such turns of phrase as “axis of evil,” these comparisons comprise part of a larger and disturbing effort to enlist the memory of the Holocaust in support of the kind of militarization that legislation like what Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism – USA PATRIOT Act for short - ultimately helps enact.

According the American Civil Liberties Union, the USA PATRIOT Act commences sweeping and unprecedented provisions targeting citizens, non-citizens, post-Watergate accountability, and judicial oversight (American Civil Liberties Union 2002b).  It revives the worst excesses of programs like COINTELPRO, which the FBI and CIA used to harass and intimidate domestic anti-war and civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. throughout the 1960s.  It authorizes the government to engage in secret searches of citizens and non-citizens, unrelated to terrorism, without obtaining a search warrant or notifying the subject of the search.  The FBI and other law enforcement agencies now have access to your medical, financial, and psychiatric records.  If asked, schools must provide confidential student records to law enforcement agencies.  If asked, libraries must provide circulation records of the books you check out.  Under the USA PATRIOT’s provision for gag orders, once law enforcement agencies make a request to see those records, libraries are forbidden from disclosing that the request has been made.

Although the USA PATRIOT Act’s sweeping militarization of civil society has profound implications for the freedoms of many, it particularly targets non-citizens.  Since September 11, the Bush administration has detained over 1,200 people without a trial, and in some cases, without charges.  The Administration refuses to disclose their names or where they are imprisoned.  The Bush Administration has yet to charge any of the over 1,200 Arab, South Asian and Muslim detainees with terrorism (American Civil Liberties Union 2002a).

The banality of 9/11 – to paraphrase Hannah Arendt’s famous observation of Adolf Eichmann’s dull appearance at his war crimes trial – rests not only with what was done in the space of a few hours, but how a paranoid Presidential administration can deploy those few hours in the service of dismantling centuries old protections and freedoms.  While the whole word might have arguably dreamed of the destruction that happened on 9/11, as Jean Baudrillard contended in Le Monde last November, certainly there are those in the Bush Administration who dreamed of what they can now do to civil liberties after 9/11.  The banality of the USA PATRIOT act appears, like Eichmann’s demeanor, in how ordinary, commonplace and acceptable the detention of thousands of immigrants can seem under the guise of national security and a so-called war on terrorism.

Perhaps, though, one must speak of multiple banalities amid the fallout from this war on terrorism.  What has 9/11 done to the incomparable dimension of the Holocaust?  As Simone Veil recently argued in an address to European Education Ministers, a routine amalgamation now lumps together the Holocaust with more modern events.  In this post-9/11 world, Saddam Hussein is the new Hitler while Israeli policies are no different than Nazi policies (Veil 2002).  Along similar lines, Gerhard Weinberg notes how the historical analogy of appeasing Nazi Germany before World War II gets used to intimidate those with legitimate questions about the need for military action against Iraq (Weinberg 2002).

For all of the legitimate concern expressed for how the Holocaust gets used to justify or critique military force overseas, however, little if any attention addresses the way in which the Holocaust gets used to justify the USA PATRIOT Act’s militarization of American democratic society.  Nobel laureate and survivor Elie Wiesel has repeatedly expressed his support for President Bush’s war on terrorism, regularly drawing comparisons between Al Qaeda and Nazi Germany to justify domestic measures taken (Wiesel 2002).  California Democrat Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor in Congress, voted in favor of the USA PATRIOT Act and frequently invokes Hitler to defend the war on terrorism.  In a radio interview, Lantos notes how he “just oh so understands the ramifications of appeasement” (Gonzales 2002).

While the world frets over Holocaust denial and Arab anti-Semitism, the more pernicious threat to the memory of the Holocaust is the deployment of Holocaust comparisons to support the militarization of the USA PATRIOT Act.  As Veil notes, these kind of comparisons are harmful precisely because they are so widespread yet less frequently condemned.   However, one should not make the mistake of refraining from drawing any comparison.  Since public discourse has already drawn and will continue to draw these comparisons, one must rigorously challenge the trivialized with comparisons of a higher standard.

As opposed to arguing that the USA PATRIOT Act will render Nazi-like adversaries powerless, or that it has rendered the United States Nazi-like, consider the USA PATRIOT Act in light of Germany before the rise of Nazism.  In the melee over establishing worthy and unworthy comparisons, one might easily forget that before World War II, Germany was a democracy with a constitution and parliament.  Article 48 of the German Constitution of 11 August 1919, however, allowed for the President to “take the necessary measures to restore public safety and order, and, if necessary, to intervene with the help of the armed forces.  To this end, he may temporarily suspend, in whole or in part . . . fundamental rights” established elsewhere in the Constitution.

When a fire gutted the German parliament on 27 February 1933, the recently elected Nazi government used the incident to justify invoking Article 48 as a defensive measure against an alleged Communist plot to overthrow the government.  The 28 Februrary presidential decree suspended “until further notice” sections of the Constitution concerning personal liberty, freedom of expression, right of assembly and association, and privacy.  Search and seizure laws and confiscation of property were also permissible “beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.”

The USA PATRIOT Act does not as summarily dismiss the U. S. Constitution as the Presidential Decree of 28 Februrary 1933 dismissed the German Constitution.  However, one might note the disturbing parallel between the far-reaching militarization of democratic society by the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 and the sweeping 1933 Nazi decree.  For example, Section 218 of the USA PATRIOT Act allows for indefinite delay in providing notification of court-issued search warrants and property seizures.  According to Nancy Chang of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Department of Justice is engaging in a radical reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment.  In a letter sent to Senators while Congress was reviewing the USA PATRIOT Act, Assistant Attorney General Daniel J. Bryant of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legislative Affairs argued, incredibly, that the Fourth Amendment does not protect individuals, but the state.  “If the government’s heightened interest in self-defense justifies the use of deadly force,” Bryant reasons, “then it certainly would also justify warrantless searches” (Chang 2002).

While the USA PATRIOT Act does not explicitly repeal freedom of expression and right of assembly, it does create an ambiguous new category of so-called “domestic terrorism.”  Under Section 802, the Act defines domestic terrorism as activities that “involve acts dangerous to human life” that attempt to “influence the policy of a government.”  As Chang points out, any direct action or protest that involves civil disobedience or nonviolence could now be broadly construed as domestic terrorism.  The Act particularly threatens the First Amendment rights of environmental activists, anti-globalization demonstrators, and anti-abortion proponents (Chang 2002).  Should the Bush Administration eventually succeed in conferring legal rights upon the fetus, the Act may well make domestic terrorists out of women exercising their legal right to an abortion, doctors who perform these abortions, or even organizations like Planned Parenthood that under the PATRIOT Act could be accused of “harboring or concealing terrorists” as outlined in Section 803.

While the USA PATRIOT Act is less immediately far-reaching for American citizens than the repeals imposed on German citizens in 1933, one class of individuals remains particularly vulnerable.  Under sections 411 and 412 of the Act, the Federal government may indefinitely detain and deport immigrants on extremely ambiguous definitions of terrorism.  For example, section 411 would allow for deportation of an immigrant expressing support for a legitimate political or humanitarian organization, if the Bush Administration finds that organization to fall under its broad and ill-defined criteria of a terrorist organization.

While one must take great care not to conflate the Holocaust with 9/11 or to use the memory of the Holocaust to justify war, militarism is militarism.  Much of the USA PATRIOT Act has yet to be enforced or challenged in the courts.  If invocations of the Holocaust have posed their dangers, failure to see an encroaching militarism upon democratic society has surely meted out its own lethal consequences.  German citizens did not fully realize the consequences of Article 48 in their country’s constitution.  The parallel, then, is not between the Holocaust and the War on Terrorism, but in the failure of democratic societies of their respective eras to confront and challenge encroaching militarization in the name of national security.  The fact that non-citizens at present bear the cost of this militarization should offer no comfort to citizens.  Their rights are only the most easily recognizable feature of how an encroaching militarism can, in its early stages, easily dismantle the democratic protections of a civil society.

Works Cited

American Civil Liberties Union, The (2002a). Civil Liberties After 9/11: The ACLU Defends Freedom. New York.

--- (2002b). Insatiable Appetite: The Government's Demand for New and Unnecessary Powers After September 11. Washington DC, American Civil Liberties Union.

Brett, Regina (2001). "We Are Still Free to Count Our Blessings." The Plain Dealer 18 Sep. 2001: B1. Internet. LexisNexis. Accessed 4 Nov 2001.

Chang, Nancy (2002). The USA PATRIOT Act: What's So Patriotic About Trampling on the Bill of Rights? New York NY, Center for Constitutional Rights.

Cohen, Richard (2001). "Tears of a Nation." The Washington Post 18 Sep. 2001: A31. Internet. LexisNexis. Accessed 5 Nov. 2002.

Dwork, Deborah and Robert Jan van Pelt (2002). Holocaust: A History. New York NY, Norton.

Gonzales, Richard (2002). "Tom Lantos Faces Unusual Challenger in Congressional Race." Weekend All Things Considered. National Public Radio 3 Nov. 2002. Radio. Internet. EBSCOhost. 19 Nov. 2002.

Veil, Simone (2002). "How Can We Teach About the Holocaust in the 21st Century?" Council of Europe. Strasbourg, France, 18 Oct. 2002.

Warmington, Joe (2001). "New York Smells Like Death; Foul Odour Is Unmistakable, Say City Residents." The Toronto Sun 13 Sep. 2001: S14. Internet. LexisNexis. Accessed 5 Nov. 2002.

Weinberg, Gerhard (2002). "No Road from Munich to Iraq." The Washington Post 3 Nov. 2002: B04. Internet. Accessed 19 Nov. 2002.

Wiesel, Elie (2002). Distinguished Lecture Series. Orpheum Theater, Madison WI, 16 Apr. 2002.