I was living in France, forty years ago, when Ronald Reagan came to Normandy to mark the fortieth anniversary of the D-Day landings. I didn’t like Reagan as a president, but he could give a good speech, and it was hard not to be moved by his words at the Pointe du Hoc, where US Army Rangers had scaled a steep cliff under terrible German fire. “These are the boys of the Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” I wasn’t there in person to hear him, but I went to Normandy soon afterwards, and at every D-Day site—Omaha Beach, the American military cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, the Pointe du Hoc—you met middle-aged veterans returning to the places where they had fought, and where so many of their comrades had died.
Forty years on, nearly all those veterans are gone. If President Biden is accompanied by any of them when he makes his own trip to Normandy this June, the youngest will be in their late nineties. World War II has slid, almost entirely, over the horizon of living memory.
It is remarkable, though, how deeply the war continues to shape our political language. In arguing against opponents urging caution in the face of aggression, a favorite tactic remains charging them with “appeasement” and raising the specter of Munich, 1938. French President Emmanuel Macron did this just a few weeks ago, in urging continuing support for the Ukrainian war effort. (A few years ago, I wrote an essay fruitlessly urging American politicians to stop using the Munich analogy). When Donald Trump scolds NATO allies for allegedly not paying their share, critics charge him with “isolationism.” Is Trump a “fascist”? A new collection of essays, edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, has just revisited the debate, and, in the process, reignited it. And charges of “genocide,” a word coined in 1944 to describe Nazi atrocities, now routinely appear whenever military aggression leads to the deaths of large numbers of civilians—most recently, of course, in regard to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and especially Israel’s campaign in Gaza.
These linguistic survivals are, in one sense, understandable. Even if nearly all the participants have left the scene, World War II remains the defining historical moment of the past century. It came close to destroying Western civilization. It took an unbelievable number of lives, including the six million Jews murdered in the Shoah and the twenty-eight million Soviet citizens who died as a result of the Nazi invasion. It caused physical destruction on a previously unimaginable scale. It ushered in the nuclear age, and a threat of apocalypse that has never dissipated. It led to the collapse of the Western European overseas empires and the rise of the US and USSR as rival superpowers locked into a Cold War. It was a moment of genuine, horrifying, powerful evil. Ever since the war, the devil has had a face, and it is the face of Adolf Hitler.
As a historian, though, I bristle at the way the constant linguistic recourse to the war leads us to run roughshod over crucial distinctions and to judge current conflicts in inappropriate and detrimental ways. Was it “appeasement” to argue against invading Iraq back in 2003? Does it make sense to place a buffoonish political figure like Silvio Berlusconi in the company of Hitler and Mussolini, as the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat did in her 2020 book Strongmen? Berlusconi did considerable damage to Italian democracy, but it nonetheless survived his time in office. Yes, he had traits in common with much worse figures. But a Mussolini he wasn’t.
Calling Donald Trump a “fascist” is a trickier issue. He certainly uses rhetoric that could have appeared in Der Stürmer: calling migrants “animals” and “vermin,” warning that they are “poisoning the blood” of the country, calling for retribution against his enemies, throwing around the word “bloodbath,” and so on. Much of this is deliberate provocation. Trump knows very well that few things excite his rabid followers more than the perception of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” among liberals. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take the rhetoric seriously. Regardless of what Trump and his allies may or may not be consciously planning, it is easy enough to imagine scenarios in which a series of escalating internal conflicts could lead a reelected Trump to curtail democratic liberties, or worse. Even so, Trumpism lacks two key elements of fascism as it operated in Europe between the wars, namely a regimented, disciplined political party, and a paramilitary force such as Mussolini’s squadristi or Hitler’s Sturmabteilung. The illiberal model that Trump and his followers have openly promoted for the United States is not fascist Italy or Germany, but Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, which has used corrupt methods to curtail free elections and press freedoms, but without widespread violence against opposition forces. Overall, while Trumpism may have fascist potential, the idea that it currently amounts to full-fledged fascism seems overstated to me.
The ”fascism” debate has had odd contours. While many liberals and centrists call Donald Trump fascist, writers to both the right and left of them frequently mock the idea as an overreaction. Conservatives do so for obvious reasons. On the left, figures like Samuel Moyn and Corey Robin make the case that Trump’s actions in office—even on January 6, 2021—fell short of fascism. As I argued in Liberties last fall, progressives like Moyn also believe that calls for centrists, liberals and progressives to unite against Trump will undermine the progressive struggle against neoliberal inequality and endless war—things that, in his view, produced the Trump phenomenon in the first place,
But many of the progressives who insist that it is inappropriate to call Trump a “fascist” have no qualms about using the word “genocide” in condemning Israel’s campaign in Gaza. The word itself inescapably summons up images of the Shoah, and some prominent critics of Israel, including Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have directly compared the current Israeli regime to Hitler. Others, while hesitating to go this far, offer comparisons such as the horrific German attempt to eliminate the Herero and Nama peoples in its colony in southwest Africa (contemporary Namibia) in 1904.
Critics making the charge of genocide against Israel frequently reference the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide of 1948. But this document itself is impossibly vague, citing the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,” and then listing “killing members of the group” as an additional criterion. What does “in part” signify? The document doesn’t say, and by its definition, one could conceivably charge the World War II Allies with genocide against the German and Japanese people in World War II. After all, several times they deliberately killed far more innocent German or Japanese civilians in a single day than have died in nearly six months in Gaza. One could make a case that in the 1990’s, the Serbs committed genocide against the Bosnians, and that the Russians committed genocide against the Chechens. One could argue that scores, perhaps hundreds of cases of genocide have taken place around the world since 1945. Yale’s Timothy Snyder has charged Russia with genocide against Ukraine since 2022, citing the UN Convention. When questioned on the subject, he has suggested that many, perhaps most wars involve genocide.
I wrote about Snyder’s claim in a Substack column sixteen months ago, criticizing the way he and others were “defining down” the crime. As an example of the misuse of the word, I turned to my own area of expertise. I discussed the surprisingly common claim that the French Revolutionaries committed genocide against Catholics in 1793-94, and the way the French far right has used it to distract attention from its own historical record, including collaborating with the Nazis in the slaughter of French Jews. I wrote: “Genocide is the ultimate crime, and, as such, it calls for the most extraordinary possible means to stop it…. The very word can shut down discussion.”
What I wrote about Russia and Ukraine in 2022 applies just as much to Israel and Gaza in 2024. Last October, Hamas deliberately murdered 1200 Israeli civilians and took 250 more as hostages. In response, Israel began a military campaign to root Hamas out from Gaza. Hamas, an organization committed to the destruction of Israel, strove to maintain as much as possible of its military infrastructure in Gaza’s densely populated cities, in the hope that a ceasefire forced upon Israel would allow it quickly to rebuild its offensive capacity. Israel has prioritized its military objectives over concern for Gaza civilians, and this has led to a massive civilian death toll, and enormous human suffering. It is entirely legitimate to condemn Israel for a disproportionate response. But to call its actions mass murder for the sake of mass murder, and to use a word that inescapably calls to mind the Shoah, is not. The word “genocide” implies an overwhelming burden of guilt for the state that perpetrate it, to the point of depriving it of all legitimacy. Many of those using the word, of course, explicitly argue that the state of Israel has no right to exist.
It is generally thankless and difficult to argue that a certain event is less severe than something to which it has been compared. Those making the comparison will inevitably charge you with downplaying, even whitewashing an ongoing evil, for not caring about the victims. But these sorts of arguments are necessary, nonetheless. Two decades ago, incessant invocation of World War II—the comparison of 9/11 to Pearl Harbor, of Saddam Hussein to Hitler, of opposing the Iraq War to Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement—helped lead the United States into one of its most horrific blunders, one which cost thousands of American lives and far more Iraqi lives. The language of fascism, of isolationism, of appeasement—and, yes, of “genocide”—needlessly distorts the way we see the world of 2024 and makes it impossible to face its challenges in a clear-minded manner. Those challenges are difficult and horrible enough without casting them as a rerun of World War II. We should take a moment, occasionally, to remind ourselves and be thankful that the unfathomable horrors unleashed on the world in 1939-45 have never been repeated. We should let its dead rest in peace, rather than constantly summoning their ghosts to march in our own, very different battles.
Your article was a very interesting read for me. Being an Italian who's lived most of my life in America, when I go back to Italy it makes me realize how much of a mark WWII has left when I see old Mussolini era buildings that still stand in cities or monuments to those who died in the mountains. I can also agree that WWII has left a large impact in how we see things now. Even in a lot of discourse I hear a lot of terms coined in that era come up frequently and it's hard to look at things through a new lens without coming back to it.