Well, despite my better judgment, I have to say that I think the "Soup Nazi" thing on Seinfeld was really funny. Part of the reason it was funny is that it was irreverently daring, that it was one of those things that polite people wouldn't say in polite company. I think Hogan's Heroes was genuinely funny in the same way, as were the references to Nazis in the Mel Brooks movies. Even more daring and irreverent was the anti-Nazi humor of the Berlin cabarets of the 1930's - this was absolutely classic humor.

The trouble with a good joke, though, is that it gets repeated over and over again, until everybody in the world gets sick of it. Then it becomes a cliche, and it isn't funny any more. So, while the joke did work on Seinfeld, it didn't work so well in the "Nazi" and "Gestapo" thread titles currently active. Still, although it may be disrespectful as well as dumb, I don't really think it trivializes the Holocaust. I think what happens is the exact opposite. If you decry something by comparing it with the Holocaust, and the issue is not worthy of that comparison; what you have done is trivialized your own position. The genocides in Africa are certainly worthy of comparison with the Holocaust, and so is the issue of slavery. It certainly is a terrible thing when people destroy the environment - but I don't think it compares in any way to the intentional killing that took place in the Holocaust, and making that comparison makes the cause of the environmentalists sound somewhat ridiculous.

On the other hand, I think it's important that we're not too cautious about refraining from comparing things with the Holocaust - to do so would be to deify the Holocaust as the Supreme Evil, something that could never happen again. All of us are capable of such unspeakable cruelty and evil, and it's important for us to be aware of that. The same forces that caused the Holocaust, were at work in the American treatment of Indians and black slaves. To a lesser degree, it was those same forces that allowed the internment of Japanese and Italian-Americans in concentration camps in the U.S. in the 1940's, and the anti-Jewish and anti-Catholic and and anti-homosexual and anti-immigrant intolerance that was pervasive in the United States until the time of our parents - and some of that intolerance is alive and well in the U.S today. Anti-Muslim intolerance is rampant in Europe (and to a lesser extent in the U.S.) today, and that intolerance could certainly be compared to the intolerance that led to the Holocaust.

-Joe Offer-