Like: Memetic Analo­gies in Social Media

Analo­gies are in. Memes, podcasts, op-ed pieces and scho­l­arly debates compare Trump to Hitler or Musso­lini. Trump, in turn, trades in false moral equi­va­len­cies, seeing “very fine people on both sides” of the “Unite the Right” rally in Char­lot­tes­ville. Poli­ti­cians refe­rence Nazi concen­tra­tion camps to describe ICE detention on the US Southern Border. To this, the United States Holo­caust Memo­rial Museum stre­nuously objects on the grounds that the Holo­caust was unique and incom­pa­rable, while ICE itself unwit­tingly proves the point in its own attempts to deny the fascism analogy (“We’re not Nazis. We’re just following orders”).

Protester in front of the American embassy in London, 2017; source: independent.co.uk

This much is not new, espe­cially on the internet where Godwin’s law has long since defined the reductio ad hitlerum as a key rheto­rical pattern of online debate. Analo­gies anchor poli­tical argu­ments and give them affec­tive charge. They build concep­tual bridges between other­wise uncon­nected struc­tures and events. Analo­gies provide an opening for the critical work of imagi­ning what could change in the future. They can produce powerful flashes of insight, and they can capture signi­fi­cant discur­sive ener­gies, bund­ling and redi­rec­ting them for all sorts of poli­tical purposes, whether salutary or dest­ruc­tive. At the same time, it is diffi­cult to over­look the trouble with compa­ri­sons. Analo­gies tend to deco­n­tex­tua­lize. Free­zing complex histo­rical processes into handy symme­tries, they sap speci­fi­city and down­play diffe­rence. Rapid news cycles and social media favor the repli­ca­tion of quick analo­gies that seem to define our present moment but explain very little about the events of any given day, week, or month if we don’t restore the ambi­gui­ties and contradictions.

Compa­ring with Germany

What strikes us today, as two white Germa­nists working in the United States during the Trump Presi­dency and after almost a decade of orga­ni­zing by Black Lives Matter, is the incre­ased two-way traffic across these concep­tual bridges over the Atlantic. This is no longer just a ques­tion of whether Hitler provides a model for Trump, or whether the situa­tion in America in 2020 is analo­gous to that in Weimar Germany during the 1920s. Commen­ta­tors or public figures amplify already ubiqui­tous Nazi analo­gies by compa­ra­tive refe­rences to diffe­rent forms of Vergan­gen­heits­be­wäl­ti­gung, or maste­ring the past; to colo­niz­a­tion, enslave­ment, repa­ra­tions and recon­ci­lia­tion; to poli­cing after the Holo­caust on the one hand, and after Jim Crow on the other. Recent months have seen a surge of memes on social media compa­ring German and US memory cultures and decla­ring the former’s coming-to-terms with the Holo­caust far supe­rior to the way America deals with its legacy of slavery.

Offe­ring Germany as a model for thin­king through American conflicts, these memes funda­ment­ally rely on making the two coun­tries, their histo­ries, their memory cultures, and their iden­tity poli­tics analo­gous. A trained scien­tist, Merkel becomes the model for ever­ything Trump is not; Drosten is the more effec­tive Fauci; German memo­rials become the right way to remember geno­cide and slavery alike. The search for simi­la­ri­ties has also gripped the two coun­tries’ memory cultures (albeit selec­tively), shaping debates on policy and iden­tity on both sides of the Atlantic.

But at what cost do we engage poli­tical analogy, and more speci­fi­cally, what do such analo­gies mean for the rela­ti­onship between Germany and the United States? We have learned to beware of tabu­la­ting compa­ra­tive evil, but how much better is it to engage in what Susan Neiman calls “compa­ra­tive redemp­tion”? If Germany leads the way in memory poli­tics, can we forget its colo­nial past? If Germany’s coming-to-terms now is to provide a template for anti-racist work in the United States, where does that leave American civil rights history? How does the invo­ca­tion of fascism analo­gies in the history of Black anti-racism factor into the current debates about the useful­ness and limits of compa­ring the Trump present to the Nazi past? What is gained and what is lost in analogy?

Neiman had primed this discourse with her provo­ca­tively titled book about German lessons for how the U.S. might work through its racist past. Calling her project Lear­ning from the Germans, she deli­ber­ately reversed the terms of postwar German “reedu­ca­tion” by the Allies. Even more recently, Isabel Wilkerson has expanded the compa­rison to include India in her widely discussed Caste: The Lies That Divide Us. The American concept of race, she argues, sets African-Americans apart like the Dalit in the Indian caste system, and indeed like the Jews in Nazi Germany.

Both of these provo­ca­tive inter­ven­tions have kindled produc­tive debate but also seen their share of critique for analogic thin­king, which inevi­tably glosses over histo­rical discrepan­cies and all too easily reduces trans­his­to­rical compa­rison to ahis­to­rical equa­tions. What neither Neiman nor Wilkinson could have anti­ci­pated, though, is how their compa­ra­tive frame­works would play out as the largest protest move­ment in the history of the United States captured inter­na­tional atten­tion. As graf­fiti covers the statue of Robert E. Lee in Rich­mond, Virginia, and the surroun­ding park becomes a staging ground for anti­ra­cist protest, the trans­at­lantic paral­lels that Wilkerson and Neiman draw between racism and memory poli­tics in Germany and the US have become an accepted idiom for inter­pre­ting civil unrest – nowhere more so than on social media.

Analo­gies Acce­le­rate in Digital Media

Much of the traffic in analo­gies occurs on Face­book and Twitter, in videos, memes, or personal posts algo­rith­mi­cally ampli­fied through retweets and likes. Each seems primed by content creators to carry affec­tive weight and elicit an emotional reac­tion. The speed of commu­ni­ca­tions tech­no­logy, combined with a global shift to the right, has rein­forced a style of analogic thin­king grounded in a meme-based syntax: A Nazi flag appears next to a Confe­de­rate flag under the heading “Flags for Losers.” A photo from the libe­ra­tion of the camps in 1945 implies an analogy to Confe­de­rate statues by exhor­ting viewers/readers to “remember history[:] Jewish people wanted the world to remember the Holo­caust. They didn’t build statues to Hitler and his henchmen to accom­plish it.” A viral tweet  paints this picture: “Say you’re Jewish, walking in Germany & see a statue of Hitler. You’re upset & want it torn down. Only for someone to say ‘how dare you? My ancestor was a nazi. This is my heri­tage’ Crazy right? Well this is a reality for black people ever­yday in America.”

source: facebook.com

The memetic analo­gies that cast the statues glori­fying Confe­de­rate soldiers as “bad” memo­rials, and that portray the solemn preser­va­tion of concen­tra­tion camps like Ausch­witz as a „good“ way to remember are just one method by which content creators imbue histo­rical compa­rison with strong emotions. One of the memes circu­la­ting this summer juxta­posed the English language plaque at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which memo­ria­lizes the site as a “cry of despair and a warning to huma­nity,” with the inscrip­tion on the Fame Confe­de­rate Monu­ment in Salis­bury, NC (dedi­cated 1909, restored 1991, removed July 2020), which addresses itself to the Soldiers of the Confe­deracy: “Fame has given you / An impe­ris­hable crown / History will record / your daring valor / Noble suffe­rings and / Match­less Achie­ve­ments / To the Honor and / Glory of our land.” The mani­fest visual parallel unders­cores the diffe­rence between memo­rials that criti­cally confront versus those that uncri­ti­cally cele­brate past violence.

There is no way to under­stand how these digital images func­tion without acknow­led­ging that white supre­macy has produced chronic denial among white people of what the Civil War was actually about. As a high school student in the 1990s in Fayet­teville, Georgia, I (Schuster-Craig) learned that states’ rights were the essen­tial conflict of the U.S. Civil War. I don’t remember any atten­tion paid to the suffe­ring of enslaved people. But there are count­less curri­cula and children’s books about the Holo­caust in American schools that portray the dehu­ma­niz­a­tion of Jewish people with empathy. If white people have diffi­culty empa­thi­zing with Black and Brown pain, it is signi­fi­cantly easier for them to draw analo­gies that invoke other people often deemed white in a US context. (While this recourse to the Holo­caust is frequent, even it may be eroding.  Douglas Macgregor, Trump’s pick for Ambassador to Germany, has decried Vergan­gen­heits­be­wäl­ti­gung as a “sick menta­lity,” keeping with the Trump administration’s assault on history and tempo­ra­lity.)

Analo­gies are malle­able. Memes compare Ausch­witz not only to Confe­de­rate monu­ments, but also to their topp­ling. The meme below is one variant of a juxta­po­si­tion that was common on Face­book in mid-June and early July 2020. On the left, there is a viral image of the train tracks leading to Ausch­witz – an image that can be found in hund­reds of Face­book posts – and is captioned “Over 1.1 million people were murdered in Ausch­witz and it still stands 72 years.“ On the right, there is a Confe­de­rate statue crum­pled around the pedestal which used to support it. There are no people in the fore­ground of either photograph.

source: facebook.com

Black-led protest move­ments have actively iden­ti­fied and torn down memo­rials in protest against injus­tice for decades. But here, Ausch­witz is invoked as a warning against such acti­vism.  Memes that draw analo­gies between Confe­de­rate statues and Holo­caust memo­rials – espe­cially those like this one, which implies that Confe­de­rate statues should not be torn down – render Black suffe­ring as well as decades of a Black-led memory culture invi­sible. Dest­ruc­tion can be an active form of remem­be­ring that requires enga­ge­ment with and know­ledge of history: who did what, where, and when? Can we deem this person and their actions worthy of memo­ria­li­zing? Do we still want to remember them? Espe­cially in the US context, the visual stra­tegy in the meme above re-centers a white subject (German, Jewish or white American) as the one who decides both what and how to remember. Such static frames reveal a stark igno­rance of Black Euro­pean acti­vists, too, who Fatima el-Tayeb argues have created “counter-memory discourses” emer­ging from diasporic and trans­na­tional networks that bear myriad and hete­ro­ge­neous memories.

Compe­ti­tive Memory across the Atlantic

As in other coun­tries across the world, Germans have come out to support the American street protests that demanded an end to murders committed by the police and a sustained and broad commit­ment to pursue racial justice. An expres­sion of trans-Atlantic soli­da­rity, the German protests had ambi­va­lent effects at home. Though in some respects protests managed to combine support for BLM with incre­ased visi­bi­lity for Black Germans and orga­niz­a­tions such as the Initia­tive Schwarze Menschen in Deutsch­land (ISD), and supported calls to rethink race and the colo­nial legacy in contem­porary Germany, we worry that an oppo­site effect could prevail: instead of new, multi­di­rec­tional enga­ge­ments, the protests may have provided an oppor­tu­nity to renew many Euro­peans’ false sense of supe­rio­rity around racism compared to condi­tions in the US. Haunted by the “spec­ters of compa­rison,” white Germans revert too easily to a compe­ti­tive para­digm in which one memory cancels the other – a para­digm that Michael Roth­berg, in parti­cular, has criti­qued and rethought in important ways. The German legal frame­work prohi­bi­ting the display of Nazi insi­gnia is now supposed to provide models for how to deal with Confe­de­rate flags. Monu­ments, street names, or Stol­per­steine (stumb­ling stones) that dot the German built envi­ron­ment serve as refe­rence points for tearing down statues and setting up memo­rials in the American South; bias trai­ning for American law enfor­ce­ment should draw inspi­ra­tion from history lessons for German police cadets. But these and other paral­lels occlude the specific histo­ries on each side of the Atlantic. The focus on German models allows us too easily to forget the history of the civil rights move­ment, the achie­ve­ments of the field of critical race scho­l­ar­ship, and the long history of anti-racist work in the United States, all of which has prepared the ground for BLM to galva­nize a broad swath of the US popu­la­tion against endemic white supre­macy. It is too soon to know how BLM will affect German culture and the public percep­tion of years-long efforts by Black Germans to deco­lo­nize German spaces. Namibia’s recent rejec­tion of German repa­ra­tions for the geno­cide committed against the Nama and Herero also shows the limits of a German poli­tics of remembrance.

Analo­gies exag­ge­rate; they encode fears. But those fears also have histo­ries, as murders by police continue, and police in Düssel­dorf have been caught on video seemingly imita­ting the tactics of George Floyd’s murde­rers, poten­ti­ally even for laughs. Poli­ti­cized analo­gies – often presented in visual form through memes – are inher­ently contra­dic­tory and purpo­se­fully reduc­tive. As a concep­tual tool, analogy is static. It risks privi­le­ging the freeze frame over the inherent mobi­lity and multi­di­rec­tio­n­a­lity of intert­wined histo­ries and memo­ries. To restore these requires diffe­ren­tia­tion and unre­mit­ting atten­tion to the processes analogy condenses, if not conceals. Analogy works to arrest our atten­tion – but only if we put the frame back in motion for context.