Former MMA fighter and Mandalorian actress Gina Carano was fired by Lucasfilm on Feb. 11 after posting a politically charged meme comparing hatred of conservatives with the treatment of Jews during the Holocaust.
Carano’s “canceling” added to the growing tensions keeping people at ideological loggerheads. The only thing Lucasfilm truly canceled was an opportunity for much-needed discussion about the Holocaust.
A 2018 survey found that Holocaust education in the United States is sorely lacking. More than 1 in 10 U.S. adults, and 1 in 5 millennials, had not heard of, or were not sure if they had heard of, the Holocaust. 45% of adults and 49% of millennials could not name even one of the 40,000 camps and ghettos the Nazis operated during World War II. Almost one-third of U.S. adults and 41% of millennials believe fewer than 2 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
Though they do not understand the Holocaust, many feel comfortable drawing comparisons between modern political circumstances and the genocide of 6 million Jews and multiple millions of non-Jews. The phenomenon is so common that Carano is not the only cast member from The Mandalorian to spread flawed Holocaust allusions. Co-star Pedro Pascal shared a meme in 2018 likening keeping children in immigration detention facilities behind bars to holding Jews in Holocaust concentration camps. Though light on facts, Carano’s and Pascal’s posts do provide an opportunity to examine how the Holocaust came to be and what it entailed.
Carano’s post alleges that the circumstances that led to Jews being reviled by their fellow Germans are being replicated in the U.S. For Carano, who is already working on a new movie project with the Daily Wire, this is clearly not the case.
The Third Reich took a regimented approach to depriving Jews of their rights. Between 1933 and 1939, around 400 official restrictions would effectively oust Jews from German public life, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. By 1939, Jews could not sell guns or own carrier pigeons. They were prohibited from working in a variety of professions, including medicine, journalism, government service, and midwifery. Jews were barred from intermarrying with “Aryans” and were not allowed to attend public schools. They had to register all property worth more than 5,000 reichsmarks (roughly $2,008), turn in all precious “gold, silver, diamonds, and other valuables,” adopt the identifying middle names of “Sara” or “Israel,” and stamp their passports with the letter “J.”
Starting in 1939, Jews were rounded up from their homes and moved to overcrowded ghettos, where they were subjected to starvation, overwork, and disease. To implement the “Final Solution,” the planned liquidation of the Jews of Europe, the Nazis sent Jews from ghettos to concentration or labor camps beginning in late 1941.
Pascal may decry the conditions in detention facilities for illegal immigrants, but they are not comparable to the conditions in Holocaust concentration camps. At Nazi concentration camps, inmates were subjected to grueling forced labor, received inadequate food and clothing, were exposed to unsanitary conditions and contagious diseases, and could be subjected to unnecessary medical testing. At killing centers like Auschwitz-Birkenau, those deemed unfit for forced labor were quickly put to death in gas chambers.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Jewish psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote about being sorted by a senior SS officer upon his arrival at Auschwitz. Frankl later asked a fellow prisoner about the whereabouts of his friend. The prisoner asked Frankl:
“‘Was [your friend] sent to the left side?’
‘Yes,’ [Frankl] replied.
‘Then you can see him there.’ A hand pointed to the chimney a few hundred yards off, which was sending a column of flame up into the grey sky of Poland … ‘That’s where your friend is, floating up to Heaven.'”
Canceling the scores of media personalities who have used the Holocaust as a political battering ram can only push people further apart and foster intolerance. Countering their factually flawed assertions with unbiased discussions about what the Holocaust was, and why it matters, would be far more useful. Writer Melissa Braunstein also makes the important suggestion that Lucasfilm could have asked a group like the Simon Wiesenthal Center “to educate their stars on antisemitism.”
While so many Americans are busy accusing their political opponents of being Nazis, the anti-Semitism that inspired the Holocaust is on the rise. Though Jews make up 2% of the U.S. population, the FBI reported that they faced more than 60% of religiously motivated hate crimes in 2019. At this juncture, people of every background should be taking a serious look at the history of the Holocaust to educate themselves about the deadly results of intolerance as it escalates throughout our society.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
