Huck wasn’t just being overcome by what he called being in the very “valley of the shadow of death.” The tour that took him to Auschwitz along with about 100 other clergy and political activists was put together by the famous Christian Dominionist organizer David Lane to graphically illustrate the supposed legacy of anti-totalitarian courage that links yesterday’s fighters against Nazis and communists to today’s fighters against legalized abortion, same-sex marriage and other abominations, including alleged threats to the State of Israel.

On the Iran deal, ex-governor and Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee brought the Republican primaries to a new low by claiming that with the tentative new nonproliferation deal with Iran, Obama "would take the Israelis and basically march them to the door of the oven ." Jon Perr already noted that for ex-governor Mike Huckabee, nearly everything can be and eventually will be compared to the Holocaust. Now Ed Kilgore points out that even Huckabee's supposed claim to expertise on the subject, " I have seen what the oven door looks like ," itself was from a publicity stunt staged last year to compare Huckabee's pet issues to the Holocaust So Mike Huckabee went to Auschwitz not to pay respects to the Holocaust's victims, but as a far-right Christian activism effort specifically intended to "graphically illustrate" how things like abortion and LGBT rights were supposedly as bad as the Holocaust. It's about as cynical a ploy as one could imagine.

This is going to sound terribly vicious, but for many years it's seemed to me that the Mike Huckabees of the world have an underlying resentment of the Holocaust and Jews who lived through it—not because of the horrific nature of the genocide itself, but because it was the ultimate example of oppression, the kind far-far-right Christians consider themselves to be either in the midst of or about to be subjected to at any moment, and here it was spent on some non-far-right-Christians that can't even get proper rhetorical use out of it. Much like the resentment of black Americans for having a clear and identifiable history of slavery, subjugation and oppression in the nation that the far-right wishes they would just stop bringing up already, the focus is almost never on the horror of what was done to the group, but on how those historically grotesque events are mere run-up to the various piss-poor examples of oppression faced by present-day Very Conservative White Christian Americans who forever consider themselves just one new law away from being sent to the FEMA camps. They do not identify with the Jewish people as victims of a genocide, or with black Americans as victims of centuries of violence; they identify with themselves as being every bit as oppressed as that, and are more than a wee bit hostile with the groups actually victimized when those groups bring up that history themselves, or points out that it was the very conservative white Christians that were responsible for those things.

Conservative language is forever appropriating the Holocaust, but only while comparing it to why they should not have to deliver flowers to a gay wedding or as empty rhetorical backdrop for a preferred farthest-right foreign policy stance. They are forever talking about slavery—but not as historical abomination, only as metaphor for their struggles against a perceived-as-too-liberal health insurance reform plan. An assault weapons ban is, according to the NRA, a form of discrimination against favored weapons akin to "Jim Crow"—and the Jim Crow history of the southern states is far more likely to come up as metaphor for gun oppression, in conservative groups, than it ever will be in discussion of the actual effects and modern legacy of Jim Crow.

As I said, there is an aura of palpable resentment in the movement that these things have to be appropriated for their use, rather than just being owned outright. The Holocaust is never an example of how the demonization and otherization of minority groups can lead nations into spasms of open barbarity—it is mere metaphor for the dangers the world faces if it does not listen to Mike Huckabee. The "heritage" of the South is not the heritage of the millions and millions of black Americans who can trace their ancestry back to men and women held in chains and who today still must wage constant battle to be treated as fully human by law enforcement, or at businesses, or in voting booths—of course it is not. The "heritage" hanging from the flagpoles and in the back of conservative-owned pickup trucks is the "heritage" of viciously conservative Christians mounting bloody rebellion to keep their fellow man enslaved, and the supposed damage done to the South by oppressors demanding that they stop. The symbol of the South remains the battle flag, not a set of broken chains. The Holocaust is what happens to zygotes if women are allowed to take a certain pill—if it once was a demonstration of the vicious malevolence of declaring that a nation has too many ethnically impure citizens, you will not hear that version on the campaign trail.

And that is all that these things seem, to some of the supposed great leaders seeking to rouse their supporters to action by warning them that they are this close to butchery and oppression, if the other fellow gets their way. The most horrific moments in history as cardboard props on a temporary stage, flimsy, cheap, latex-painted things that exist only to set the mood while the actor of the moment struts his stuff.

