[Salon] The Gary Lineker Lesson: Nazi Analogies Are Now Legitimate - Israel News

Mar 16, 2023

BBC presenter Gary Lineker walking outside his home in London on Sunday.Credit: Henry Nicholls/Reuters

As far as historical comparisons go, Gary Lineker’s tweet last week – on the rhetoric of the British government’s plans to deport refugees being “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s” – had only one real problem.

Back in the 1930s, the Nazis had no problem with refugees in small boats. In fact, it was one of their preferred methods for getting rid of German and then Austrian Jews – before the Third Reich moved on to industrial extermination in the 1940s.

Then as now, it was His Majesty’s Government trying to stop the refugees from taking to sea and reaching safety. In fact, King George himself was so incensed at the idea of the Jews reaching a safe haven in what was then British Mandatory Palestine that he instructed the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, to ask Berlin to prevent the Jews from leaving.

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This was less than five months before Britain would declare war on Germany, and by that time Germany’s antisemitic policy was well known. George still had no problem consigning the Jews to their fate. At some point his grandson King Charleswould do well to issue an apology for that dark period in his family’s history.

But as I said, despite that historical inaccuracy, I’m fine with Lineker’s tweet. As he wrote, the Conservative government's plans to detain refugees landing on Britain’s shores and deport them to Rwanda is indeed “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people.”

Danish Jews escaping to Sweden in September 1943.

And while personally I’m not a huge fan of comparisons to the Nazis, whether we like it or not, these have by now become a legitimate part of political discourse. Even Mike Godwin, the guy who in 1990 came up with the famous Godwin’s Law about online discussions inevitably ending in a comparison to the Nazis, has recently admitted that this theory “should function less as a conversation ender and more as a conversation starter.”

At this point, readers with no background in British culture will need a few lines of context. Those of you with no need of an introduction to Lineker and his television program “Match of the Day” can safely jump to the next paragraph. Gary Lineker is one of the all-time greats of English football (that’s real football, what you Americans call “soccer”), with scoring records both in the domestic league and as a striker for England’s international team.

Some of those records stand to this day, three decades after he retired from the game. But his even greater renown comes from his anchoring for the past 24 years of “Match of the Day,” BBC’s weekend roundup of league matches. Arguably it's the most popular, certainly the most enduring, television show on the BBC, and probably the oldest sports show in the world, having been broadcast continuously since 1964.

Lineker, in short, is a national icon, which didn’t stop the populist right-wing press and some members of the government from lashing into him after his tweet last week pressuring the public broadcaster to suspend him from the show. What ensued surprised everyone, as Lineker’s co-presenters and commentators, former players like him, all announced they wouldn’t be going on the air either. Neither would current players be giving interviews after last Saturday’s matches, leaving the BBC to air a truncated 20-minute show with just goals from the games and no commentary whatsoever.

The BBC headquarters in London, the site of the controversy after Lineker compared the U.K. government's descriptions of its refugee policy to language "used by Germany in the 30s."

Realizing that the suspension backfired, Lineker has been restored to his seat, with his tweeting rights intact. There are two conclusions from this footballing farce. The first is that sports stars have more sway than politicians, broadcasting executives and the populist press. The second is that it’s pointless to fight people making comparisons between current affairs and the Nazi era. No matter how inaccurate or crass those comparisons often are, they're here to stay.

Not everyone who criticized Lineker was acting out of political opportunism. In The Times, Karen Pollock, who heads Britain’s Holocaust Education Trust, wrote: “However passionately we feel about important and pressing issues of the day, comparing those current concerns with the unimaginable horrors of the Nazi period is wrong.” Pollock is an excellent champion for Holocaust survivors in Britain and has done valuable work to improve the teaching of the Holocaust in its schools, but her argument is sadly obsolete.

There are plenty of strong arguments in favor of the contention that the Third Reich represented a unique brand of murderous evil and that the Holocaust was a planned and comprehensive genocide unlike any other. You don’t need me to rehash them here. But it has been clear for a while now that as Jews we can’t expect others not to use a period in history for political argument, especially as we don’t abide by that rule ourselves.

When I first read Lineker’s tweet last week, it immediately reminded me of a speech by an Israeli general I’m pretty sure the “Match of the Day” host has never heard of.

Seven years ago on Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day in the spring, Yair Golan, then deputy chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, said: “If there's something that frightens me about Holocaust remembrance it's the recognition of the revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany, back then – 70, 80 and 90 years ago – and finding signs of them here among us today in 2016.”

Yair Golan, who seven years ago an Israeli general made a controversial comparison of his own.

Just like Lineker, Golan was roundly abused by the right-wing media for daring to make any such comparisons; he was also criticized, in milder tones, by then-Education Minister Naftali Bennett, even though he wasn’t comparing those processes in Germany to any specific policy or development in modern-day Israel.

Unlike Lineker, Golan wasn’t suspended, but his chances of becoming chief of staff were seriously damaged. He retired from the army two years later and spent a brief stint as a left-wing Knesset member, including a disastrous attempt at winning the leadership of the Meretz party, though I doubt that his speech was the reason 60 percent of party members chose Zehava Galon instead.

Seven years later, with neo-Kahanistsin senior cabinet positions, who can honestly criticize Golan for identifying fascistic trends in Israeli society? It was an accurate assessment. Was it wise all the same to use that comparison?

Perhaps not. The furor his choice of words caused deflected attention from his message. The same is true of Lineker’s tweet. The debate over the past week in Britain has been about whether the highest-paid broadcaster at the BBC should be tweeting anything controversial, not about the callous immorality of the government’s refugee policy. Lineker won this round. But the refugees he supported still lost.

Still, his swift reinstatement proves that comparisons to the Nazis and the Holocaust are now legitimate, if somewhat controversial. The lesson here is that we can’t stop these comparisons; they will keep being made by prominent mainstream voices. We need to drop this taboo that has already been irretrievably broken and try to ensure that people draw better lessons from the Holocaust, rather than insisting that they don’t do so at all.

[Salon] The Gary Lineker Lesson: Nazi Analogies Are Now Legitimate - Israel News - Haaretz.com

The Gary Lineker Lesson: Nazi Analogies Are Now Legitimate