The Auschwitz Analogy: Holocaust Memory and American Debates over Intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s

This article examines the use of analogies to the Holocaust in debates over the propriety and morality of American intervention in the Balkan crises of the 1990s. Both the proponents and the opponents of intervention invoked the Holocaust precedent, drawing very different conclusions about its applicability to Bosnia and Kosovo. The debates demonstrate how ostensible lessons from the Holocaust experience were deployed to mobilize public opinion behind a humanitarian intervention. On the other hand, they also show how the application of Holocaust analogies to a controversial public policy often resulted in gross simplification of a complex past.