When Holocaust Trivialization Manifests in the Wrestling World
A Friend Highlights the Far Right's Manifestations in One of His Favorite Entertainments.
Click here to check out the first 30 Installments - Volume I - in this series on Antisemitism and Culture. Among the most important pieces from this first wave:
What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites
4 Stupid Reasons People Don't Take Antisemitism as Seriously as They Should
Is Qatar the Most Terrible State in the Middle East? Or Is Iran Worse?
7 Reasons This Christian Hippie Became a Zealot Against Jew Hatred
Why This Bible Thumper Is Going to Keep Using Plenty of Profanity
How Multi-Faith Mysticism & Maimonides Can Bring Peace to Jews, Muslims, Christians, and Everyone
This is the fifth installment in Volume II, intended as another 30 installments exploring the many manifestations of Jew Hatred and the issues surrounding it in America and globally. See the previous installments in this collection below.
Martin Luther King, Jr: An American Hero and Courageous Zionist Voice
Talking to These Students Gave Me Hope in this Dark, Dark World of War and Hate
Why I Don't Expect the Palestinians Will *Ever* Make Peace with Israel and Thus Gain Statehood
The Antisemitism of Ron Paul's Far Right Anarcho-Capitalist Ideological Cult
These writings are part of my ongoing effort to overcome my PTSD by forcing myself to try to write and publish something every day commenting on and analyzing current cultural affairs and their impacts on politics, faith, and, well, everything. “Politics is downstream from culture,” the late Andrew Breitbart popularized among conservative bloggers while he was alive. I’d go a step further: Everything is downstream from culture. The cultures you embrace determine who you are and who you become. You become what you worship.
I’m a bit overdue for another installment in my “antisemitism and culture” series - the hyperarousal has been raging, thus making the binge of podcasting I’ve been doing this week a bit easier to handle to provide regular GOTD Substack content. Also what little writing focus time I’ve had has gone toward the article sequel to the JNS piece which I wrote about and presented here in the series:
But a friend of mine forwarded me an obvious example of a softer form of antisemitism which I’d characterize as “Holocaust trivialization.” I mentioned it here a few days ago in a comment at another Zionist’s substack
by :As we prepare for International Holocaust Remembrance Day I want to ask: what is an inaccuracy, misconception, or other strange comment that someone has made to you about the Holocaust? Comment your answer below.
My answer:
This op/ed that I selected to be published at Algemeiner yesterday comes to mind: https://www.algemeiner.com/2023/01/22/the-rampant-use-and-abuse-of-the-holocaust-analogy/
I think something growing more and more common is Holocaust trivialization. It is so normal now in our political discourse to compare someone to Hitler or Nazi policies or Nazi entities. It's just the go-to comparison now for so many people that they reach for when they want to complain about something that is nowhere near as significant as the Holocaust and the Nazis.
Here’s an excerpt from the op/ed by Rafael Medoff which I cited: The Rampant Use and Abuse of the Holocaust Analogy:
A new record may have just been set for the most Hitler analogies in a 24-hour period.
From Moscow to Mar-a-Lago, public figures this week were inappropriately invoking Nazi-related terms to denounce developments that did not at all resemble those of the Nazi era.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared that the United States and its European allies are attempting to solve “the Russian question” in the same way that “Hitler wanted a ‘final solution’ to the Jewish question.”
Meanwhile, more than five thousand miles away, former President Donald Trump tweeted that the FBI agents who recently removed classified government documents from his Mar-a-Lago residence were “the Gestopo” (as he spelled it).
Before the news cycle was done, a former Israeli attorney general called proposed judicial reforms in that country “a pogrom” and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman described them as a “putsch,” the term commonly associated with Adolf Hitler’s failed coup attempt in 1923, known as the Beer Hall Putsch.
If such outbursts were an aberration, they would be bad enough. But there have been numerous such remarks flung about in public discourse in recent months.
Go ahead and be sure and read the rest. Now a good example of this Holocaust trivialization manifesting in culture can be found at my pal
's wrestling blog . I have very little interest in wrestling. It's a bit too much of a macho display of extreme masculinity for my general entertainment tastes.I like some of the real life people involved in it previously - Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson seems like a decent guy and I quite appreciate him as an actor. Mick "Mankind" Foley seems like a thoughtful guy behind the mask. And I'll always have a sense of childhood affection for Andre the Giant (especially his classic acting turn in The Princess Bride) and Hulk Hogan (and good on him winning that lawsuit that destroyed that terrible website Gawker!)
But Jeff is a friend - we talk about the sorry state of the American Right, our former political home for both of us - on a regular basis and I certainly want to encourage his writing on this and whatever other subjects strike his fancy. He has a great post up recently about a story he’s been following in the wrestling world, about a notable figure who has fallen into the sad problem of Holocaust trivialization:
Jeff writes,
I wrote about Missy Hyatt, the “First Lady of Wrestling” when she reposted the picture above back in October 2022. The photo, originally from 2010, features Hyatt wearing a Nazi SS visor cap and coat and very little else. Now, I am bringing her up because of her appearance next Sunday, February 5, at Baltimore Celebfest 6 in Westminster, MD.
Hyatt has had to deny she’s a Nazi before, which is never a good look. Her 2013 denials of being a Nazi mentioned that she was both a World War II and U.S. Civil War reenactor and that she chose to reenact as a Nazi nurse because, to quote her directly, “I just like the uniforms since they look better than the Allies.”
That picture at the top of this post is a lot of things, but it isn’t of reenacting. The SS was responsible for a good share of Nazi war crimes and atrocities. One notable one was the Lidice massacre.
For further evidence of her viewpoints, she praised Infowars, the show hosted by conspiracy nutjob Alex Jones.
Read more at Jeff’s Substack for further information about this unfortunate far right ideological celebrity’s upcoming appearance at a public event.
If there’s one thing that I’ve seen with great clarity in my years researching and writing about antisemitism it’s that the ideology and cultural tendencies around it are very much a spectrum. Wearing a Nazi uniform because one appreciates fascist aesthetics is not as bad as actually advocating for Nazi antisemitism or praising Hitler Kanye-style. Comparing Covid policies to Nazis or fascism is not as bad as literally advocating for Nazism or fascism. Holocaust skepticism is not as bad as outright Holocaust denial. Holding Israel to a different standard than all the world’s other countries is not as bad as advocating for its outright destruction.
This Missy Hyatt celebrating herself dressing in a Nazi uniform is a form of trivializing the Holocaust and thus a milder, more moderate form of antisemitism. By celebrating the uniform and trying to look sexy in it, the effect is that fewer people take what the Nazis did with the degree of seriousness that they should.
But what she’s doing is actually part and parcel with her affinity for the conspiracist ideology of Alex Jones. In the Jones InfoWars world America is no more moral than a nazi state and is perpetuating fascist actions against its citizens and pursuing imperial actions across the world. Jones likewise does not take antisemitism seriously in his regular advocacy of the ideology and previous presidential campaigns of the antisemitic racist Ron Paul, whose Jew hatred and conspiracism I explained in this previous installment of the series:
What’s the proper way to respond to making the mistake of wearing a Nazi uniform? I wrote about it recently in this JNS brief about the lengths Prince Harry went to learn more and make amends when he - at his brother’s and sister-in-laws’ alleged encouragement - wore a Nazi uniform to a party:
The prince was 20 years old at the time and has since apologized, stating in a recent Netflix docu-series, “It was probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life….I felt so ashamed afterwards.”
The prince explained his efforts to learn from the mistake, “All I wanted to do was make it right. I sat down [and] spoke to the chief rabbi in London, which had a profound impact on me. I went to Berlin and spoke to a Holocaust survivor. I could have just ignored it and gone on and made the same mistakes over and over again in my life. But I learned from that.”
In the Netflix series, the prince attributes the donning of the costume to his family’s “huge level of unconscious bias.”
Harry expanded on unconscious bias, saying, “I’m not saying you’re a racist, I’m just saying that your unconscious bias is proving that because of the way that you’ve been brought up, the environment you’ve been brought up in, suggests that you have this point of view—unconscious point of view—where naturally you will look at someone in a different way. And that is the point at which people start to have to understand.”
Can we expect this wrestling lady to do anything similar? I highly doubt it but who knows? Maybe she’s got some Jewish friend or fan somewhere who can set her straight. It’s possible for anyone to become educated on this subject and to then change what they’re saying and doing. If I didn’t believe that to be possible then what sense would it make trying to educate people about the myriad forms and manifestations of Jew Hatred?