When the GOP isn't obsessed with Hunter Biden, it's busy trivializing the trauma and suffering endured by victims of horrific situations by promoting the benefits of slavery and the Holocaust.
Here's an extraordinary exchange on Fox News' The Five (video below):
Jessica Tarlov: I'm just fundamentally uncomfortable with this sentence that blacks benefited at all from this. And, you know, it made me think of someone obviously, I'm not black, but I'm Jewish. Would someone say about the Holocaust, for instance, that there were some benefits for Jews, right, while they were hanging out in concentration camps, you learned a strong work ethic, right? Maybe you learned a new skill.
Greg Gutfeld: Did you ever read Man's Search for Meaning? Vik Frankl talks about how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills. You had to be useful. Utility! Utility kept you alive.
Gutfeld's condescending take suggests that those who perished did not have useful skills. It also misinterprets Viktor Frankl's book. As Gutfeld himself noted, the title is Man's Search for Meaning, not Man's Search for Utility and is about finding meaning in suffering, and maintaining psychological and spiritual integrity in the face of inhumane conditions, not "how you had to survive in a concentration camp by having skills."
But I shouldn't expect better from Gutfeld. After all, this is the guy who "hired several dwarfs to attend a conference of the Magazine Publishers of America on the topic of "buzz," with instructions to be as loud and annoying as possible." [Wikipedia]
In response to Gutfeld's disinformation, the Twitter account for the Auschwitz Memorial set the record straight, explaining that the goal of the Holocaust was systemic genocide, not the preservation of the useful Jews. Some Jews did temporarily increase their chances of survival in concentration camps during the Holocaust by using their skills. However, the Nazis aimed to exterminate the entire Jewish population, regardless of an individual's usefulness. Millions of Jews were brutally murdered, including in extermination camps where nearly all arrivals were killed immediately, regardless of their skills or abilities.
Apparently, Gutfeld thinks the Arbeit macht frei ("Work makes you free") signs in front of the death camps were truth in advertising.
