Brazil’s Bizarre Love of Comparing Things to the Holocaust

In March, just as high-level Brazilian officials were arriving in Israel on a diplomatic mission, a group of left-leaning Brazilian activists wrote an open letter to the United Nations claiming that President Jair Bolsonaro’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic had turned their country into an “open-air gas chamber.” In response, Israel’s foreign minister Gabi Ashkenazi condemned the increasingly widespread use of Holocaust comparisons to talk about the pandemic. Ashkenazi’s counterpart, Ernesto Araújo—the most senior member of the delegation—joined him and denounced the letter, calling it a violation of the memory of the Holocaust and an insult to Jews around the world.

But such comparisons have become part-and-parcel of Brazilian political discourse—and Araújo himself is far from innocent. Writing on his personal blog in April 2020, he asserted that the COVID-19 pandemic is part of a Chinese plan for world domination. Therefore, he concluded, support for lockdown measures is akin to support for Nazi concentration camps. The Brazilian Jewish community demanded an apology, but Araújo denied that he was minimizing the Holocaust and, in his own defense, highlighted his support for the Jewish state and his record of opposing anti-Israel resolutions at the UN.

In these two representative examples, one can find numerous parallels to the United States. As in the U.S., the Brazilian left has tended to support stringent measures to blunt the spread of the coronavirus, while those on the right have tended to oppose them. In the U.S. too, right-wing figures like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have made far-fetched analogies between public-health regulations and the Holocaust. The Brazilian left, like its American counterpart, is also home to much anti-Israel sentiment; likewise the Brazilian right is strongly pro-Israel, especially because of the influence of evangelical Christian voters.