The Unbearable Lightness of Awkward Analogies

I don't know if I'm to make this a regular thing, but there is another thought posted at Wordsmith.org to which I thought I might attempt a sensible contribution. Today there is a thought from Roger Ebert, who, though presumably valiant in intention, draws an at least inaccurate moral equivalence between a justification for capital punishment and acceptance of the Holocaust. I think he goes a step too far. I explain why below.

Re: A Thought for Today, 6/18/19 (Wordsmith.org)

"The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?" -Roger Ebert, film-critic (18 Jun 1942-2013)

Regardless of the degree to which "so many Europeans" were or were not okay with the Holocaust (a debatable point), an absolutely critical distinction to be drawn between capital punishment (as a matter of law and principle) and the state-sanctioned, systematic extermination of the Jewish people (as a total act of genocide) is that in the former case there is the understanding of a crime committed by an individual (presuming of course actual guilt), the retribution for which is execution. In the case of the Holocaust, the "crime" so regarded was an "infection" of the gene pool and body politic by those of Hebrew extraction and Judaic faith. Humanity at large has rightly come to see the Holocaust for the inhuman and insane horror that it was. A crime against humanity, and of the highest and sickest order, to be sure; but it was an organized genocide born in hate and fear and advanced by a propagandistically conditioned and socially anchored ethos (not simply by the authoritarian order of a thoroughly depraved man, i.e. Hitler).

Capital punishment, whatever one's position on this very complex moral issue, would not in any responsible evaluation be so analogously (and causally) linked to the genocide of the Holocaust. To justify capital punishment, whether as a general principle or restricted to a specific case, is by no means to breach the slippery slope toward Auschwitz and Dachau. "Halfway there," the film critic says. I think we are rather in a different moral universe--at least a different country of concern. (This itself being an unsettling analogy or awkward link in the larger semantic chain.)