During yesterday's joint meeting of the House Agriculture Finance and House Agriculture Policy committees to hear information about and an update on High Pathogen Avian Influenza (HPAI) in Minnesota, Danube pullet producer Barb Frank knew that making the analogy between her operations' fate in the avian flu pandemic last spring and Nazi concentration camp Dachau might be crossing a line.
Frank went there anyway, saying:
Pardon me and I hope this doesn't cause problems where it goes. It's Dachau effect because we felt like Dachau.
She paused after making the remark, which was met with dead silence in the committee room. Surprisingly given the emphasis Frank put on her remark, no one attending the meeting tweeted about her special moment of silence for her own Dachau feels.
Here's the video:
Frank, who is a polished communicator for agriculture by virtue of having completed the Minnesota Agricultural and Rural Leadership (MARL) training, can't fall back on the stereotype that rural folks aren't good communicators. She's been trained to speak up for agriculture and her operation. This is no bumpkin.
Frank seems to have invented the phrase, "the Dachau effect," as we are unable to find it used anywhere in a google or Nexis search.
There are a couple of problems with comparing the experience of Jews and other prisoners at Dachau with the experience that Frank went through, and it's not some newfangled political correctness to point these problems out.
We need only to look at an ethics case study from the Society of Professional Journalists, Using the ‘Holocaust’ Metaphor, to find a succinct explanation of the problem:
The mass-murder of millions in a catastrophic historical event should not be utilized as a communication tool to gain support for one’s organization. The comparison, while arguably similar in quantifiable terms, is disgustingly insensitive and takes advantage of others suffering to make a point.
Frank and her family-run operation may have lost property and suffered economic losses, but the comparison of her own reaction with how people "felt" at Dachau is not hers to make.
It's not that Frank and her family need to reach for the Holocaust metaphor to convey their anguish. In several news accounts in June of the family's reaction to avian flu hitting their flocks, Frank's daughter has contrasted the flu hitting the barns with the death of her son. The Crookston Times reported in Everything that can go wrong: Avian influenza devastates area poultry producer:
When Becky Bruns’ son died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in April 2007, it was the worst week of her life.
Now she thinks it was the second worst.
“When Dominick died, it was horrible, but we only had to get through that week and we could begin trying to heal,” she said on her rural Danube farm Monday afternoon.
“But this...this just keeps going on and on. It doesn’t end. I’m fighting for everything in my life right now.”
That framing, drawing on the family's own experience, is moving and appropriate.
Moreover, poultry producers might not want to bring Holocaust metaphors to the table. That SPJ case study reviewed PETA's 2003 “Holocaust on Your Plate” campaign that compares the slaughter of animals for human use to the murder of 6 million Jews in WWII.
The emotional appeal backfired, as the case study pointed out--and we strongly suspect that Frank might not want to borrow PETA-style emotional appeals in her rhetoric.
African-Americans "not from this area"?
In her testimony, Frank also pointed out that all the members of an inexperienced work crew that worked at her operation were African-Americans.
Paul Anderson asks about the crews brought her farm; Frank replies:
The depopulation crew was a crew hired by the USDA. The original crew, I have no idea where they came from. Obviously not from our area [raises eyebrows]. They were all African-American. I have a name and that's it.
Her point in identifying the race of the workers puzzled a couple of Bluestem's sources who attended the meeting. African-Americans live in this area, even here in tiny Maynard just over the Renville-Chippewa county line, so we share that sentiment.
The remarks came just before her "Dachau effect" comment.
Here's the moment:
The excerpts above begin at the 15:35 time marker and end at the 16:37 marker in the full hearing (below). We omitted some material in between, but listeners can view the sequence below or watch the entire hearing via the embedded Minnesota House Youtube of the informational hearing:
Photo: Frank's daughter and Frank in better times inside one of the barns at the Pullet Connection. Frank now wants a safety net for smaller producers. Image via the 2011 Redwood Falls Gazette article, The Pullet Connection.
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