Nazi analogies all too common

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/01/2022 (962 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In his 1953 book Natural Rights and History, the German philosopher Leo Strauss coined the Latin term reductio ad Hitlerum, or “reduction to Hitler.” This concept, as he wrote, was that a “view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Adolf Hitler.”

For example, Hitler detested modern art, which he considered “degenerate”; hence, one might argue that anyone who hates modern art is a Nazi. This is a fallacy referred to as “playing the Nazi card” — clearly, you can object to modern art without being a Nazi.

Forty years later, Mike Godwin, an American lawyer, built on Strauss’s proposition with what became known as “Godwin’s Law.” He postulated that as an online “debate increases in length, it becomes inevitable that someone will eventually compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis.” And at that point, the argument must end.

These comparisons persist nonetheless. For decades so-called “pro-life” anti-abortion advocates have repeatedly played “the Nazi card” with provocative declarations that abortion is akin to the mass murder the Nazis perpetrated during the Holocaust.

Most recently, American and Canadian opponents of COVID-19 vaccine mandates and pandemic restrictions have been quick to make Nazi comparisons. Last fall, a protester at an anti-mask rally at the Manitoba legislative building held a sign that said “Just Following Orders Like In Germany.”

At a similar gathering in Calgary, protesters wore yellow stars and held up pictures of Anne Frank. Others have equated receiving tickets for violating health regulations to being sent to a concentration or death camp.

A few months ago, Lara Logan, who has bizarrely morphed from a respected journalist on 60 Minutes to a talking head on Fox News, compared Dr. Anthony Fauci to Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician who conducted hideous medical experiments on Jews at Auschwitz.

In mid-January, U.S. Ohio Republican Congressman Warren Davidson objected to state and civic orders requiring proof of vaccination to enter restaurants and other public places. He tweeted, “Let’s recall that the Nazis dehumanized Jewish people before segregating them, segregated them before imprisoning them, imprisoned them before enslaving them, and enslaving them before massacring them.” (He has since apologized for the comparison, but not deleted his tweet.)

His congressional colleagues Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Brobert and Madison Cawthorn, among others, have made similar ridiculous analogies.

Not only are these Nazi and Holocaust comparisons “a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decay,” as the Auschwitz Memorial Museum tweeted in response to Davidson’s comment; they also display a woeful ignorance of history and illustrate “Godwin’s Law” in action.

The fallacy of their claims is easily proved with the facts. In mid-March 1938, more than a year before the Second World War began, Hitler fulfilled his dream of a German empire with the Anschluss, or political union between Nazi Germany and Austria, the country of his birth.

Austrians in Vienna and elsewhere in the country cheered the arrival of the Nazis; Austrian Jews, however, were humiliated and brutalized and subjected to the regime’s “Aryanization” policy— the forced expulsion of Jews from economic life and the expropriation of their businesses and property by ruling “Aryans.”

As terrible as that was, the treatment of Jews in the conquest of Poland, especially following the June 1941 Nazi invasion of the eastern part of the country then occupied by the Soviets, was horrific. Forced segregation in crowded ghettos, starvation, disease, mass murder in pits and deportation to death camps — that was what the Nazis inflicted on Europe’s Jewish population.

Comparing that with a requirement to show proof of vaccination is unconscionable.

Still, there are times when the Nazi analogy does fit; even Mike Godwin concedes that. Commenting in 2017 about comparing the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Va., chanting “Jews shall not replace us” to Nazis, Godwin felt the analogy was appropriate. (His actual tweet was less delicately worded: “By all means, compare these s**theads to the Nazis…I’m with you.”)

There is one current Nazi comparison that does hold up: Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” and “stolen” from him. Polls show that a rather amazing 70 per cent of Republicans believe this easily disproven nonsensical charge.

Whether Trump understands it or not — and his historical knowledge certainly seems almost non-existent — there is a direct line from his endless repetition of his “Big Lie” with the strategy employed by Hitler and his scheming propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. They used their version of the “Big Lie” to blame Jews for Germany’s humiliating defeat in the First World War ,and then sought to hammer away at this falsehood “until the last member of the public understands,” as Goebbels explained his strategy.

And like Trump, they never ever admitted to lying, and instead kept on doing so.

In this case, the notion of “playing the Nazi card” is not a fallacy; it is, rather, the truth.

Now & Then is a column in which historian Allan Levine puts the events of today in a historical context.