Nazi analogies

During the Nazi era, Adolf Hitler was frequently compared to previous leaders including Napoleon, Philip of Macedon, and Nebuchadnezzar. The comparers wanted to make Hitler understandable to their audiences by comparing him to known leaders, but according to historian Gavriel Rosenfeld the comparisons obscured Hitler's radical evil. When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933, Hitler was compared to Napoleon by The Brooklyn Eagle and Middletown Times. The Night of Long Knives was compared at the time to such events as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, a 1572 massacre of French Huguenots by Catholics. The comparison between Hitler and Philip of Macedon was used by some American journalists who advocated the United States's entry into World War II. Others felt that this did not go far enough and used other metaphors such as Nebuchadnezzar and Tamerlane: Harold Denny of The New York Times visited Buchenwald and later stated that "Tamerlane built his mountain of skulls ... Hitler’s horrors … dwarf all previous crimes".[2] In a public radio broadcast of 24 August 1941, Winston Churchill compared Nazi war crimes in the Soviet Union to the Mongol invasion of Europe, saying "There has never [since] been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale."[3]

Nazism has come to be a metaphor for evil, according to academic Brian Johnson, leading to Nazi comparisons.[4] The Anti-Defamation League suggested that the Nazi era had become the "most available historical event illustrating right versus wrong."[5] Rosenfeld noted that Hitler "gained immortality as a historical analogy" and that he became:[2]

... a hegemonic historical analogy. He did not so much join the ranks of earlier historical symbols of evil as render them unusable. Indeed, perhaps because Western observers became convinced that wartime analogies had underestimated the Nazi dictator’s radicalism, they began to employ Hitler as the baseline for evaluating all new threats.

According to the ACLU, calling someone a Nazi is protected free speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.[6] In 2008, British radio presenter Jon Gaunt called a guest a Nazi on a BBC radio, for which he was fired. An Ofcom complaint against TalkSport, his employer, was upheld by the United Kingdom High Court of Justice in 2010.[7][8] In 2019, the Ukrainian S14 group won a defamation suit against Hromadske, a newspaper which had labeled them neo-Nazi, despite such a characterization having been used by Reuters and The Washington Post.[9] In Israel, a law was proposed in 2014 that would make it illegal to call someone a Nazi or use symbols associated with the Holocaust (such as striped clothing or yellow stars), in order to respect Holocaust survivors.[10]

Reductio ad Hitlerum, first coined in 1951 by Leo Strauss, is a logical fallacy which discounts an idea because it was promoted by Hitler or Nazis.[11] Godwin's law, coined in 1990 by Mike Godwin, asserts that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1".[12] A related convention is "Whoever mentions Hitler first, loses the argument."[5][13][14] However, Godwin has said that not all Nazi comparisons are invalid.[15][16]

According to a press release of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize, demean, and intimidate their targets."[67] Jonathan Greenblatt, director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that "misplaced comparisons trivialise this unique tragedy in human history... particularly when public figures invoke the Holocaust in an effort to score political points."[5]

In 2017, the German journalist Pieke Biermann argued that Nazi comparisons were undergoing a process akin to inflation due to their increased and inappropriate use.[68]

Amanda Moorghen, a researcher for the English Speaking Union, said that Nazi comparisons were not often persuasive: "Wielding accusations of fascism as an insult doesn't help to get your audience on side - instead, you raise the stakes of the debate, forcing a polarisation between 'good' and 'evil' into a discussion that may have reasonable positions on both sides." Instead, she recommended criticizing the opponent's argument directly.[5]

• Holocaust trivialization
• Holocaust uniqueness debate
• Never again
• Fascist (insult)

Source

• Geyer, Michael; Fitzpatrick, Sheila (2009). Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511802652. ISBN 978-0-521-72397-8.
• Rosenfeld, Gavriel (2019). The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-49749-7.

• Adam, Heribert (1997). "The Nazis of Africa: Apartheid as Holocaust?". Canadian Journal of African Studies. 31 (2): 364–370. doi:10.2307/486185. ISSN 0008-3968. JSTOR 486185.
• Bourdon, Jerome (August 2015). "Outrageous, inescapable? Debating historical analogies in the coverage of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict". Discourse & Communication. 9 (4): 407–422. doi:10.1177/1750481315576835. ISSN 1750-4813. S2CID 145056540.
• Caplan, Arthur L. (2012). When Medicine Went Mad: Bioethics and the Holocaust. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-1-4612-0413-8.
• Fermaglich, Kirsten (2007). American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957-1965. Brandeis University Press. ISBN 978-1-58465-549-7.
• Johnson, Brian (2010). 'Just Like Hitler': Comparisons to Nazism in American Culture (PhD thesis). University of Massachusetts Amherst.
• Michalczyk, John J. (1994). Medicine, Ethics, and the Third Reich: Historical and Contemporary Issues. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-55612-752-6.
• Musolff, Andreas (2016). "Instrumentalisation of Holocaust Memory and False Historical Analogies". In Seymour, David M; Camino, Mercedes (eds.). The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Contesting/Contested Memories. Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315647968. ISBN 9781315647968.
• Rosenfeld, Gavriel (2015). Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-07399-9.
• Smeekes, Anouk; Van Acker, Kaat; Verkuyten, Maykel; Vanbeselaere, Norbert (14 November 2013). "The legacy of Nazism: Historical analogies and support for the far right". Social Influence. 9 (4): 300–317. doi:10.1080/15534510.2013.855141. S2CID 145131946.

• Media related to Comparisons with Nazis at Wikimedia Commons