It’s a familiar script in American politics now. Every few months some politico runs his mouth off, comparing the policies of the other party to those of Nazi Germany. Then pundits take to the airwaves to criticize the exploitation of such painful memories to score cheap political points. The guilty party usually doubles down, insisting that the comparison was taken the wrong way—that he was merely warning of a slippery slope down to Nazism. Finally, the Anti-Defamation League steps in and denounces such glib analogies with the unchallengeable moral credibility of actual Holocaust survivors.
The latest iteration of this drama has been playing out over proposed tightening of America’s gun control laws. Talk radio host Lars Larson warned that registration of assault weapons “will be ‘your papers, please’ like Nazi Germany.” On the other side, legendary crooner Tony Bennett likened opposition to gun control to “the kind of turn that happened to the great country of Germany, when Nazis came over and created tragic things.” And when the Drudge Report ran the headline “White House Threatens ‘Executive Orders’ on Guns,” it featured photos of Hitler and Stalin.
On January 24, the ADL issued a press release condemning such rhetoric. Its national director, Abraham H. Foxman, was quoted: “While Americans are entitled to have strong opinions, there is also language that is inappropriate and offensive in any such discussion.” This echoes earlier releases: “Holocaust analogies simply have no place In politics” and “invoking the Holocaust and the Nazi effort to exterminate the Jewish people is offensive and has no place in civil discourse.”
The ADL is right. Such rhetoric is deeply disrespectful. But the righteous backlash against insensitivity should not overshadow the greater danger: that frivolous analogizing bludgeons the public into cynicism about historical lessons altogether. Through callous overuse, the worst tragedy of the twentieth century has lost much of its power to educate—and to warn.
When George W. Bush moved to grant legal immunity to telecom companies for providing information on suspected terrorists, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann declared that it “begins to look like the bureaucrats of the Third Reich trying to protect the Krupp family industrial giants”—a conglomerate that exploited slave labor. With even less cause, Glenn Beck likened the young victims of the 2011 Utøya island massacre in Norway to the Hitler Youth. Such obviously vacuous comparisons cause great offense, and for little gain: Most everyone is wise to them by now.
But to banish invocations of Nazi Germany entirely is to overlook the reason why it’s so important to preserve our cultural memory of its crimes in the first place. There are indeed some cases in which the analogy—though uncomfortable—is both apt and necessary. Put simply, while most things are not slippery slopes to evil, some things might be. And unless we can draw upon history’s bitterest lessons, we risk judging wrongly.
When the principles of eugenics rear their head in bioethical debates, we should remember how those policies were justified in the past. Sure, there’s a difference between promoting amniocentesis screening for Down syndrome so parents can choose whether to abort, and actually mandating the abortion of disabled children. Certainly, physicians were motivated by compassion, not the racist pseudoscience behind Hitler’s T4 euthanasia program, in formulating the Groningen Protocol for euthanasia of infants. Yet citizens must be wide-awake to history when they decide how slippery that slope might be.
The same is true of the many questions that war forces us to consider. We live in a dangerous world in which our nation must make wrenching decisions about torture, assassination, and the death of innocent civilians. Considering these issues in light of history does not mean that there is a moral equivalence between us and the Third Reich. It means that we cannot stay on the moral high ground if we consider it automatically offensive to remember where the low ground is.
When authoritarian regimes around the world repress minority populations, history is our best counter to the assurance that “it won’t get any worse.” Since last year, thugs from Greece’s black-shirted Golden Dawn party have been marching through the streets of depression-ravaged Athens in broad daylight, terrorizing immigrants, gays, and ethnic minorities. One of Golden Dawn’s elected lawmakers stood before parliament and read a passage from the notorious anti-Jewish forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That can and should remind us of Nazi Germany. But as Laurie Penny said, writing during the worst of the crisis for The Independent, opportunistic commentators have stripped Nazism of its instructive force by “tossing the simile into discussions of food labeling and over-enthusiastic traffic control.”
Although we can’t expect the people who’ve been abusing Nazi analogies to stop anytime soon, those of us who know better have a duty to refute them properly. Insensitivity to victims is offensive, but anesthetizing the public to history’s darkest chapter is truly dangerous. Like a powerful antibiotic, invocation of mankind’s gravest crimes carries deadly peril with overuse. Yet neither should we fear the medicine itself.
John-Clark Levin is the winner of the 2010 Eric Breindel Collegiate Journalism Award. He is writing a book on private maritime security forces, due out from Lexington Books later this year.
Become a fan of First Things on Facebook, subscribe to First Things via RSS, and follow First Things on Twitter.
Comments:
Needless to say, the leftist-dominated media and academia are largely responsible for this white-washing of the Bolshevik regime and its crimes. Another victory for Cultural Marxism.
Is it any wonder, then, that we project our fears onto the ambiguities of the world by seeing him in so many forms and places?
That being said, astute observers of history and human nature will see the writing on the wall, because the animating features are always the same. As the last two popes have clarified for us all, the culture of life that animates Christendom is opposed by a relativistic world view that thrusts the will to power to the forefront and cannot help but slouch toward tyranny and carnage. Simply put, it is a recapitulation of the original sin.
When a political leader says that his idea of sin is not living up to his own ideals, then there can be no doubt that he is an adherent of the tyranny of relativism. And when a culture manages to eliminate 90% of Down's Syndrome children before they are born, a feat that would have made Hitler proud, and strives to drive spikes through the heart of religious liberty and the foundation of the family, there is no longer much ambiguity about what is happening.
The kinship between what we currently call liberalism and the aggressive nihilism of even the recent past is increasingly evident, though many only smell the coffee and are not sure how and why it is being brewed. The invocation of earlier atrocities is appropriate in today's West, even though the devil will throw up all kinds of smokescreens to confuse us and get us to sit back, in the name of fairness, until it is too late.
Indeed, but Mr. Levin misses a very important analogy. In his 1942 classic description of how the Nazi Party came to control Gremany, Franz Neumann details political and economic acts that have an all-too-familiar feel to the current Administration's policies and actions. The bypassing of Congress to rule through executive orders and regulatory fiat is mirrored in the take-over of legislative duties by the cabinet after the act of March 24, 1933. Similarly, the Nazi's did not need to physically take over the means of production (as in the Soviet Union) but gained effective control through regulations and implicit threats of actions that would be inimical to those who opposed the Nazi's desires. The Federal Government's increased interference in the activities of State and local governing (and in some cases de facto control) through regulation and pre-emption also mirrors the synchronization (Gleichschaltung) of federal, state, provincial and municipal activities. The national state could not and would not brook the existence of autonomous public bodies within it, and a series of enactments in 1933 and 1934 took care of that. In the United States, it seems that not only are individual states to be brought to heel (Obamacare, federal education mandates, etc.) but non-governmental organizations that do not comply are also to be pressured and/or regulated into compliance or surrender. The Catholic Church and its medical, educational and charitable organizations are perhaps the most visible example (homosexual adoption and marriage, contraception, abortion and abortifacients, etc.).
Historical ignorance of how the Nazi's came to power is perhaps even more dangerous than the ignorance of what they did after they gained control.
Exactly. The original sin was mere creatures deciding they could “be like God, knowing good and evil” and make such determinations autonomously. This is the essence of eugenics, the egomaniacal nature of which is epitomized by Margaret Sanger's complaint in *The Pivot of Civilization* that “hundreds of millions of dollars” were wasted on “the care and segregation of men, women and children who should have never been born.” Sanger and the Nazis were so certain they knew good and evil that in their self-imagined god-like wisdom they even decided who among humanity “should have never been born.” They then made and carried out plans to eradicate what *they* considered an evil and did so for the good of society – a “good” as delusional as their notion of evil.
“Sure, there’s a difference between promoting amniocentesis screening for Down syndrome so parents can choose whether to abort, and actually mandating the abortion of disabled children.”
Not so much. It is an immoral catastrophe of immense proportions when children are murdered, regardless of whether that is mandated by the state or by the collective mandates of many individual parents. Would it have been any less evil if the millions of those deemed unfit had been killed by private individuals who exercised a “legal” choice to do so instead of the Nazis doing it themselves?
Be that as it may, since when has a child committed a crime punishable by death simply by being disabled? Well, not since the last time the medical profession abandoned the Hippocratic Oath – which has only happened twice in modern history: in contemporary society and in Germany during the twelve years of the Third Reich. Not since then.
After eugenics was firmly established in this country, it spread to Germany. The Nazis actually learned a great deal from American eugenicists. They first emulated our programs of racial purification and then carried them to the ultimate extreme.
Fortunately, after WWII, the horror of Nazism gave it all a really bad name. One of the underlying premises of the entire movement, of course, was the assumed superiority of Anglo-Nordic racial types, so it seems a stretch of the imagination to link a black American president with this mentality.
I think that what is even more important is that when most people think of Communism, they do not think of the Bolshevik regime at all. They think of “the Party of the Resistance,” the « Parti des 75,000 fusillés » [the Party of the 75,000 shot] That, I believe, is the popular perception.
In general, the actions of the Nazi's that were done directly due to assumed "Aryan" racial superiority would be evil even without that exact component, and it should be noted that the evil of the Nazi's extends beyond racism. There are comments by several posters above that refer to other evil aspects of the Nazi's that do not necessarily require anti-black racism. It should also be noted that many of the comments above did not single out one man as though simply having a different president would cure the current issue.
