Stop Invoking Hitler: It’s Annoying, Disrespectful, and Dangerous

If you are a fan of cable news like I am, it seems like you can barely turn around without hearing someone in some political position being compared to Hitler or their followers and policies compared to that of the Nazis. This is not exclusively a tool of one particular political side, I have seen it employed from both sides many times over. I don’t wish to address this issue from a political perspective, I want to look this specifically from its role as a political analogy and its inherent allegorical significance.

Nuremberg: Not What You Think

One of the principle fallacies I want to address is references to the trials of Nuremberg. This is often the context that the phrase “just following orders” is used to allude to Hitler’s officers attempting to absolve themselves of responsibility for aspects of the Holocaust. This is not true; the Nuremberg trials were not regarding the Holocaust. In fact, in history no one was every put on trial for genocide until the Tutsi regime in Rwanda for acts in the early 1990s (this was the subject of the Don Cheadle film Hotel Rwanda­).

Nazi officers were put on trial for “waging and carrying out an aggressive war.” The Nuremberg trials were for war crimes, and additionally for starting and escalating the war itself. Yet, this does not stop people now from comparing any authoritarian policy to Hitler and any scandal to the necessity of Nuremberg type trials.

Not Everything is Hitler, Almost Nothing Is

When so many movements, decisions, and power changes are compared to Hitler, it serves only to incarnate Hitler as evil in an elementary way—where we have little opportunity to actually learn the historical lessons contained in Germany’s Third Reich. Embodying Hitler as pure evil discounts the fact that he thought he was doing right and there is a lot to learn from a situation like that. Making sure a power hungry regime isn’t able to amass the type of power and political will that led Germany into Hitler’s hands is more than just a matter of mindlessly repeating the phrase “Never Again.”

Additionally, referring to all you dislike as Hitler discounts the legitimacy of your argument. Arguments where people, policies, and politics are automatically compared to Hitler are not taken seriously. It is not seen as an authentic disagreement with the substance of your opponent’s arguments; rather it is seen as a desperate attempt to shock the spectators of the conflict and shadow the lack of actual evidence.

Many times the tools of governance of Hitler are referred to in this way as though they are inherently evil rather than just being historically used to facilitate an evil end in one historical example. This encompasses things like Hitler’s push for affordable transportation (VW Beetle) and his fiery oratorical style. When things like this are constantly being compared to Hitler, it makes them less effective and makes the person making the argument look ignorant and incapable of intelligent discourse.

There are a host of lessons that need to be learned from a host of political and historical situation. Even confining arguments to regimes that had remarkable acts of atrocities there are many other equally important events to learn from. Joseph Stalin killed nearly 20 million in the Soviet Union during the same time as the German genocide was being conducted; and he was an ally of the US during the majority of that time. Pol Pot killed several million in southeast Asia; he was held to live out the rest of his life under house arrest and is largely forgotten by modern culture. Additionally, there was the death of approximately 5.25 million civilians during the American war in Vietnam. There are a lot of lessons that need to be remembered from many aspects of this, and unfortunately many of them have left consciousness.

Those that do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. This is a phrase I am sure you have all heard hundreds of times. And yet we have created a demagogue out of this one small slice of world history and its overemployment may be what it takes to make us forget those other atrocious mistakes of the past that we may be doomed to watch repeated.