Enough Nazis, already!
A good piece at Harry's Place, one of my favourite blogs and home to Britain's last remaining pro-Jewish Lefties, a group fast becoming so obscure we'll soon be as confused by them as we are by Liberal Unionists or Whigs. In the article the author calls for an end to Nazis in Israeli politics – not actual Nazis, of course, but the use of Nazi analogies that are almost always totally inappropriate.
Many Jews were upset, understandably, at the liberal use of Auschwitz analogies during Operation Cast Lead, with dimwits from San Francisco to Shoreditch carrying around placards juxtaposing the Star of David and the Swastika, and shouting "Warsaw, 1943, Gaza, 2009".
Whatever the rights and wrong of Israel's actions, anyone with even the vaguest knowledge of European history can see that the comparisons with Nazi Germany are wildly inaccurate, and so are only there to shock and hurt Jewish feelings and to stir up exaggerated anti-Israeli rage. But, as the article says, Israeli politicians are also guilty of using the "Nazi card" to denounce both Israel's enemies and Israeli liberals.
The Reductio Ad Hitlerum, the cod Latin name for the fallacy of comparing x with Hitler, is almost as old as the Second World War itself, the term being coined by philosopher Leo Strauss way back in 1950 (I sometimes wonder what analogy people used before the War). But strangely the further away Nazi Germany and the Holocaust become in history, the more it is invoked.
In the UK the collapse of history as a school subject has played an enormous role. Most people are so ignorant of world history outside of the years 1933-1945 that when measuring political immorality the first things they reach for are a brown shirt and jackboots. Critics of Israel could quite reasonably compare its actions with the French in Algeria or the British in South Africa – both of those were wars carried out by strong, relatively decent powers whose leaders wanted to kill as few people as possible, but did some bad things as a consequence of their actions. Israelis might argue theirs is not a colonial conflict, but at least we're in the same moral ball park – comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is absurd.
The Israelis are in good company, though – in Europe the Left has long been inappropriately invoking Nazism to criticise anyone suspected of racism, the result being such high levels of immigration that we're more likely to have future conflict (in the same way the horror of World War One led to pacifism and so World War Two). Also vegetarians, anti-smoking campaigners, feminists and the Chinese have all been likened to the Gestapo repeatedly.
However the king of the Reductio ad Hitlerum is George W Bush, who spawned so many ludicrous and absurd comparisons that I could fill a book with them. However my favorite was this gem by Teresa Hakaraia in the Korea Times:
Like Hitler, Bush has one of his very own concentration camps, Guantanamo Bay. We have seen the photographs. Are we not like the Germans that knew of Auschwitz but kept quiet?
Ah yes, Guantanamo Bay, just like Auschwitz. Guantanamo, the only concentration camp in history where the inmates have put on weight during their time inside, and who are more likely to die from gout or type-2 diabetes than typhoid or dysentery.
This sort of hyperbole might be funny, but comparing Jews to Nazis isn't. It's time the West got over its obsession with Nazism and left the Third Reich to serious study, not cheap jibes.
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