You’ll pry my Hitler comparisons from my cold, dead hands.
You’ve probably heard of Godwin’s Law., it’s hard to be online and not encounter it. Originally it had this formulation: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1″. Then, it also became a way to mock the hundreds of stupid, dishonest and bigoted comparisons to Hitler or the Holocaust. By now, we’ve entered a third phase: the use of the term to talk about virtually any reference to Hitler outside of a vanilla discussion of history.
I think it’s time to relax this. I won’t deny the volume of ridiculous comparisons. Apparently, Nazi Germany is just like:
- more people getting health insurance in the US [link]
- people boycotting Chick-fill-a for being homophobic [link]
- the mere existence of LGBT people in Russia [link]
You can find dozens more within five minutes. But by tabooing any (or even most) comparisons, we’re taking away good opportunities to point out just how fucked up some things are. It’s letting wingnuts spoil something valuable. I’ll discuss a few examples where I think the Hitler comparison is not only apt but that the connection must be made in order to see these for what they are:
Jews vilifying other ethnicities
In October 2013, I posted on Facebook about a terrible headline the New York Times had published about the Roma. I then had one Russian Jewish Facebook friend (referred to as EX-FACEBOOK-FRIEND below) respond with the worst bigotry I’ve seen in ages. A hefty warning about the level of hatred here:
ME: From the fuck-you-New-York-Times edition http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/sunday-review/are-the-roma-primitive-or-just-poor.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
Are the Roma Primitive, or Just Poor?
nytimes.com
After centuries of persecution and living on the fringes of society, can the Roma ever integrate into Western Europe?EX-FACEBOOK-FRIEND: the Roma don’t WANT to work, they want to steal. They like the life of crime – plenty of their songs say so. In Russia they are well known for stealing children who they drug into a coma and use to beg in the streets. They are only poor as far as we can see – dirty clothes, poor hygiene, but their LEADERS live in huge private mansions and most of the money that’s obtained goes to them, that is their law. Their girls get married off and impregnated from age 8 onwards. These are not the people who are in a hurry to INTEGRATE into what you and I know as normal life.
ANOTHER FRIEND: the Jews don’t WANT to work, they want to steal. They like the life of crime – plenty of their songs say so. In Russia they are well known for stealing children who they drug into a coma and use to beg in the streets. They are only poor as far as we can see – dirty clothes, poor hygiene, but their LEADERS live in huge private mansions and most of the money that’s obtained goes to them, that is their law. Their girls get married off and impregnated from age 8 onwards. These are not the people who are in a hurry to INTEGRATE into what you and I know as normal life.
Hello Hitler. Thought you’d been comprehensively dead and buried, but it seems not.
This is the most disgusting thing I have come in contact with on fb, and I feel contaminated by reading it.
[Click here to see how it ends]
So the extra bit of irony is that all of EX-FACEBOOK-FRIEND’S accusations were taken verbatim from the antisemitism playbook, including the one deployed Nazi Germany. To have a Jew utter those vile things without the smallest bit of self-reflection about how the same lies were used against Jews was astounding. I had a similar experience in Israel with some relatives who made claims about Arabs that were direct counterparts to what was said about Jews in Germany – they were wealthy at the expense of the general public, that they had nice houses but didn’t give a shit about public property, they managed to avoid taxes etc. It wasn’t enough to realise that this was racist dehumanisation. To understand the full context, we have to do what many refuse refuse: make a Holocaust analogy.
The cocaine trade
A disturbing article in Slate outlines some of the atrocities brought about by the cocaine trade. While the costs of the war on drugs (obligatory scare quotes) are well known in English-speaking countries, the supply side is not much talked about. Based on the article, it may be one of the largest sources of violence and abuse today, possibly exceeding the sex slave trade in its prevalence and extent. Most of the people employed are low wage mules and runners desperate for any income. Their bosses commit acts like torture with sanders or chainsaws. The article describes gunmen massacring an entire party of teenagers in Ciudad Juarez when told the person they were looking for wasn’t there. The death toll is incalculable. Drug gang violence in Mexico alone has claimed 50,000 lives since 2006.
The article’s headline was Why Buying Cocaine Is Like Donating To the Nazi Party. When BoingBoing posted about it on Facebook, the Godwin accusation came out by the second comment:
Because apparently it’s a total exaggeration that a system causing that much suffering, torture and death and requires that much dehumanisation is comparable to the Nazis. Later comments defended the headline but it just shows that the impulse to condemn has become knee-jerk.
Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers
Some background for those who don’t live in Australia. One route for people who want to claim refugee status is to make their way to Indonesia and pay a smuggler for a seat in a not-quite-seaworthy boat that will attempt to cross 480km of open sea to reach Australia’s Christmas Island. For decades now, our treatment of these arrivals has been appalling and both major parties have engaged in a horrific campaign of race-baiting in order to campaign as having “protected Australia’s borders”.
Since last year when the more conservative party was elected, it’s gotten exponentially worse. People are now taken to a detention centre on Manus Island with terrible conditions (which now include the possibility of being murdered) — as bragged about by the Australian government in a publication targeted at asylum seekers. There is no option to be settled in Australia if their refugee claim is found to be genuine (which in over 90% of cases, it is). It was also reported that authorities are confiscating belongings like glasses, hearing aids and prosthetics from the detainees. How can anyone deny the similar imagery? Of course the detainees aren’t being gassed but there is a similarity in the procedure being used to dehumanise. “Welcome to hell. BTW, you won’t be needing those.”
Addressing the concerns
I see two main concerns that would stop a Hitler comparison. The first is not wanting to appropriate WWII and the Holocaust for your own purposes and shit on the memory of tens of millions of victims. And when you say something’s as bad as the Holocaust, that is an end result, not to mention playing Oppression Olympics. So far so good. But seeing a parallel doesn’t require you to find something “as bad as”. If that were true, the we’d have fulfilled the idea of “never again” by definition. (Ya know what’s exactly like the Holocaust? The Holocaust!) No, trying to stop something similar from happening requires looking for relevant similarities.
There’s another worry that doesn’t get voiced nearly enough — the danger of perpetuating a Eurocentric “gold standard” for atrocities. Hitler is used because the imagery carries an emotional weight in western societies that Pol Pot, the Trail of Tears and King Leopold don’t. This highlights the idea of those Other People that our culture doesn’t care about. So, it would be great to broaden our comparisons to increase the circle of whose suffering matters to where it doesn’t yet reach cough cough. But sometimes, based on the scope of your argument, the clearest thing to pull is a Godwin. It can also be used to broaden understanding of non-WWII atrocities like this quote from Generation Kill:
Na, na, na, na, Brad. You cannot say that you like Pocahontas. The genocide of my peoples turned into a cartoon musical with a singing raccoon. I mean, think about it, dog. The real story of Pocahontas is about a bunch of white boys who come to my land, bribe the corrupt Indian chief, kill off all the warriors and fuck the Indian princess silly. Would the white man make a story about Auschwitz? Where the inmate falls in love with the guard? And they go off singing love songs, with dancing swastikas?
Yes, we should definitely be wary of Hitler comparisons and their inappropriate use or overuse. But it’s important not to immediately dismiss them. And sometimes it really is like Hitler, and by not acknowledging it, we actively refuse to learn anything. In a cheap rhetorical trick, I’ll end with Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist who had fought against the Nazis:
The risk of the Holocaust is not that it will be forgotten, but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins.
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