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Nazi analogies or Nazi comparisons are any comparisons or parallels which are related to Nazism or Nazi Germany, which often reference Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, the SS, or the Holocaust. Despite criticism, such comparisons have been employed for a wide variety of reasons since Hitler's rise to power. Some Nazi comparisons are logical fallacies, such as reductio ad Hitlerum. Godwin's law asserts that a Nazi analogy is increasingly likely the longer an internet discussion continues, though Mike Godwin also noted that not all Nazi comparisons are invalid.

Origins

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". 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 been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale, or approaching such a scale."

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

... 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.

Legal issues

According to the ACLU, calling someone a Nazi is protected free speech under the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 2008, British radio presenter Jon Gaunt called a guest a Nazi, for which he was fired. An Ofcom complaint against TalkSport, his employer, was upheld by the United Kingdom High Court of Justice in 2010. 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 being used by Reuters and The Washington Post. 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.

Fallacies

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. 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". A related convention is "Whoever mentions Hitler first, loses the argument." However, Godwin has said that not all Nazi comparisons are invalid.

List

Anti-smoking

Public health measures adopted since World War II in order to reduce smoking have been compared with anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany, which is considered by proponents of anti-smoking measures to be a fallacious reductio ad Hitlerum which often exaggerates how much the Nazis actually opposed smoking. Historian of science Robert N. Proctor speculates that Nazi associations "forestall the development of effective anti-tobacco measures by several decades".

Bioethics

According to an editorial by Arthur Caplan in Science, bioethics questions including "stem cell research, end-of-life care, the conduct of clinical trials in poor nations, abortion, embryo research, animal experimentation, genetic testing, or human experimentation involving vulnerable populations" are often compared to Nazi eugenics and Nazi human experimentation. According to Caplan, the Nazi analogy has the potential to shut down debate and its capricious use is unethical. Similar arguments were made by Nat Hentoff in 1988, writing for The Hastings Center Report.

Chinazi

Analogies between China and Nazi Germany have also been drawn by Australian politician Andrew Hastie. However China–Nazi comparisons are considered by Edward Luce to be a form of Sinophobia and potentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Donald Trump

While qualified comparisons between Hitler's rise to power and the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election have been made by some historians, NeverTrump Republicans, and Democrats, the comparison is opposed by other scholars and commentators who cite reasons such as Trump lacking a coherent ideology, not supporting a dictatorship or political violence, and his rejection of interventionist foreign policy. According to Rosenfeld's research, the frequency of comparisons between Trump and Hitler in the media peaked in 2017 and the number of internet searches for "Trump and Hitler" has also decreased from a high point between mid-2015 and mid-2017.

European Union

Some Eurosceptic politicians, including UKIP's Gerard Batten and Finns Party MP Ville Tavio, have compared the European Union to Nazi Germany. In many Greek newspapers during the Greek government-debt crisis, caricatures appeared depicting the European troika and Angela Merkel as Nazis preparing to reenact the Axis occupation of Greece. Merkel was also depicted as Hitler during demonstrations against her 2016 visit to the Czech Republic; the demonstrators objected to her approach to the European migrant crisis. Opponents argue that the Nazi empire was formed by conquest and that joining the EU is voluntary, among other differences, but the feeling among those to compare the EU to the Nazis is that the EU has already meddled in its affairs before a country takes steps to joining the EU.

Indian Wars

The Nazi war of annihilation on the Eastern Front has been compared to the United States Army's conduct in the Indian Wars. However, Native American demographic collapse was mostly caused by introduced disease, rather than warfare, and historians disagree as to whether the Indian Wars, or parts thereof, can be considered a form of genocide.

Islamism

Some historians, including Matthias Küntzel, Wolfgang G. Schwanitz and Barry Rubin, argue that there is a high degree of similarity between the ideologies of Nazism and Islamism, especially in their radical antisemitisim.

Israel

The comparison between Nazi Germany and the State of Israel is considered inaccurate and antisemitic by the Anti-Defamation League and is part of the Working Definition of Antisemitism.

LGBT issues

The AIDS–Holocaust metaphor, used by some activists, is controversial. Susan Sontag said that "It’s wrong to compare a situation in which there was real culpability to one in which there is none".

In 2017, Patriarch Kirill, the highest authority in the Russian Orthodox Church, compared same-sex marriage to Nazism because in his opinion both were a threat to traditional family. In 2019, Pope Francis criticized politicians who lash out at homosexuals, Romani people, and Jews, saying that it reminded him of Adolf Hitler's speeches in the 1930s.

"Second Holocaust"

The term "second Holocaust" is used for perceived threats to the State of Israel, Jews, and Jewish life. In 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said "Iran wants a second Holocaust" and to "destroy another six million plus Jews", after his Iranian counterpart described Israel as a "malignant cancerous tumor". In 2019, Israeli education minister Rafi Peretz compared Jewish intermarriage to a "second Holocaust".

Stalinism

Various historians and other authors have carried out a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, with particular consideration to the similarities and differences between the two ideologies and political systems, the relationship between the two regimes, and why both came to prominence simultaneously. During the 20th century, comparisons of Nazism and Stalinism were made on totalitarianism, ideology, and personality cult. Both regimes were seen in contrast to the liberal democratic Western world, emphasising the similarities between the two.

Political scientists Hannah Arendt, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Carl Joachim Friedrich, and historian Robert Conquest were prominent advocates of applying the totalitarian concept to compare Nazism and Stalinism. Historians Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer highlight the differences between Nazism and Stalinism, with Geyer saying that the idea of comparing the two regimes has achieved limited success. Historian Henry Rousso defends the work of Friedrich et al., while saying that the concept is both useful and descriptive rather than analytical, and positing that the regimes described as totalitarian do not have a common origin and did not arise in similar ways. Historians Philippe Burrin and Nicolas Werth take a middle position between one making the leader seem all-powerful and the other making him seem like a weak dictator. Historians Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin take a longer historical perspective and regard Nazism and Stalinism not as examples of a new type of society but as historical anomalies and dispute whether grouping them as totalitarian is useful.

Criticism

According to a press release of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize, demean, and intimidate their targets." 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."

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.

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.

See also

• Holocaust uniqueness debate
• Holocaust trivialization
• Never again

References

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Further reading

• Adam, Heribert (1997). "The Nazis of Africa: Apartheid as Holocaust?". Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines. 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.
• 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". The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century: Contesting/Contested Memories. Taylor & Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315647968-11 (inactive 28 April 2020). ISBN 9781315647968.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of April 2020 (link)
• Rosenfeld, Gavriel (2015). Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-07399-9.
• 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.
• 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.

• CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of April 2020
• Comparisons
• Nazism in popular culture
• Nazi analogies