Prince Charles stirred up an international fuss when, in a private conversation during his Canadian visit, he apparently compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler.
When meeting a Halifax woman who had lost Jewish family members caught up in the German invasion of Poland, the prince is reported to have said: “And now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler.”
The reaction ranged from calls for his abdication to highly offended indignation from Russian diplomats. We’ll leave it to political scientists and historians to sort out the right or the wrong of the royal remark, but it illustrates the hazards of invoking Hitler and Nazism. Such comparisons should not be lightly or thoughtlessly made.
Comparisons and metaphors liven the language. They can be useful shortcuts in effective communication. They can evoke powerful images with a few words. But used too often or inappropriately, they lose their power or provoke reactions that distract from the message.
Nazi analogies go beyond that, because they stem from one of the most evil and brutal regimes in human history. To compare, say, a seemingly heavy-handed federal or provincial government of today to Hitler and his warped henchmen is not only historically inaccurate, it is cruelly insensitive in so many ways.
Occasionally, we get letters to the editor that liken public figures to Hitler or the Nazis.
They are quickly turfed, not only because they are unethical and incorrect, but because they are also potentially libellous.
And useless. There’s a wonderful dog-Latin term that has come to describe the Nazi-comparison phenomenon: reductio ad Hitlerum. It’s an effort to refute an opponent’s view by comparing it to a view held by Hitler or the Nazis.
When that point is reached, the argument is lost, because it means the person invoking the Nazi image has run out of facts and logic.
Sometimes an event or person is so monstrous, the Nazi analogy is apt — Hitler was not the only butcherous dictator, and the Third Reich was not the only regime to attempt genocide — but usually, the comparisons are way out of proportion.
And they happen so often, so predictably, that American lawyer and writer Mike Godwin formulated Godwin’s Law, which basically states that the longer an online discussion grows, the greater the probability of a comparison involving Hitler or Nazis.
But such comparisons are not connected to reality, and they ignore the accurate images of the Nazi era: walking skeletons clinging to wire fences; children torn from their parents and tossed into gas chambers; neighbours betraying neighbours; populations uprooted and transported simply because of their ethnic origins; homosexuals and the mentally handicapped executed for being “different.”
Someone enthusiastic about women’s rights and equality can be labelled a feminazi. Overzealous environmentalists are called eco-nazis. Firm enforcement of a law can result in public officials being accused of Gestapo tactics.
It’s shrill language, bordering on the obscene, and detracts from effective and useful criticism in the public arena.
No matter how ham-handed or insensitive a B.C. or Canadian politician is perceived to be, he or she should never — can never — be compared to Heinrich Himmler, Josef Goebbels, Hermann Goering or any of the other twisted misfits who surrounded Hitler. No matter how frustrating our governments can be, we always have the option to remove them, without bloodshed, without fear.
To compare them to the Third Reich (or any other dictatorial regime, for that matter) is to reveal a yawning gulf of ignorance about the past.
Nazism spawned systematic racial hatred and indescribable barbarity on a monstrous scale. To invoke the Nazi spectre carelessly is to trivialize its cruelty, dishonour the memory of its millions of dead victims and revive the pain of many thousands still living. Casual Nazi analogies cheapen the sacrifice made by those who died fighting to rid the world of that pestilence.
When strong words are required, our language has an ample supply of terms to describe almost any situation. Dipping too frequently into the lexicon of Nazism is a lazy way to use the English language and shows a disregard for history.
