Why One Should Never Compare Anyone to the Nazi Party

Why One Should Never Compare Anyone to the Nazi Party May 4, 2015

A lot of people get called “Nazis,” but very few of us know what the insult means. Americans my age and younger (most of us!) know the Nazis were a vile German political movement that killed at least six million Jews. If we have watched any classic movies or Indiana Jones, then we know they were worth hating. In fact, so many people fling Hitler into discussions that the argument has a name: reductio ad Hitlerum.

Adolf Hitler
Just the worst, don’t compare.

The rule in our house: if you compare anybody to the Nazis that was or is not a Nazi, you lose the argument. Of course, there are people, even in the United States, who admit to being Nazi party members. They are small, but the evil done not so long ago in the name of the Nazi Party is so heinous that we should be aware even of such tiny groups. Small cancers are dangerous.

I spent some time this Spring reading about the rise of the National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany and came to this utterly not-so-startlingly conclusion: the Nazis were not just bad, they were really bad. They were bad in so many ways that no other regime can quite match the evil. So if you are tempted to compare your foe to Hitler: stop. Think about it. Don’t do it.

A lot of regimes have been horrible. The Soviet Union before, after, and during Stalin was a particularly malevolent regime and Pol Pot tried to kill a record percentage of Cambodians. Nobody should  confuse ISIS with anything other than a hive of scum and villainy and North Korea is ISIS with longevity. Nobody gets everything wrong quite like the Nazis and it is good to remember what:

The Nazis took over a powerful and important nation.

Germany was defeated in World War I, but also had been left (relatively) untouched by the War. The great battles had (mostly) not taken place on German soil. The Treaty of Versailles was tough, but Germany could have recovered and finally did. Germany was a first-rate power. The loss of the War combined with the Great Depression was too much for the Republic and left Hitler in command of a weakened nation with super-power potential.

Few dictators have such a rare combination of power and opportunity.

The Nazis had only one rule: what would help the German Reich.

The Nazi leaders were united only in their depravity: Goering: the charming self-indulgent war hero, Himmler: the obsessive party man, Goebbels: the academic turned propagandist, and Hitler: the charismatic man of destiny. Some worshipped pagan gods, others were “nuts about the occult,” a few were open atheists, and some of the generals were cultural Christians. Hitler believed only in himself and his destiny.

Everybody got used by the Nazis and nobody can feel good about the amount they opposed them.

The one unified ethical principle for all Nazis: if it helps the German Reich, then it is good. Lie about your belief in God. Lie about your life. Lie and lie and lie and lie again if it helps the Party. This situational ethic of selfishness made it impossible for good people to survive. Nobody who had character was safe from the Nazis because no deal that got in the way of their will to power would stand. There was nothing the Party would not do to keep in power.

Many evil men have had a few ragged moral principles or ideals that could be used to provide “space” for a degree of liberty. There was nothing sacred in Germany but power.

The Nazis co-opted and corrupted many good things in Germany.

Heidegger bought their lies, but so did the too many burgers in Catholic Bavaria. Outdoor youth movements were infiltrated and wrecked so the Nazis could use them for their twisted ends. Labor Unions were co-opted and destroyed and vacation time used to inculcate Nazi values. Nothing, from opera to film, was free from their taint. One of the greatest filmmakers of her generation made propaganda films for Hitler and I cannot listen to Wagner without seeing images of Hitler at Bayreuth. Christianity was plundered. Secularism wrecked. The Nazis left nothing private.

The Nazis based their beliefs on race theory that was indefensible, but scholars defended it. 

Say what you will about Marxism, and I think it false, but it is one hundred times more defensible intellectually than the race-based nonsense of Hitler. There were no Aryans, but an entire country went looking for them and killing those who failed the test. “Blood” was everything for many Nazis and the notion that “blood” mattered was ludicrous. There were no philosophers of world-class standing to defend it, no intellectual tradition, no common culture. Nazism was built on a palpable, wicked lie: scholars defended it.

Professors were found to staff Nazi universities. Teachers were found to work in Nazi schools. Later, all of them would claim to have resisted (mentally), but few were as brave as the students of the White Rose in Munich and other cities who said no to evil passed off as thought.

Education, reason, and science turned out to be no defense against insanity, corruption, and evil.

The Nazis blamed Jewish people for all the evils they faced and had a concentrated hatred towards them. Most good people suffered under the Nazis, but nobody suffered like Jewish people. 

The greatest evil of Nazi Germany was the obsessive hatred of the Jewish people inculcated as state policy. From the beginning, the Jews were the targets of the Party and the Final Solution, the mass murder of all the Jews the Nazis could get, was a “logical” outcome of the hate. Few nations or movement have targeted one people group for total destruction as consistently as the Nazis did the Jews.

In his final Testament, Hitler kept blaming the Jews for all the bad things that had happened to him. Comparing any action to the Holocaust cheapens the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the planned, intentional, attempt to kill all the Jewish people. Nazism was Jew hatred and Jew hatred led to the worst mass murder in human history.

The Nazis might have conquered a great part of the world by winning the War. 

The Nazis might have won or at least won enough of the world to accomplish many of their goals. The “final solution” might have been as hidden as much of Stalin’s evils are today. They were evil hooked to global dominating power and it was a close call.

Don’t forget this fact: we almost lost the war to the Nazis. Panic about any threat now facing the USA must be tempered by this fact: no power now abroad could defeat the USA.

The Nazis embraced the “leadership principle.” 

The Nazis had no real constitution. They embraced the idea that the “leader” must be untrammeled. Plato could speculate about all power in the hands of his (purely hypothetical) philosopher king, but the Nazis put all power into the hands of an ideological, clever, narcissist. Right to the last day of his life, there was no limit to the harm Hitler could do except for the decline in number of areas controlled by German arms.

The Nazis encouraged thoughtless obedience in a culture of fear. 

We like to pretend that the trials of Nazi leadership after the War introduced a new idea: the Nuremberg Rule. This is the ethical truth that one cannot excuse a great crime against humanity by citing “orders.” But it is a lie that this is a new ethical principle . . . The German army was trained to disobey “unlawful” or “immoral” orders. No officer and gentleman should have helped with genocide, shooting prisoners, or other war crimes. They knew better.

But the Christian ethic that stated that each man was responsible to God for his deeds was totally undercut by the Nazimovement. Men were taught to obey and not to think and this gross evil was not just in some backwoods cult, but at the head of the nation of Luther, Goethe, and Bach.

Nobody that should have stood up to the Nazis and could have stood up to the Nazis did enough to stand up to the Nazis.

At some point, humanity should have recognized that the Nazis were a unique and powerful evil. Anti-Bolshevik Winston Churchill saw that the Nazis were the worst group in history and was willing to partner with Stalin. Churchill thought Stalin a devil, but that the Nazis were the Devil and the Spirit of Antichrist in his Age. Sadly, most people never grasped what the Prime Minister knew: anybody dealing with Hitler in any way was corrupted.

Why bother reminding ourselves of the past, especially since the Nazis are so distant?

We must pause and recollect the Nazis because this past is not so distant, men are still alive who believed Hitler’s lies and those men and women are not so different from ourselves . . . except they became Nazis. The Nazis show that the bottom for humanity is much lower than we wish to believe and that otherwise good people can become brutes. There are young people who embrace Nazi ideas and standards to run for office. We must cast those parties and people out of polite discussion. Say something good about National Socialism and you are beyond the pale of decency.

Lie about the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews, and you should never hold a position of trust in American society.

We must also recall the lessons of the Nazi era and not allow any comparably brutal group to gain power over a nation. We must stop the budding-Nazi-like movement before we can fairly compare them with Nazism! ISIS is not Nazism because it lacks the power of the German nation state and is highly unlikely to get it, but that does not mean we should let ISIS grow and thrive.

Don’t compare ISIS to Nazism. Strike it down when it is merely evil and not comparable to the most hellish regime of all time.

Still, we can be calm when facing North Korea or ISIS as compared to the gravity of Britain facing Hitler in 1939 over Poland. This evil is not what my grandparents faced in terms of magnitude. The North Korean regime is plenty vile, but weak villains in terms of exporting their villany! North Korea is not Germany in the 1930’s. Every deal we strike with North Korea is not a “Munich” where we have sold our soul to Hitler because North Korea has power to do evil, but not nearly the power of Hitler.

Nobody now alive who was not or is not a Nazi is as bad as a Nazi. If we remember what made the Nazis so bad, perhaps we will never see their like again. Perhaps.


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