A New Career Opportunity For Hitler? How moral laziness renders Hitler contemporary
Reductio ad Hitlerum and its criminalization of dissent
‘Just like Hitler’ has become a constant refrain deployed by moral entrepreneurs in Western public life. The rhetorical strategy of drawing an analogy between the behaviour of a contemporary public figure or party and Hitler seeks to marginalise, criminalise and pathologise the intended target. Nazi analogies have become a powerful weapon for de-legitimating opponents. And these analogies are used so often that they have become a normal medium of public discourse.
Just listen to the following voices randomly chosen!
In September 2024, speaking at the 79th United Nations General Assembly in New York, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan compared Israeli prime Minister Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler, and declared that just as Hitler was halted by a united global front, so too must Netanyahu be stopped to prevent further violence in the region[i].
Lula da Silva, the President of Brazil could not resist the temptation of accusing Israel of emulating Hitler in its supposed ‘genocide’ of Palestine, he claimed that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ just like Adolf Hitler in Germany[ii].
Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine had something similar to say about Vladimir Putin, the President of Russia. He claimed that Putin acts like Hitler and ‘just like Hitler’ he was guilty of carpet bombing![iii]
Back in April the German defense minister Boris Pistorius jumped on the ‘just-like-Hitler’ bandwagon and stated that Europe must prepare for a long war because ‘Putin is like Hitler’[iv]
Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India is also the recipient of the Hitler brand. ‘If we want to show to the present generation the character of Hitler, we should show Modi’ for he is behaving ‘just like Hitler’, stated the Chairman of India’s Election Commission Coordination Committee[v].
Apparently, the ghost of Hitler also haunts Christian nationalism in the United States. One critic asserted that ‘Christian nationalism flagrantly distorts Christianity and purposely puts down people of color, the disabled, those who are LGBTQIA ... just like Hitler did’[vi].
Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are regularly assigned the Hitler status. According to one just-like-Hitler entrepreneur:
‘Just like Hitler, there are millions of MAGA Republicans who perceive any word or even gesture by Trump as being above the law. Like zombies, they are ever ready and willing to obey the will of one man to follow him into war and to madness, just like Nazi Germans[vii].
With millions of little MAGA Hitlers prowling the street of America it is only a matter of time before the fantasist begin to raise the alarm about an impending Final Solution.
Reductio ad Hitlerum
In a lecture delivered at the University of Chicago in 1949, the political philosopher Leo Strauss presented his phrase reductio ad Hitlerum as a variant of the term of reductio ad absurdum. Unfortunately, distorting the memory of Hitler is not always interpreted as absurd. Indeed, sections of mainstream media are often complicit in providing opportunities for the practice of reductio ad Hitlerum.
More recently Strauss’ concept of reductio ad Hitlerum has been updated by the American author Mike Godwin. According to Godwin’s Law; ‘as a discussion on the Internet grows longer, the likelihood of a person/s being compared to Hitler or another Nazi, increases.[viii]’. With its increasing usage even ordinary punters – who know next nothing about the historical significance of Hitler – resort to the practice of charging individuals with being just like Hitler. The phrase has become an anodyne insult casually hurled at the most unlikely targets.
Proponents of the practice of reductio ad Hitlerum are not simply alarmist practitioners of the politics of fear, they are also intellectually and morally slothful sophists. Why? Because they rely on a throwaway alarmist phrase to compensate for their inability to develop and come up with sound and compelling arguments. They use Nazi analogies because they believe that their mere incantation will do the trick. They know they will provoke anxiety and fear towards their target and encourage the public to adopt an extremely negative perception towards those branded with the Nazi label.
At times in our highly polarised environment, it often seems that Hitler has become the go to point of reference in public debate. Take a Newsweek article that posed the question: ‘Just how similar is Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler?’ The very posing of this question incites the readers to discover the shallowest similarities between these two very different individuals. Newsweek answered its question by stating ‘what makes the comparison between Hitler and Trump so poignant’ is ‘that both men represent their personal character as the antidote to all social and political problems’[ix]. But many politicians do that; they often play the saviour card. Focusing on this one personal attribute that Trump and Hitler allegedly share is as arbitrary as saying that something binds them together because they both have problems with their hair.
If Donald Trump sported a moustache or painted pictures in his spare time or refused to eat meat, he could be represented as even more like Hitler. But of course, none of this has anything to do with the unique historical role of Adolf Hitler. Comparing Hitler or Nazi Germany to contemporary political figures and movements trivialises the catastrophic crimes committed by this terrible regime. By stripping this episode from its distinct historical context, the experience of Nazi Germany is turned into a shallow morality play that serves as a substitute for moral reflection on the meaning of good and evil. Paradoxically the Trump-Hitler analogy partially rehabilitates the leader of the Nazi movement. If he is just like Trump than Hitler becomes detached from the evils committed under his watch.
The proliferation of the phrase ‘just like Hitler’ should be understood as a symptom of the normative crisis of western civilization. Western civilization struggles to uphold its traditional system of values and is constantly looking for new substitutes for communicating ideas about good and evil. During the past fifty – sixty years it has drawn upon the negative experience of the death camps to attribute guilt and construct an idea, even and ideal of evil. Knowing that there can be no counter-argument to Auschwitz, the just-like-Hitler merchants have turned the Nazi era into a generic marker of evil. One that because of its generic character can be attached to a wide variety of circumstances. The cumulative outcome of this practice is to inadvertently lighten the significance of the terrible events of the Nazi era.
The tendency to constantly rediscover Hitler in the most unlikely settings distorts the way society thinks about politics and morality. It habituates society to acquiesce to a politics of fear for which there is no morally acceptable answer. It also encourages the crystallisation of an outlook that spares politicians of responsibility for developing a positive account of their programme for society. Instead, focusing on the negative/evil attributes of their opponents has become an end-in-itself.
The French political commentator Renaud Camus wrote about what he characterised as ‘the second career of Adolf Hitler’. He believed that Europe had never recovered from its Hitler trauma and turned him into an absolutised negative personification of evil that haunts the contemporary imagination. In his second career, Hitler plays an indispensable role of providing an indisputable legitimacy to anyone who assumes the role of an Anti-Hitler. To be sure this is a negative form of legitimacy that opportunistically exploits the terrible memory of the death camps but in the absence of a narrative of the good Hitler’s second career will continue to flourish.
Regrettably, the second career of Adolf Hitler has led to the emergence of a political imagination that is hospitable to a series of negative counter-concepts associated with him. Anti-Hitlerism possesses no moral content but as a source of negative legitimation it is powerful enough to begat many other Anti concepts. Anti-Hitlerism is communicated through the more familiar anti-fascism and anti-racism. What binds these anti-concepts is their plasticity and their capacity to envelop an expanding range of targets. Notwithstanding the absurdity of the way these anachronistic analogies are applied they work have acquired pride of place in the woke political vocabulary.
Anti-Fa and their collaborators in different Anti movements appear to be committed to reviving Hitler. The negative legitimacy they gain from being able to draw a moral contrast between themselves and the man with the moustache overrides any concern about lack of scruples and dishonesty.
It would be great if we could bring the second career of Hitler to a close.
[i] MENAFN - Business & Finance News
September 25, 2024
[ii] Noticias Financieras English
February 18, 2024
[iii] Ukrinform (Ukraine)
June 15, 2024 Saturday
[iv] The Times, 12 April 2024.
[v] https://www.pressreader.com/india/the-free-press-journal/20240220/282939570221732?srsltid=AfmBOopOXXmb2k80f9Y9bn1P-PWDQWqlx53m12Xmc-oJaW-5ycDGHZZa
[vi] St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)
April 26, 2024
[vii] The Niche March 13, 2024
[viii] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
[ix] https://www.newsweek.com/just-how-similar-donald-trump-adolf-hitler-501252
It would indeed be good to bring Hitler's second career to a close. His contemporary status must make followers of Pol Pot jealous. I suppose 'that's Pol Potist' lacks impact and resonance here in Europe even though it would be a better rebuke to the year zero, reset cultists in eco-loonery projects.
'Nazi', 'fascist' and 'like Hitler' etc., have been overdone, perhaps, in that they are losing impact. Snarl words and slurs do cease to have effect eventually. As an active campaigner for Brexit I was called a racist, xenophobe etc (particularly in middle class Lib Dem wards) and intially found this disturbing. By the end of the campaign I was immune.
A higher level example is the re-election of Trump. It seems a large number of Americans saw through the tactic of delegitimising through slur. A sufficient number of voters were unconvinced by the Democrats. The tactic was exposed as and understood as a substitute for argument and debate. And that is the problem.
Those of us on the right want debate for we realise that there can be legitimate reasons for holding an opposing view and they are worth exploring properly. The left when it tries to shut down debate deny that useful exercise and frustrate refining and improving what we do or decide. During Brexit my wife and I did not attend the many debates led by Brexiteers - we had already researched our own view - but attended the debates organised by Remainers. We wanted to see what arguments they came up with and genuinely consider them. Of course, the level of debate was so poor there was little chance we would change our minds. We were never offered good reasons to change our minds.
The worrying lesson from Brexit, and subsequently, is the moral simplicity of political debate. Too many people frame everything in terms of good and evil, blinding people to necesary debate and blocking out any humility in argument. I lost my naivety during Brexit.
Schopenhauer was right when he said ""The majority of men...are not capable of thinking, but only believing, and ...are not accessible to reason, but only to authority".
The antidote to this is education not indoctrination as has been happening in our schools and universities, when reason is elevated as authority not ideology, which is why Labour's curriculm review is so worrying. It suggests things are going to get worse. Everyone wants to feel a sense of purpose, of acting for good, of belonging to the side of good, but when what is good is defined ahistorically and ideologically we have the decadence of Western civilisation as it turns in on itself and loses confidence. This appears to be the project of the left which has achieved a moral inversion labelling the West as intrinsically bad and deserving of self-immolation.
In America Hitler's ghost was laid to rest on 5th November but not yet here. We still have much to do.
Excellent article thank you. I especially appreciated the Camus argument regarding the anti-Hitler brigade's consequent justification of their extreme behaviour. If they are against 'Hitler', then surely they are allowed to expand the boundaries of what may have hitherto been morally acceptable. In my own country, NZ, we have seen our Supreme Court claiming that Parliament has no right to impose unjust laws (well, actually here, our democratically elected Parliament does indeed have that right), and our seditious, race based 'Maori Party' behaving in ways that runs roughshod over years of accepted parliamentary protocol. Their most egregious conduct is 'justified' in their eyes because colonial oppressors, traditional males and indeed evil white folk in general are lauding Luigi Mangione as some kind of modern day Robin Hood for 'executing' United Health CEO Brian Thompson. (I get the anti-corporate thing, and am no fan of big Health Care, but surely street murder is a step too far?? For some, apparently not, but then Bonhoeffer would have been a hero if he had succeeded right? Well, yes, but...)
Consider also the actions of the Trans brigade or the BLM rioters. Then compare to the double standard punishments handed down to those demonstrators in the UK for whom the awful murder of three beautiful young girls was the final straw.
Btw, 'genocide' is another of many words which the 'left' fire off so inappropriately. Whether ignorantly levelled at at Israel, or colonial British in NZ, such use waters down what is actually the among the most heinous of crimes. Your point was most valid, that such terms should be used appropriately, lest they lose their historical significance and weight of meaning.