Like Hitler
Recently (June, 2005), a number of people have made political statements comparing the actions of their political opponents to practices that were found in either NAZI Germany or Stalinist Russia, who met with such a harsh rebuke they later retracted their statements.
Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan wrote that Gitmo, the American prison for suspected terrorists in Cuba, is “the gulag of our time.” The response to this claim that it insults the United States to say that we are as bad as the former Soviet Union resulted in a retraction which, I fear, gave the impression that what the United States is doing is permissible. It is as if to say, “The events in the Soviet Union were on just across the border into what is wrong, and as long as we are on this side of that line, no condemnation of our acts is justified.”
In another example, Senator Dick Durbin was coerced into apologizing for saying of descriptions of events at prisons that Americans are running, “If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.”
It is easy to test this thesis. Read these things to people without telling them that these are things that Americans had done to prisoners in their control, and see if they believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.
Senator Durbin was forced to retract this statement. However, this did not come about because people tested his claim and found out that what he said was false. The truth or falsity of the statement did not matter. All that mattered was that he made a comparison to Nazis and the like.
Senator Santorum of Pennsylvania said that the Democratic criticism of Republicans breaking the rules on judicial filibuster was, “the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, ‘I’m in Paris. How dare you invade me….It’s mine.’” Again, he was attacked, not for being wrong, but for “comparing Democrats to Hitler.”
In fact, Senator Santorum did not compare Democrats to Hitler. He was comparing an argument that he claimed Democrats were using to an argument that Hitler might have used. He used a form of logical reasoning called reductio ad absurdum (to reduce to absurdity) to argue that an opponent’s argument was absurd.
The claim that he was comparing Democrats to Hitler was simply false.
Trivializing
The claim that I most often hear being made against those who compare contemporary acts to those of NAZI Germany or Stalinist Russia is that it trivializes the moral crimes that were committed in these regimes. If we compare Hitler’s crime of managing the murdering millions of people and torturing untold millions more, forcing them to work as slaves who were fed less than they needed to survive until disease and starvation killed them, to the treatment of 700 people in a foreign prison, this is said to make Hitler’s evils seem less heinous.
There is a form of rhetoric that says that if you do not like the way a debate is going, you can get out of trouble by changing the subject. Like a magician who shows something flashy with one hand while the other hides the ball, the demagogue diverts peoples’ attention from criticism by giving the people something else to pay attention to.
The “trivialization” claim serves this purpose.
What is the real point of making these comparisons? Nobody is saying that America is in the process of murdering 6,000,000 people and enslaving and starving countless millions more, because everybody knows that it is not true. Interpreting the statement as making this type of claim simply misrepresents the facts.
Senator Durbin’s point was clear. If you read descriptions of these acts to people who do not know who they were hearing about, they would assume that they were hearing about people such as Nazis or Stalinists. This suggests that the acts themselves are evil. The person who calls something evil when done by a Nazi, but refuses to call it evil when done by an American, is a hypocrite.
Another way of stating the argument is this. “Let us give the Nazis a moral ranking of zero, and the type of society we should be striving to become a moral rank of 10. These acts described in these reports of the treatment of prisoners in Gitmo are not the acts of people striving to move society towards a ‘10’, they are the acts of people who are dragging us, as a society, that much closer to a ‘0’”.
It is no defense against this objection to say, “How dare you compare us to those with a moral rank of ‘0’. We are clearly not among those societies that did reach ‘0’”
No, we are not. Not yet. However, the assumption behind this response, that it does not matter how bad you are as long as you are not as bad as Hitler, is a poor assumption for building a moral defense.
False and Misleading Statements
There is certainly something objectionable with saying that a contemporary practice is like that of Stalinist Russia or NAZI Germany if, in fact, there are clear differences. What is objectionable is that a person is making false statements, and doing so for the purpose of promoting a political agenda.
This is wrong.
It is similarly wrong to fix intelligence reports around a favored policy of going to war by claiming more certainty over whether Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction than the evidence allows.
It is similarly wrong to rewrite science reports so that they pretend that there is greater uncertainty over whether humans are engaging in actions that threaten to change the global climate in ways that put the life, health, and well-being of hundreds of millions of people at risk.
If Durbin and Santorum were making false and misleading statements than they should be condemned, and forced to stand before their peers in shame and retract their statements.
So should the people who rewrote these reports and essays in an attempt to fix the facts around their favorite policy, rather than design a policy that fits the facts.
An Example: Under God
I find the policy of having a Pledge of Allegiance that contains the words “under God” to be morally objectionable. The easiest way to explain why it is objectionable is to compare it to a policy in the early years of Hitler’s Germany -- the policy of requiring Jews to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing.
Jews looked too much like common Germans to be easily recognizable as Jews, and a great many Germans were associating with Jews without knowing it. These laws made Jews conspicuous, so that the underlying hatred that already existed in the German society can more efficiently target its victims.
The Pledge of Allegiance, with the words “under God”, and its invitation for those who are not theists to sit out the ceremony, performs the same purpose. It serves to make non-theists conspicuous, like forcing them to wear a Star of David, so that hatred and bigotry can more easily find its target.
It promotes that hatred and bigotry by delivering the clear message that those who do not say the Pledge are not one of us. They are excluded. They are outside. They do not belong.
Somebody may protest that those who support these rules do not really intend to make non-believers conspicuous, so that they can more easily identify those who are to be excluded and targeted for ridicule. Not all of them, anyway.
However, it seems reasonable to believe that a majority of German citizens did not see the requirement to wear the Star of David in its true light either. They could not recognize their hate crimes for what they were, because recognizing them as such would require admitting their own immorality. Nobody wants to see themselves as evil. To avoid this, they wrap their evil in a shiny veneer and polish it so that it looks good, even to themselves.
They saw themselves as decent people who wanted leave their children with a better Germany than they had grown up in. They happened to think that there was no place for Jews in a better Germany, the way that many people today believe that there is no room non-theists (and, for many, no room for non-Christians) in a better America.
A policy that requires school children and others to conspicuously wear their lack of religious belief in front of their classmates and fellow citizens in ceremonies that say that those who participate in the ceremonies are better (more patriotic, more moral) than those who do not is a policy like those practiced in Nazi Germany, and which can be clearly seen to be wrong.
That is not a good thing.
Like a Cliff
This argument contains an analogy to events in early Nazi Germany. This means that some will react merely to the fact that I made a comparison to Germany and ignore the question of whether or not the analogy is apt. The mindset that condemned Senators Durbin and Santorum without looking at the truth of their statements, will condemn this without looking at the truth of these statements.
Few of us want to be like Hitler. That is a good thing. However, it is better not to be like Hitler, regardless of what anybody else may say, than to merely be somebody that others are too afraid to say is like Hitler.
One way to keep people from walking off of a cliff is to allow people to put up signs that say, “WARNING: CLIFF”. One way to prevent a society from denigrating to the levels reached by Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, is to make sure that people feel free to point out when we are acting in ways like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.
If we condemn people from saying these things, we could walk off that cliff, and not even know it.