Reductio ad Hitlerum
Lately, everything is coming up Hitler. Where does that leave us when we talk about, you know, actual Nazis?
Sorry for the long delay between posts, my friends, but I’ve been having trouble with words, lately. I could chalk it up to good, old-fashioned writer’s block — you know, when you stare at your computer screen for hours on end, temporarily immobilized by the terror of the blank page? But that isn’t it, at least not entirely.
I’ve been struggling because words I thought I understood keep creeping up — in news, in social media posts and in conversations — in ways that I struggle to make sense of. You know the phenomenon when you hear some phrases so often they become meaningless sounds? It’s called semantic satiation.
(Fans of Ted Lasso are very familiar with this concept. In case you haven’t seen the show, watch the clip…and then the entire series. You’re welcome.)
Did You Say Nazi?
There are a number of words that are giving me pause lately because their meaning seems to be evolving/devolving before our eyes —words like decolonize, Holocaust, apartheid, Intifada, Zionism. I could focus a post or two on each one but for now, I’d like to just focus on just one word: Nazi.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin compared Zelenskyy to Hitler and claimed the “military operation” was to de-nazify the country. This narrative of Ukraine harbouring Nazis has a long history and serves a particular purpose in Russia, according to Omer Bartov, my go-to expert on anything genocide- or Holocaust-related.
Read my previous interview with Omer Bartov, here:
“Invoking Hitler and Nazism is a way of bringing the Russian people together against their historic enemy,” Omer Bartov explained in the Wall Street Journal. “In Russia today, the term Nazi simply means anyone who stands in the way of Russian greatness and Mr. Putin’s rule.”
But Zelenskyy is Jewish, right? In an interview in May 2022, according to the WSJ, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explained this apparent contradiction by saying: “… Hitler also had Jewish origins. So it means absolutely nothing. For some time, we have heard from wise Jewish people that the biggest anti-Semites were Jewish.”
Ah, and yes ladies and gentleman, here we have it. Jews are Nazis, responsible for our own demise. While there certainly were and are self-hating Jews, this lingering narrative that we are to blame in our genocide brings us to exactly where we are today.
Israel (aka Zionists) are the new Nazis?
After October 7, Putin warned Israel about “laying siege on Gaza as Nazi Germany did to Leningrad in 1941,” which is not only “absurd virtue signalling,” as pointed out by Ha’artz’s Batsheva Neur, it continued to solidify that idea that Zionism is racism, or more particularly, Nazism.
As with Putin and Zelenskyy, playing the Nazi card has an immediate impact. No one wants to be seen as friendly to Nazis (at least, no one I care to know.) And it shuts down a conversation. When you’ve hit Nazi/Hitler in an argument, it’s as if both sides admit that any particular discussion is going nowhere.
The term for this type of conversation-stopper is known as reductio ad Hitlerum. While what is taking place in Gaza right now is certainly an atrocity, possibly a genocide (I’ll leave it up to the people at the UN’s court to decide), comparing Israel to Nazi Germany dilutes and distorts the memory of the Holocaust.
In fact, there are many atrocities that occur globally and rarely have commentators used the Hitler/Nazi card (i.e. no one talks about Nazism in Darfur.) It should go without saying, but one can remember the Holocaust as well as acknowledge the atrocities in Gaza. They need not cancel each other out.
Wait, Don’t Go. There are More Nazis We Need to Discuss
Admittedly, it’s not only Israel that is being compared to Nazism. Netanyahu has invoked the Holocaust repeatedly to justify the IDF’s actions in Gaza, taking a page out of Putin’s book. If Hamas are Nazis, then the logic goes, it’s okay to kill them. No one cries over dead Nazis.
“To associate Hamas with the Nazis means really that Hamas, and by sleight of hand it refers to the Palestinians more generally – or to Palestinian resistance to Jewish to Israeli occupation more generally – as Nazi. And therefore you don't talk with Nazis, you kill Nazis," Omer Bartov, a professor at the US’ Brown University, told Anadolu in an exclusive interview.” (See why I like Bartov so much?)
Can We Use the Word Nazi Without, You Know, Detracting from Actual Nazis?
The question is tricky but the answer is simple. Yes we can. After the Oct 7 massacre, I too in my bones remembered the Holocaust. I called it a pogrom and wrote about it here:
Of course, pogroms pre-dated the Holocaust but I drew a connection to a historical occurrence and I stand by that observation. But it’s not the only pogrom in recent history and they are not only directed at Jews. Etgar Keret correctly pointed one out that occurred in the West Bank in the months before the war.
My belief is that deploying the Hitler/Nazi card is more art than science, steeped in research and used in a way that brings insight, not shuts down conversation. It’s a fine line and one that’s not easy to navigate.
Many years after the German-American philosopher Leo Strauss coined the “Reductio ad Hitlerum” term, a man named Mike Godwin came up with a theory known as Godwin’s Law. In the early days of the Internet (the 90s!) Godwin observed that the longer an online discussion goes, the probability that someone will bring up Hitler or Nazis approaches 1 (or 100 percent).
But even Godwin says it’s okay to invoke Hitler, so long as it is in a historically informed way.
So use the term Hitler or Nazis if you must, but understand the comparison. I don’t say that lightly. A “shocking” number of Gen Z and Millennials don’t know what happened in the Holocaust. They don’t even know the word Holocaust.
You see where this is going, right? At some point, their only cultural marker for what constitutes a Nazi or Hitler will be something completely different than Nazis and Hitler. And there my friends, is how history gets rewritten, even by those with the best of intentions.
Yours truly in reading and writing,
Leah
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I loved this post -- one of my favorite to date. I really appreciate the way you point out how all sides in the current conflict (not to mention many other players) seem to mis/use Nazi analogies for their own benefit...and at some point, words like "Nazi" or "Hitler" stop making any really sense. And that this is happening at the very same time that many young people don't seem to have any real sense of what actually happened under Nazis! The question I'm grappling with is...what's the solution?
While this was written a few months ago, I'm curious if you now have changed your mind about the UN deciding whether Israel is conducting genocide. The UN is led by terrorists and have never once persecuted or held trial for the Islamic countries who have murdered their own people. UNWRA is made up of terrorists as well as the proof has been shown again and again. It pains me to see South Africa thinking Israel is the only wrong-doer in this scenario.