If I am not misled by our expert pundits and elected officials, we are now living in the most dangerous time of all of human history.
This is not because of terrorism, economic instability or global climate change, but because every single person of even moderate prominence is Adolf Hitler.
That’s right, every last one of them. We are all doomed.
The temptation to accuse someone who disagrees with you of being Hitler (or, on occasion, one of his slimy subordinates) is obviously a strong one – absolutely no one resists it.
Disagree with the left? You’re Hitler.
Disagree with the right? You’re Hitler.
Help yourself to my leftovers in the office refrigerator? You’re Hitler.
Washington Post Columnist Michael Gerson recently wrote, “The accusation is a staple of American T-shirt and bumper-sticker political culture, found too often at liberal anti-war protests and conservative tea parties.”
Right. What he said.
This phenomenon is not just ubiquitous, however; it is also very, very old.
Godwin’s Law and its corollaries (which show the probability of comparison to Nazism increases the longer a debate continues. The first side to employ the comparison immediately loses the argument) date to 1990.
Leo Strauss, renowned political scientist, first posited the “reductio ad Hitlerum” in 1953, noting that “a view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.”
Winston Churchill went to this well as early as the election of 1945, which he lost.
The Hitler comparison is many things: a logical fallacy, a fantastically annoying rhetorical device and generally a silly thing to do that is worthy of all possible ridicule.
But I fear that it’s also so firmly entrenched we can never get rid of it.
Without forgetting for a moment the actual, terrible impact the Nazi regime had on so many aspects of history, politics, geography, sociology and science, we may just have to accept we’re going to be hearing a lot of this from now on, and learn to take it in stride.
So I now propose to have a little fun with this, using an entirely unscientific regression analysis of Hitlerian tendencies and develop a scale upon which current world figures may be compared.
Then we’ll see who’s really the most like Hitler.
You may find learned men and woman who will debate many assertions about Hitler.
But, he was undoubtedly the following ten things:
- A teetotaler (someone who drinks no alcohol).
- A raving demagogue.
- An outstanding public speaker.
- The owner of awful facial hair.
- Addicted to narcotic painkillers.
- Poorly educated.
- A frequent claimant that a higher power drove his decisions.
- Responsible for stabilizing a free-falling economy.
- A failure in all occupations outside of politics.
- Responsible for tens of millions of deaths.
Therefore, the Hitler scale will run from zero to 10; with zero being nothing at all like Hitler, and 10 being the very man himself.
Now, let’s pick some entirely arbitrary individuals for comparison, starting with today’s most popular analog, the president of the United States.
President Barack Huessein Obama: 3:1.0; 8:1.0; 10: 0.05.
(Obama receives one point for the only positive thing on our list, and a nominal default mass deaths fraction for being president during wartime. That number is likely to increase throughout his term.)
Total: 2.05
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: 1:1.0; 2:1.0; 4:1.0, 6:1.0, 7:1.0; 9: 0.5 10:0.3.
Total: 5.8
Former President George W. Bush: 1:1.0; 7:1.0; 9:1.0; 10:0.3.
(Bush’s mass deaths number is significantly higher than Obama’s because every single Iraq war death is, ultimately, on his hands. Still, no comparison to Hitler.)
Total: 3.3
Radio host Rush Limbaugh: 2:1.0; 3:1.0; 5:1.0, 7:1.0, 9:1.0.
Total: 5.0
So the Iranian president edges the conservative radio icon in this admittedly small sample.
Now, of these people, whom most frequently resorts to reductio ad Hitlerum?
The honor, of course, belongs to our winners.
Limbaugh has fashioned comparisons between the Democratic and Nazi parties into an almost admirable art form.
Ahmadinejad, meanwhile, revels in both simultaneously denying the Holocaust and using it as rationale that Israel should be moved to Germany.
Therefore, I propose the Shields Corollary, or informally, the “takes one to know one” rule.
The greater one’s number on the Hitler Scale, the more likely, more frequent and more meaningless will be one’s uses of the comparison.
Enjoy, Limbaugh and Ahmadinejad.
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