On the internet, no one knows you’re not a Nazi.
Watch people argue online. There’s a very high likelihood that, sooner or later, someone in the conversation will try to win the argument by comparing her opponent to Hitler/the Nazis/the Holocaust. A guy named Godwin actually came up with a sociological law to describe this phenomenon: “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”
Why are we so quick to compare people and positions we disagree with to the Third Reich? To me, it makes sense that we use the Nazis to smear our opponents because they were so horrific and evil that they are pretty much universally despised. This has been reinforced by depictions of Nazis in popular culture, both overt and subtle, that associate the symbols of National Socialism with villainy. For example, Darth Vader’s helmet was modeled after the distinctive Wehrmacht Stahlhelm, while the Imperial Stormtroopers were meant to evoke the Nazi’s own Stormtrooper battalions.
Understandably, Hitler and his legions have become a shorthand for the evil that men do. That pernicious ideology deserves every bit of the opprobrium we can give it. However, what we shouldn’t do is follow the Internet’s lead, and reverse the wholly deserved negative connotation with Nazism and use it as a weapon against people and things we don’t like.
Disturbingly, Godwin’s law is creeping into real life. It’s hard to tell if the people who do this are simply dumb or are deliberately manipulating facts.
We saw it in the National Review article that smeared Bernie Sanders as a “National Socialist,” because the self-professed socialist also believes American labor should be protected. Same thing with Ben Carson’s comparisons of the Obama Administration to Nazi Germany; they both make the mistake of seeing the word “socialist” in “National Socialist German Workers Party” and assuming that means Hitler was a guy who loved unions and proudly sported red on May Day. This ignores the obvious fact that as a socialist Jew and a mixed-race liberal, Sanders and Obama would’ve been carted off to Buchenwald long before the Final Solution began. National Socialism is a different name for fascism, an essentially racist idea that sees socialist class struggle as a scheme implanted by the Left; Hitler hated socialists, made no secret of it, and persecuted them violently.
But it doesn’t stop there. Carson’s comments go beyond ignorant mislabeling. After this year’s 295th mass shooting, Carson said that had the Jews not surrendered their guns to Hitler, the Holocaust would not have happened. Apart from NRA hacks, this statement was widely condemned by Holocaust scholars as “false, silly and insulting.”Jews did mount an armed resistance against Hitler. The most famous example is the Warsaw ghetto uprising, which was crushed by the better armed and trained professional army sent to destroy it. Your fantasy that you and your pump-action shotgun are the only thing that stand between freedom and tyranny is just that—leave Holocaust victims out of this.
But the most recent and baffling misuse of the Holocaust in rhetoric comes to us from Israel’s premiere race-baiting hack: Benjamin Netanyahu. In a recent speech, Bibi told the audience that, despite an avalanche of accessible evidence to the contrary, Hitler did not originally intend to exterminate the Jews. In this fictional story, it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem—himself an anti-Semite and admirer of the Nazis—who gave Hitler the idea to “burn (the Jews).” This conversation never happened. The Final Solution was entirely the work of the NSDAP high command. Professor Moshe Zimmermann of the Hebrew University, along with legions of professional historians of the Holocaust, said this was tantamount to Holocaust denial. Netanyahu showed a shocking willingness to whitewash Adolf Hitler, of all people, for an easy jab at Palestine.
I’ve been to Buchenwald. I’ve seen the ovens which swallowed tens of thousands of bodies, the scratched tiles on the mortician’s table where they removed gold teeth and shrank heads for trophies. I’ll never be able to fully wrap my mind around the reality of something that horrible; even though it’s just the ruins of one of 20,000 camps they built, I like to think that seeing that place gave me an appreciation for its gravity. It’s not something you can casually toss around to rile up your base of the paranoid and the ignorant.
Alec Carver is a UF history junior. His column appears on Fridays.
