The Danger of Hitler Comparisons: Part 2

After I wrote about why it’s dangerous to compare your political enemies to Hitler (which is an epidemic right now), I thought I was done with the subject. In fact, last week I moved on to something else. But I started thinking more about it and realized that I still have much to say. While the first blog was about why it’s both dangerous and intellectually lazy to categorize a politician you didn’t vote for as “the next Hitler,” this week I want to explore why people do it in the first place.

Specifically, why Hitler? What is it about the Austrian dictator of Germany who started World War II and the Holocaust that makes not just a de facto villain of the 20th century, but the imaginary boogeyman that people today see lurking in today’s office holders?

I already covered in part 1 that Hitler didn’t even produce the highest body count. Far more died in Stalin’s and Chairman Mao’s purges. It’s often been said, and I think is most likely, that leftists who compare conservatives to Nazis have too much in common ideologically with Communist dictators to consider them villains in the first place. Perhaps even more disturbing is to hear Democrats praise Castro or Mao Tse Tung as “great leaders.”

However, I think there’s more to it than that. The Soviet Union, while not necessarily our friends, was at least on our side against Hitler. Not being part of the Axis powers, Russia and China technically gets a pass for all the evil the committed in the twentieth century in our collective memories. At least in a dumbed down version of history.

I also touched on the human desire to find patterns in chaos. Rather than rewriting it, let me directly quote myself:

“The reality is so complicated that I’ve conceded that history doesn’t actually repeat, though one could certainly argue that it rhymes. The repetition is merely an illusion that stems from our desire to find patterns in chaos. Humans fear randomness, because it leads to the possibility that anything terrible could happen at any moment. This scares us, so we mentally look for patterns as coping mechanisms when the unexpected occurs. This psychological phenomenon explains the existence of conspiracy theories. In a weird way, it’s more comforting to think that sinister government operatives are behind tragedies like 9/11 than to accept that tragedies could strike at any moment.”

This desire to see patterns to try to make sense of what is genuine chaos leads to the illusion that history repeats itself. But it does more than that.

Reality is a very complicated thing. Each instant, countless things are happening all over the world. Imagining what you’re doing right now, combined with what you’re neighbor’s doing, combined with what all 7 billion people in the world are doing is more than the human brain can fathom. Just think of the amount of decisions you have to make on a daily basis. We create routines to shorten the amount of thinking our brains have to do. It’s a shortcut to make life manageable. But now imagine how much more exponentially complex reality is over the course of a week. Or a year. Or a decade. Or a thousand years.

This means that if “in-the-now” reality is complex, history is beyond complex. Multiply the complexity of a single instant over the course of humanity’s past, and the results are something we can never fully comprehend no matter how hard we try.

Just like our minds create shortcuts in the form of daily routines just to make our everyday lives bearable, we also tend to examine history in extremely oversimplified terms. Rather than look at it as a flat, factual set of infinite events over the past, it’s easier to take history in bite-sized chunks. It’s even more tempting to set history as a movie.

That good and evil have existed throughout human history is undeniable. But reality is far more complicated than that. This presents the opportunity to make heroes out of some figures and villains out of others.

A perfect example in recent years is the absolute destruction of Christopher Columbus’s legacy. The story of how the first European discovered the Americas has fallen victim to an anti-white narrative, portraying Columbus as a genocidal maniac who never discovered anything and wiped out native populations. But what we were taught as children, that the world believed the earth was flat until Columbus proved them wrong by “sailing the ocean blue” and discovering America in the process, is also a revisionist myth from A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus by Washington Irving.

As is often the case, the truth is somewhere in a gray area. There was no contention on whether the earth was flat or round, and Columbus used the best maps available. His accidental discovery of the American continents is in fact a major landmark in human history that connected the East and the West, for better or worse. The majority of natives were wiped out by the inevitable disease brought by the Europeans, but Columbus’s alleged mistreatment of them could well be exaggerated claims from his enemies.

But it’s easier to just vilify him than to search for the truth, which at the end of the day isn’t as exciting.

Hitler, on the other hand, is a no-brainer. In part 1 I touched on his mere appearance. He looked like a cartoonish villain with his slick black hair, little mustache, and deranged eyes. The Nazis’ German accents and uniforms with skulls and swastikas all form perfectly evil cosmetics. Hitler strikes a perfect note as a historical villain: on top of his appearance, the Holocaust and the Second World War, there’s also the fact that people are still alive who were affected by his actions. This makes him a more appealing go-to villain than someone like Genghis Kahn, whose ancient brutality doesn’t resonate with modern audiences. It’s also why you don’t see anyone comparing President Trump to the Kaiser.

It also helps that in World War II, it’s clear who that the Allies were the heroes. It’s a distinct example from recent-enough history of good standing up and saving the world from evil. You don’t have to think too hard about it. But the reality at the time was much scarier. We didn’t know who was going to win. It took genuine courage in the midst of disaster to win the Second World War.

We all want to be in a movie, with us as the star, saving the world. We want to be on the winning team. We want to be special. We all want to undergo that third-act twist where the going gets tough, but then persevere and still save the day at the end. But I’ve often said that one of the most dangerous things in the world is the inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. The obsession with being the hero who saves the world without actually having to make any real sacrifices can lead one to dark places.

So Antifa and today’s left-wing protesters look back at history, see a clear play of good versus evil, then imagine that they’re living in a modern version of that play with themselves as the heroes. Trump becomes the manifestation of Hitler while they are the reincarnation of the Greatest Generation.

Untangling this web is no easy task because of how much visual confirmation plays a role in the hallucination. The story of illegal immigrant children being separated from their parents was largely blown out of proportion and misrepresented by the news media. But it gave leftist protesters what they were already looking for: something that looked enough like a concentration camp to confirm their Trump-is-Hitler narrative. The other complicated matter is the myth that the Nazis were somehow far-right ideologues. This helps push the idea that Trump and his supporters are somehow white-supremacist heirs to Nazi philosophy. Of course, the fact that “Nazi” actually means “National Socialist” doesn’t seem to strike them as odd. The only different between Hitler and Stalin is how they wanted to achieve the Great Worker’s Paradise.

There are so many reasons why this doesn’t work, not the least of which is that the political situation today looks absolutely nothing like 1930s Germany. The reality taking place every instant today is completely different from what took place then. The men who fought in World War II came up during the Great Depression. They overcame hard times and knew value of family and morals. Millennial rioters who think they can walk in their shoes by “saving the world” from Trump aren’t worthy to lick the boots of the Greatest Generation. They haven’t persevered through a depression. They’ve never been hungry and have had everything handed to them on a silver platter. This was the generation that had to go to therapy if one of their classmates chewed a pop tart into the shape of a gun. They wouldn’t be able to look up from their cell phones long enough to raise a flag over Iwo Jima.

Nevertheless, the illusion prevails. The news media, desperate in its attempts to stop Trump, add fuel to the. But real life is not Call of Duty. Real violence doesn’t play out like a video game. And I shudder to think of what it will be like when this nation learns that lesson.

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My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge: Hosea 4:6.

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The leftists compare their enemies to national socialist Hitler because of projection. In reality leftists are much like Hitler for their totalitarian tendencies and use of hatred to destroy those not dependent on leftist government.

Yeh, we get the normative intellectual argument. But it’s so much fun to call leftists Nazis. Their heads spin around, they spit Linda Blair pea soup and go bat-chit crazy.

Try it; you’ll enjoy it.

The dems have gone way too far. They have nowhere to go in the name calling business. There are only two things worse than the names they have been calling the President: the devil and a liberal.

Thanks!

Any discussion of “devil Hitler” should prominently include mention of a great Communist fraud: naming Hitler’s National Socialists “right wing”.

Of course, from the far, far left wing perspective of Stalin’s Communists, Nazis were indeed to the right of them.
But Nazis were far from “right wing”, they were always far left wing.
Communists were far far left and Nazis just far left, hense “right wing” from that perspective.

But our own left-wing media adopted Stalin’s lie claiming Nazis were “right wing” and thus potentially in alliance with other “right wingers” like Constitutional Conservatives!

It a Big Lie perpetrated by virtually every media, even some who should well know better.

Pretty much. It’s one of many contradictions among leftists that I can’t quite wrap my head around.

Just like people using fascist tactics to “fight fascism.” It’s self-refuting, and they seem completely oblivious to the contradiction.

I got taken to task for not mentioning that in Part 1. But which one is actually closer to Nazi ideology wasn’t the point I was trying to make. I did want to make sure to bring that up this time...Hitler was no right-winger. Everything about Nazi ideology was leftist authoritarian. Like I said, the only difference between the Nazis and Communists were how to get there.

I never understood how you can be accused of fascism or of wanting a dictatorship when the entire premise of your ideology is based around smaller government and greater individual freedom. But I guess that simple, logical truth doesn’t register with people who don’t want to think for themselves and just obey what they’re told by the leftist narrative.

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