A man holds a poster with a picture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel wearing a swastika. Merkel opposition said that the euro forces German taxpayers to rescue bankrupt southern European countries whose people denounce them as Nazis for their efforts. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis,File)
I covered this tendency in 2011, citing incidents in which presidential candidates, from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama were compared to Hitler. That spectrum should be enough to reveal the emptiness of the comparison. If politicians as different as Reagan and Obama can attract the Hitler zinger, it means that the content of the comparison is less important than the propaganda effect of comparing your antagonist to one of the world’s most notorious villains.
It’s happening again. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee put it this way in a Sunday radio interview in which he expressed opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran: “This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naïve that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”
March them to the door of the oven? You mean like Hitler? Tuesday morning on the Today show Huckabee defended his language, saying that he had been to Israel many times, visited Auschwitz twice, and stood at the door of the ovens that signified the killing of six million Jews, what we now call the Holocaust.
Huckabee never used Obama’s name with Hitler’s, preferring a comparison to Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who, it is widely believed, let Hitler get the best of him in negotiations leading up to World War II.
Given the president’s basketball skills, a comparison with Wilt Chamberlain might be more appropriate.
But wait, I forgot to tell you. Donald Trump is like Hitler too. That preposterous comparison has been promulgated by two of my closest professional friends and colleagues. In a recent essay on this site, ethicists Arthur Caplan and Kelly McBride argue against the Huffington Post decision to cover Donald Trump’s campaign as entertainment rather than politics.
“Can Trump win?” ask the Ethics Twins. “It seems unlikely, especially after this weekend [when Trump attacked John McCain]. Of course that is what the media said about a funny-looking spewer of hate with an odd mustache who was dismissed as an awful public speaker and not a serious candidate in Germany in the 1930s. In the Reichstag elections of November 1932, held months before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, there were 37 different political parties competing in a melee that bears some resemblance to today’s Republican primary. Given a long time to spread racist drivel to a public nervous about preserving their national identity from ‘non-Germans,’ Adolf Hitler won.”
So let me try to understand the arguments of the day:
President Obama is like Hitler, leading the Jewish people to the door of the oven.
And Donald Trump is like Hitler, spewing hate speech against the Mexican people in the interests of racial and national purity here in the United States.
So back to my Logic Class at Providence College in the fall of 1966:
If A = C
And if B = C
Then, of course, A = B
Which means that Obama is like Trump.
Now that’s what I call reaching across the aisle.
