I’m getting kind of tired of the Nazis being the universal standard for evil. People will call individuals or groups Nazis, say that “that’s exactly what the Nazis did”, refer to someone as “a second Hitler” (that’s what some have called the current president of Iran), etc. I once heard preemptive war justified by the logic of “if we had done something about the Nazis before hand, the Holocaust would have been prevented.” It doesn’t matter whether the comparison is valid or not (people will call abortionists Nazis, or even those who propose increased taxes).
Why does it have to be Nazi this, Nazi that? Sure, they were evil, but they certainly weren’t the only group of evil people ever to walk the Earth. Every once in a while, I hear someone called a Stalinist, but for every time I hear that, I hear someone called a Hitler or Nazi one hundred times. If we have to make defamatory comparisons to historical dictaters and their political parties, couldn’t we at least have some variety?
Nope, Nazi’s and Hitler would do quite well as being the standard of evil. I sincerely hope that like Attila the Hun, Hitler remains the ultimate Boogieman of history for a long time. For him not to be, someone as evil or more evil would have to come into power.
There is an old quote from WWII, someone can fill in the details:
“If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”
-Sir Winston Churchill.
To which some wit replied, “Stalin will be very happy to hear that”.
On relative scale, Hitler was a greater, more organized and swifter evil.
Stalin was a more run of the mill despotic evil.
I was just gonna post that I hope nobody sets the bar higher. And yeah, those poor Nazis, having people think they were evil just because they did evil things – boo hoo
So true. A few times, I’ve considered throwing in that line as a complete non-sequitor in some thread that had nothing to do with the Spanish Inquisition. Because that way, obviously, nobody would be expecting it.
It’s hard to dispute that they’ve earned it, but it’s still annoying. When you compare everybody bad to the Nazis, it makes it sound like all ‘bad’ people are pretty much the same in terms of motivation, methods and ideology, so you lose touch with reality. And of course, you can lose sight of what the Nazis were really like - it’s even worse when you start making the comparison with groups that might not even be that bad.
And then the niggling details start showing up: there were governments that killed more people than the Nazis did, so it appears that the key issue is the way the Nazis killed people, not the ultimate result. No denying that there are some uniquely horrible features to the Nazi combination of murderous hatred and calculated organization. It’s easy to see why they’re still the standard and have captured the imagination. But it’s not like you can prove they’re the worst, either.
You’d have the same problem if some other group was “the standard for evil.” If there was a Worst Guy Ever, whether it was Hitler, Pol Pot or some other guy, there’s no point in making a comparison to some guy who is less Evil. It’s about the mental shorthand.
Convenient though the Nazis are, I think I see FrantzJ’s point. Sometimes it’s TOO easy to use them as a historical stereotype.
Why did the Naziz commit the crimes they did? Because they’re evil. Yes, but why specifically? Because… they’re evil! I’m sure we’ll recognize it if it happens again.
Plus, setting the bar so high surely deludes a few nutjobs into believing they’re not AS evil as the Nazis, just because they themselves haven’t committed genocide yet. I propose a sliding scale of evil. Growing a big black mustache is the first step, and it gets worse from there.
Yeah, that’s another reason it bothers me. Today, Kofi Annan spoke to the President of Iran and said this:
Genocide, democide and similar crimes have been repeated many times in the last 60 years. Maybe none have had the same bodycount as the Nazi version, but when I read about Darfur now or think of Rwanda 10 years ago, how can you say it hasn’t been repeated already? Between half a million and a million people died in Rwanda in the space of a couple of months. I don’t know if the Nazis ever worked that fast.
Being greeted with a “torrreadorrrrr!”, told that I must teach flamenco to my coworkers, or told to bring Spanish music (by which they mean Shakira, who is Colombian, or flamenco; of course I bring over my Mago de Oz, Molotov and Loquillo along with the Shakira, I don’t have any flamenco) is a tad of a pain. But when someone’s response to “this is Nava, she’s from Spain” is “ooooh, oh, don’t sic the Inquisition on me! Hehehe, just kidding, hahahahah!”… God, I DO feel like siccing the Swiss Inquisition on them!
Personally, not only am I very happy to have the Nazis continue as the gold-standard for evil, I am also happy to keep using individual Nazis as the bennchmark for specific kinds of evil:
Himmler for "creepy, imprsonal, ‘rationally justifiable’ " evil
Goering for “slothful drug addicted decadent” evil
Heydrich for “sadistic” evil
Ribbentrop for “stupid people abusing their power” evil
Hitler for the general all purpose "wake up in the morning, drink a big 'ole cup of crazy " evil
and Goebbles for just flat out being a son of a bitch.
works for me and I think it’s gonna keep on working for me.
Having lived in Germany, I can tell you that Germans are quite aware that Nazi’s still reign supreme when it come to the standard of evil - but what is depressing is that kids who were born generations later are still getting called, “Nazi” whenever they travel anywhere. I mean, seriously, you are going to label a 16 year old German backpacker a Nazi?
Living, breathing ex-Nazis would now be in their mid-to-late 80’s by now, but the vast majority have long since died. But that doesn’t stop people from hearing someone is German and smile and say, “So, was your grandfather a Nazi?”
Germany has stringent laws that forbid anything to do with the Nazi era - no Swastikas, no flags, no uniforms, no nothin’ from the war is allowed to be displayed or worn in public - and if you were stupid enough to do so you are subject to arrest and imprisonment. The book, Mein Kampf, is forbidden in Germany. This is not to say there are no neo-Nazis in Germany (quite a few neo skinheads in the old East German sections), but my guess is there are probably more neo-Nazis in Oklahoma, Montana and Wyoming that in all of Germany.
Germans tend to be the most anti-war populace in Europe, if not the world - it takes a lot to get them to send even a few soldiers to any war zone and trust me, there is huge national debate before they do so.
Germans are fully aware of their history - but having taught over there, it was always kind of depressing to see some young boy or girl being called a Nazi by some asshole from another country - those kids are still living in guilt and shame for the sins of their great-grandparents.
Was it really that much worse to be killed by gas in a Nazi concentration camp than it was to die slowly of starvation and exhaustion in a Soviet gulag?
The left has its own equivalent of Holocaust denial: Gulag denial. Holocaust deniers tend to meet the problem head-on by flatly denying the reality of the Holocaust. Gulag deniers, however, deal with the problem in a more circumspect manner. They seldom deny that the Gulags were real, but as soon as possible after being confronted with the Gulags, they change the subject, preferably to something that makes Westerners look bad. They don’t deny the gulags, they simply refuse to talk about them.
In other words, a Holocaust denier says, “There is no elephant in the room! You have been blinded by pro-elephant propaganda!” A Gulag denier says, “Well, yes, certainly, there is this elephant in the room. But what do you think of the drapes and carpet? Aren’t they dreadful?” And no matter how much you try to focus conversation on the elephant, they insist on diverting attention back to the drapes and carpet.
Of course, we actually fought an all-out shooting war with the Nazis; military conflict with the Communists–Korea, Viet Nam, some other proxy wars–was on a much smaller scale. An entire generation was subjected to a constant barrage of anti-Nazi propaganda, and the image of the Nazis as the living embodiment of pure evil became deeply embedded in the popular mind. There have been thousands of photographs and films of the Nazi death camps widely published in the West, but very few photographs of Gulag victims. Images hit the audience at a gut level and have a much greater emotional impact than mere words, so it’s only natural that people would tend to have a much stronger gut level feeling about Nazi atrocities than Soviet ones.
If Patton had liberated the inmates of a Soviet gulag, and pictures of the horrors there had been widely circulated, perhaps we would be as quick to think of Stalin as we are to think of Hitler when want a concrete example of extreme evil.
