Victor Davis Hanson explains at National Review Online how misuse of the label “Nazi” does lasting damage to political debate.
[B]eside using such historical slurs for the partisan purposes of pressuring a political opponent to modify his agenda, or to create the sort of hysteria that leads to a climate of violent resistance and even death threats, the Nazi trope is a sin against history.
If Nazism was once the equivalent of authorizing military action against the genocidal Saddam Hussein, on the consent of 23 separate congressional writs, or the same as temporarily separating foreign nationals who entered the U.S. illegally from the children they brought into the country, then what exactly are the 60 million dead of World War II, which Hitler started, or the 6 million who were gassed, starved, or shot in the Nazi extermination archipelago, or the 27 million Russian dead on the Eastern Front?
Answer? Their fates are all more or less analogous to those of the well-fed, clothed children temporarily separated from the parents who undertook a dangerous trip to bring them into the U.S. in violation of U.S. law and who may have used fraud to seek political asylum. What then were Treblinka, the siege of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and the Warsaw Ghetto all about? Were Hitler’s death camps and nightmarish slaughters merely temporary parent-child separations at the border? …
… So the sick Nazi comparison work both ways: It elevates political opponents into homicidal criminals who deserve extreme punishment, while reducing real historical monsters into little more than petty partisan zealots.
