(also known as: argumentum ad Hitlerum, playing the Nazi card, Hitler card)
Definition: The attempt to make an argument analogous with Hitler or the Nazi party. Hitler is probably the most universally despised figure in history, so any connection to Hitler, or his beliefs, can (erroneously) cause others to view the argument in a similar light. However, this fallacy is becoming more well known as is the fact that it is most often a desperate attempt to render the truth claim of the argument invalid out of lack of a good counter argument.
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What seers see often depends on where they are standing, their vantage point. Two people standing on the same mountain looking at the vista before them are likely to see different things depending on where each is perched. One is perched looking east, the other looking west. Same mountain, different vista.
Similarly, people looking out at the political or cultural landscape are apt to see different things, depending on where they’re perched.
That’s true of most of us. What we read, who we listen to—our news sources, our circle of friends—tend to inform our views. This tendency has been called many things—confirmation bias, filter bubbles, herd mentality, group-think. Its allure is strong, and it takes deliberate effort to resist.
There are some good books on the subject.
Former NPR CEO Ken Stern wrote a book in 2017, awkwardly titled Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right. I’m sure he got skewered by his liberal colleagues.
Eli Pariser has written and spoken about filter bubbles (see his TedTalk here).
Jonathan Haidt wrote about living in "moral matrices" in his book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Clay Johnson wrote a book called The Information Diet: The Case for Conscious Consumption in which he encouraged people to be more deliberate about the news media they consume.
What prompted these thoughts about argumentum ad Hitlerum was a friend's Facebook post referring to Donald Trump as a modern-day Hitler, and one of her friends subsequently posting a list of what she "sees" when she looks out at the current political moment. Ah, a modern-day seer.
I could be wrong—perhaps this "seer" traipsed the country and visited small towns across a wide swath of America, interviewed people of varying ages, ethnicities, professions, life experiences, and religious affiliation, trying to understand their world view. Perhaps she has reams of data to support her claims. If so, then her conclusions are worth taking seriously.
If not, if what she “sees” is based on her limited vantage point—the news media she consumes, the friends she associates with—then it’s hard to put much stock in what she sees. So much of this list seems culled from something one might hear on cable news. Each item is presented as a fait accompli, end-of-discussion, self-evident fact. However, where she sees fact, I see sweeping generalizations, logical fallacies, incomplete or skewed information. Each of these issues is much more complex than her epigrammatic one-sentence descriptions suggest.
By ending her list with another mendacious comparison to Hitler (“now I begin to understand how so-called good Germans supported a madman”), people like her lose all credibility as an honest broker of information. And by slandering those whose political views she disagrees with by comparing them to Hitler’s “willing executioners,” people like her also lose my respect.
We go far afield in our attempts to work through difficult or polarizing issues when we refer to our political opponents as Nazis and reduce complex issues into single-sentence maxims.
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(Source: a foolish woman on Facebook)
It always perplexed me that Hitler could do the terrible things he and his comrades did with such relative ease. These past four years have been instructive in that regard.
- I see Christian people call a cold-blooded murderer a “patriot”, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for him.
- I daily read the violent and vile threats that nice people publicly direct towards those who disagree with them.
- I see Christians supporting a man who openly bragged about sexual predation, defends white supremacists, lies with impunity, while he pretends to share their faith.
- I hear upstanding citizens disparage and insult people who aren’t white or straight or...
- I see anti-abortion proponents who have little or no concern for the the predicament of children separated from their parents and kept in confinement indefinitely.
- I see good people of faith who naively believe that Trump will abolish abortion, something he was in favor of before he ran for office.
- I see immigrants senselessly deported or treated shamefully while good people silently stand on the sidelines.
- I see respected members of society excusing Trump’s well-documented immorality and adultery.
- I see a pandemic mishandled and good people think it is funny or a hoax.
- I see people who refuse to wear a mask for the safety of others because it infringes on their perceived freedom.
- I see people being indoctrinated by news outlets that are really propaganda.
- I hear incendiary phrases like “fake news” and “nasty women” over and over.
- I see nice people making light of those who have suffered from the effects of Covid-19.
- I see respected politicians who expressed their utter disdain for Trump before he came into power, now eagerly defending and excusing everything he says and does.
- I see pastors enjoying the flattery of a man who has never even read the Bible, rarely attends church, and shows no signs of Christian attributes.
- I see a leader who has insulted our first Black President and the current vice-presidential candidate by questioning their birth places despite overwhelming proof.
- I see nice people very comfortable or dismissive of Trumps’s racist comments.
- I see smart people believing that all the violence going on right now is Obama or Biden’s fault.
-I see religious leaders obsessed with the “evils” of the BLM movement and socialism while ignoring the Sermon on the Mount.
-I see the senseless and cruel deportations of some of our military veterans.
- I see Trump make fun of a man with a disability and nice people think it is funny and harmless.
- I see this administration denying asylum to those who are persecuted. This is not a commitment to life.
So now I begin to understand how so-called good Germans supported a madman and it terrifies me.
