Comparisons to Hitler

The Issue of Drawing Comparisons to Hitler

By Roy D. Follendore III

September 25, 2002

The other day a member of the German government made a comparison between the political tactics of our President George W. Bush to the tactics of Adolph Hitler. The immediate response from our administration resulted in the resignation of that individual. The philosophical question I am asking within this essay is not about that particular circumstance, but rather whether and why it should be reasonable and acceptable to draw such comparisons between Hitler and any politician.

The first thing that must be recognized is that Adolph Hitler was a man whose very name resonates evil. He remains for many people the definition of evil. It is therefore useful to understand that when one compares actions of Hitler with the actions of a governmental leader, that leader will probably take offence. Most people would not like such comparisons and it is easy to see why President Bush would not like it. President Bush does not consider himself in any way comparable to Hitler. He is not Adolph Hitler and as far as our President is concerned that is the end of the story. Most Americans feel we should not be particularly interested in attempting to understand Hitler's genius. Most of us in America like to take the simple view that we were the good guys and Germany were the bad guys. The end. The truth is that Hitler was evil but he was also more than that, and for that matter, so are we.

Whether we want to admit it or not, he was a political genius that rose through a hot democratically contested power base to accomplish his evil. The problem we face in our modern world is not some contaminated abstraction of Hitler, but the potential that if the citizens and leaders of this planet do not try to understand the nature of his particular combination of genius and evil, then nations will continually be burdened by such leadership over time. We therefore must come to grips with the strange combination of genius and evil such as that of Adolph Hitler because we must be able to recognize and never underestimate the potential of our enemies.

Functionally a comparative analysis of the vast majority of the day to day activities of this creature would fall in the range of normal. As a human being, we can be certain that Adolph Hitler rose to dress himself before putting on his socks and shoes one foot at a time, just as most of us do. Undoubtedly he fed himself pretty much the same as any one of us. From some accounts there were people who found him to be highly intelligent, charming and mild mannered. In fact if we were able to actually tally up every one of his individual activities within an average day, we would find that Adolph Hitler was probably pretty average. By this I mean that he would do much the same kinds of generic things that anyone of his day would do. He was a human being. In making this statement, it is not my intention to compare evil of this man to that of mankind.

The second thing that must be recognized in answering this question is that in doing so we are admitting that mankind has the capacity to be simultaneously both evil and good. This is simply the obvious observation that Hitler was a man who was very much the same physically with respect to daily activities as many of us. There was no mythical aura that differentiated him from the next man. In a final analysis, no doubt the same thing could also be said about most of his use of political tactics. Most of what he did then within politics or within interpersonal relationships remains conventional practice. Because of this, any of us could therefore reasonably be compared in the narrow sense to Adolph Hitler.

The great capability and capacity for the evil of Hitler did not lie within his human lifestyle or mannerisms. It existed within his ability to have men and women do his bidding. He controlled and manipulated people even as they thought he was serving them. He allowed others to do things in the name of defense of their homeland that supported his own ends. He manipulated the power of the population of Germany by moving into the position to accept control without responsibility. He removed the roadblocks of democratic checks and balances by making his name synonymous with German defense, expansion, and opportunities.

To accomplish this within his nation at that time required a cultural population which could be blamed for not only the German flaws of the past, but also the imperfections of the future. The pseudoscientific concept of cultural and racial purity was introduced as a tool to isolate the majority of Germans from the minorities. Adolph Hitler knew that the true checks and balances of democracy exists as the status quo of the culture. His absolute alignment with the "pure" majority was not unintentional. In an age of emerging absolute belief in Science, his rise to power was essentially a social experiment, the false basis of which he believed. The nature of his evil resided within his unraveled belief in the goodness of his objectives.

At this point we must not forget that there is perhaps not a human being who has created more pain and suffering for this planet. He was the architect of the holocaust. He was a leader that had no true capability for empathy. He was a creature without a true sense of remorse, willing to lead to slaughter and be slaughtered for his own personal political objectives and unwilling to change. The true evil of Adolph Hitler was that he was able to identify those things in others that made them evil and allowed it to come out. He simply leveraged his position to amplify what was already there.

The single fact we know today from his existence is that every nation has the latent capability for unleashing untapped evil. The rational for doing so may be as simple as pitting cultures against each other in the name of survival. For any single individual to be able to accomplish this within a given nation requires the deliberate concentration of economic, political and military powers. Hitler required the ability to control national debate. In order to rise to power, he required national justification for war in the guise of German interests of national security. Hitler was able to create a plausible rationality for his constitutes that they wanted to believe. The expansion of German national security interests outside of their borders appealed to those who needed a justification for taking unilateral military action across borders. Hitler made international sovereignty secondary to the absolute German perspective of world order because he was given permission to do so. His evil genius was based on the fact that he could politicize the positive concepts of war for his nation's future well being and in doing so he was able to absolutely dominate detractors. Reason did not prevail within a free society because one man began to control what was acceptable free expression. If we need to identify the issues of power that resemble those of Adolph Hitler, these are the things we should look for today.

If there is one ultimate lesson from Adolph Hitler it is that this and all great and free countries must come to terms with the fact that politicians like Adolph Hitler can come into existence in any nation at any moment in history. In many ways Hitler was unfortunately not that much of a unique political specimen and it is important that we both are able to recall and invoke his dangerous image so that we can recognize and hopefully prevent such a reoccurrence. The idealistic language of labeling others in terms of liberals and conservatives fails us if we allow ourselves to only think within the range of a politicians terms. That which is often considered liberal tactic or philosophy may be a radical approach at a different point in time. On the other hand, that which is considered conservative tactic or philosophy may in fact be a radical approach by the time it can be implemented. The strength of American National Security for this country therefore does not exist on the idealized point of its center of balance, but through the balance of opposing forces which dictate that rational center of balance with respect to anarchy. We must never forget that it is through the anarchy of civil freedom that allows democracy to exist and remain stable. In the end and within this context, national security lies with the country's ability to maintain and utilize it's checks and balances for the opportunity and implementation of open constructive debate.

We may never be able to prevent all of the potential Adolph Hitler's from participating within constitutional governments of free countries, but this country can certainly use the freedom and checks and balances guaranteed by our Constitution to filter most of them out of positions of power. To ignore the name of Adolph Hitler is to recognize him a more powerful than he was rather than eliminate his existence. There is no doubt that he came to his end at the extreme end of the spectrum of humanity. But to ignore his place within the spectrum of humanity is to ignore the potential in all of us for evil within positions of great power.

The answer to the question I began with should therefore be obvious. To label an individual as Hitler is not the same as comparing common political tactics and methods Hitler may have used to obtain and maintain power. Americans must allow such comparisons because in doing so we strengthen our nation and assure that our political means remains cautious. If this is a tender point for some of our leaders then perhaps they and the American people should recognize why this is so. We may never agree on the nature of liberty.

"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act.... Plainly the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty." -- Former President Abraham Lincoln

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