Your Dad Is Not Hitler

A few weeks ago I noticed the following slogan painted on the walls of a supermarket in France:

Hitler, Sarko—même combat

[Hitler, Sarkosy—same battle]

One didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, be angry or even pitying: for it is not necessary to be an unequivocal admirer of the former [amazon asin=1442214244&template=*lrc ad (left)](and possibly future) president of France to see that the analogy is not quite exact, nor illuminating.

To be sure, anything or anybody has features in common with something or somebody else. Both Hitler and Sarkozy were and are short, the latter shorter than the former (actually, President Hollande is exactly the same height as Hitler). Both had two eyes; both spoke—and one still speaks—an Indo-European language. The similarities are endless. Even a discarded woolen glove and an asteroid [amazon asin=0974925381&template=*lrc ad (right)]have something in common: they are both objects in the solar system.

As it happens, on the very day I saw this slogan I read an interview in a newspaper with the author of Reductio ad Hitlerum, a book named after the use of analogy with Hitler or Nazism to draw all discussion about something to a close: for once an argument or opinion is tainted, however unjustly or inaccurately, by analogy with Hitler or Nazism, it is rendered absolutely impermissible, [amazon asin=1500844764&template=*lrc ad (left)]containing within itself both original and continuing sin. It is an accusation from which it is impossible to free an argument. It is like the policeman at a political rally in America who replied to a man who claimed to be anti-communist, “I don’t care what kind of communist you are.” (The joke has been recycled a thousand times.)

If you have to protest that you’re not something, that only goes to show that really, underneath it all, you are that something: for if [amazon asin=0990463109&template=*lrc ad (right)]you were not, you wouldn’t have to proclaim it. After all, a bear doesn’t have to go round proclaiming it’s a bear, that it partakes of ursitude; it just is a bear and everyone knows it. Only someone pretending to be a bear would go round saying “I’m a bear.” This means that you are what you are accused of being, provided only that the accuser belongs to that self-selected group (which seems to be ever-enlarging) of people who can tell appearance from reality and were born with original virtue.

The author of the book, a philosopher called François de Smet, attempts to explain this too ready resort to the reductio ad Hitlerum. But it seems to me that he only partially hits the mark—as, I suppose, would be true of anyone who attempted the question.

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