The "Bush in 30 seconds" video is perhaps the pinnacle of the phenomenon of comparing politicians to Adolf Hitler. As a historian, I cringe when I hear this formula--and I have difficulty resisting jumping into the fray. I have not seen the video (and may never), but all the arguments are the same: politician X said things like Hitler, politician y's supporters are like the SS, the situation under Hitler was like it is now so we should do such and such a thing. There are even many problems with the notion that Saddam Hussein is Hitler.

These arguments are always weak, useful for generating a few laughs, but not useful.

1. Hitler did things that are typical of politicians and leaders. What differentiated him was how he either used, twisted and perverted normal political mehtods.


2. If Hitler was the epitome of evil, it is difficult to find sufficient simlarities between him and other politicians to justify making the comparison.


3. Nothing about the current condition of US politics and culture resembles Germany or Europe in the 1930s and 1940s for comparisons to be useful.

The best argument against this type of reasoning acutally comes from a review of a book by Daniel Goldhagen on the Third Reich. Goldhagen became a superstar of academia when he published Hitler's Willing Executioners, a book that argued that the Holocaust was the fulfillment of deeply seeded hostilities in the German mentality: complete eliminiationist antisemitism. It was a complete condemnation of all Germans. As quickly as it was popular and oft-quoted, it fell out of fancy as reckless scholarship. Goldhagen tried again last year, writing a book that would implicate Christian Churches in the Holocaust, especially the Catholic Church, as major vehicles for genocide. The message fell flat (with good reason.) He is the conclusion of an H-Net review of the book:

Does Goldhagen succeed in his task? If he seeks to more broadly implicate the Catholic Church by pointing to its own tragically long and deep history of Jew-hatred, then he has performed is job well. While he too often underemphasizes those within the Church who have worked toward the kind of change he calls for--John XXIII, for instance, receives no mention until page 159--he allows that this is a community of choice, where positive choices for change are possible, even probable. The findings are not particularly original, but the fact that Goldhagen reaches a larger audience than most academicians of this subject will mean that an important ethical message will have reached more people. However, if the goal is to place the Catholic Church front and center in the ideological origins of the Holocaust, then the effort must be deemed less successful. It is not enough to infer that the Catholic Church or its religious values "must" have played a role in the Holocaust. The antisemitic expressions voiced in the day by leading Catholics, while proving that Christian Jew-hatred was a necessary precondition for the Holocaust, do not prove direct causality. As antisemitic as the Pope was, his public silence in the face of genocide is not tantamount to approval of genocide. Where Goldhagen tries to fill empirical gaps with syllogistic reasoning, he pleads rather than proves his case. The larger issue of the religious roots of the Holocaust remains open. Such questions are better answered not by examining the reactions of bystanders, but by scrutinizing the motivations of the perpetrators themselves, their own estimation of the religious rather than "racial" origins of their prejudice.

Is there anything that I have learned from studying the Holocaust and Third Reich that is politically useful?

1. Those who ignore race as a poltical factor are fools.


2. Almost anyone can be demonized.


3. Fear anti-parliamentarianism.


4. There is a thin line between collaboration and resistance, and the two often hold hands.