Nazi analogies

Nazi analogies or Nazi comparisons are any comparisons or parallels which are related to Nazism or Nazi Germany, which often reference Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, the SS, or the Holocaust. Despite criticism, such comparisons have been employed for a wide variety of reasons since Hitler's rise to power. Some Nazi comparisons are logical fallacies, such as reductio ad Hitlerum. Godwin's law asserts that a Nazi analogy is increasingly likely the longer an internet discussion continues, though Mike Godwin also noted that not all Nazi comparisons are invalid.

Quotes

• We are deeply troubled by the Taliban’s continual repression of its people. Particularly painful, with its unavoidable connections to history, is the order requiring all Hindus in Afghanistan to wear an identity label ontheir clothing. This is an extension of the Taliban’s policy of religious intolerance and a stark reminder of the exclusionary tactics employed by the Nazis as a precursor to genocide. The Taliban rulers in Afghanistan have adopted a policy that more than 60 years ago spelled the beginning of the end for six million Jews. The Holocaust began with the ostracizing of the Jewish people and their forced separation from society, which can be the only purpose of labeling "others" as outsiders. In Nazi-occupied Europe, the badge of shame was the yellow Star of David worn as a patch. In Afghanistan, the Taliban rulers today are ordering Hindus to wear a similar label to enable Muslims to identify them. This is a clearly a policy founded on intolerance, mistrust and religious hatred. One would hope that we have learned from history. Following the recent desecration ofstatutes in Afghanistan, it has now progressed to marking people. We cannot help but ask, "What comes next?" We call on the international community and all religious leaders to immediately speak out against this practice.
  • Abraham Foxman, "ADL Calls on Word Leaders to Condemn Afghanistan's Policy of religious Labelling", Anti-Defamation League (22 May 2001)

• This book contains quite a few references to Nazi Germany, and there is a tendency for many people to discount such comparisons because they are so overused and often in simplistic and inappropriate ways. I am no less tolerant of such facile uses of a horrific set of events; and I find their overuse an insult to the memories of the victims. But I am using it rather extensively in this book precisely because the parallel is appropriate, certainly in the similar end foreseen by Islamists for Bengali Hindus and Nazis for Jews. If that recognition awakens the world to action, then this will be one of the most important uses of the comparison since World War II... (6-7) Pogroms were initially anti-Jewish riots in the empire of Czarist Russia.... What makes the term particularly apt in this incident is the fact that this anti-Hindu pogrom was also carried out by average (Muslim) citizens, but the entire process was inspired by the government , abetted by it, and the perpetrators were protected by it. It is this unholy wedding of mob action and deliberate government effort that makes it truly an anti-Hindu pogrom. (112-113)
  • Benkin, Richard L. (2014). A quiet case of ethnic cleansing: The murder of Bangladesh's Hindus.

• Making people believe in a history of Hindu-Muslim amity is not an easy task: the number of victims of the persecutions of Hindus by Muslims is easily of the same order of magnitude as that of the Nazi extermination policy, though no one has yet made the effort of tabulating the reported massacres and proposing a reasonable estimate of how many millions exactly must have died in the course of the Islamic campaign against Hinduism (such research is taboo). On top of these there is a similar number of abductions and deportations to harems and slave-markets, as well as centuries of political oppression and cultural destruction...
  Only off and on did this persecution have the intensity of a genocide, but it was sustained much longer and spread out much wider geographically than the Nazi massacre. Whereas the Germans including most members of the Nazi party, were horrified at the Nazi crimes against humanity within a few years, the Muslims, for whom Gott mit uns (God with us) was not a slogan but a religious certainty, managed to keep a good conscience for centuries. We will encounter similarities as well as differences between Nazi and Islamic crimes against humanity, but the most striking difference is definitely the persistence with which Islamic persecutions have continued for 14 centuries. This is because it had more spine, a more powerful psychological grip on its adherents than Nazism....
  "Those who deny history are bound to repeat it": that is what many critics of Holocaust negationism allege. This seems slightly exaggerated, though it is of course the well- wishers of Nazism who practise negationism. In the case of Islam, it is equally true that negationism is practised by the well-wishers of that same doctrine which has led to the crimes against humanity under consideration. While Nazism is simply too stained to get a second chance, Islam is certainly in a position to force unbelievers into the zimmi status (as is happening in dozens of Muslim countries in varying degrees), and even to wage new jihads, this time with weapons of mass-destruction. Those who are trying to close people's eyes to this danger by distorting or concealing the historical record of Islam are effective accomplices in the injustice and destruction which Islam is sure to cause before the time of its dissolution comes. Therefore, I consider it a duty of all intellectuals to expose and denounce the phenomenon of negationism whenever it is practised.
  • Elst, Koenraad. Negationism in India: concealing the record of Islam. 1992

• We should certainly like an impartial investigation into the events of those days and we have no doubt it will be found that while, on the Indian side, it was the spontaneous outburst of a people indignant at what they considered the weakness and the appeasement policy of their leadership, on the Muslim side, the League, the bureaucracy, the police and the army worked like Hitler’s team with the tacit if not open approval of those in charge of the Pakistan Government.”
  • Editorial entitled “Who Was Responsible?” The Hindustan Times (July 7, 1948) . Wednesday, July 7, 1948. “Who was Responsible?” in Gurbachan Singh Talib in Muslim League Attack on Sikhs and Hindus in the Punjab 1947, 1950, Amritsar: Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee pp 248 ff

• What Hitler wants in Europe, Jinnah wants in India.
  • HMS Madras leader Satyamurthy, quoted in B.N. Jog, Threat of Islam, 1994. p. 258. and in Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". I.33.

• When Nehru returned after a brief visit to Europe in 1938, he was struck by the similarity between the propaganda methods of the Muslim League in India and the Nazis in Germany: 'The League leaders had begun to echo the Fascist tirade against democracy... Nazis were wedded to a negative policy. So also was the League. The League was anti-Hindu, anti-Congress, anti-national... The Nazis raised the cry of hatred against the Jews, the League [had] raised [its] cry against the Hindus.'
  • J. Nehru quoted in B.R. Nanda: Gandhi and His Critics, OUP, Delhi 1993 (1985), p.88. also in Elst, K. (2010). The saffron swastika: The notion of "Hindu fascism". I.140-1.

• We cannot let Pakistan continue this holocaust.
  • Indira Gandhi commenting on the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• He [Jayaprakash Narayan] demanded the defense of the “political and human rights” of the Bengalis, and decried a “holocaust” carried out by a “Hitlerian junta in power in Islamabad.”
  • Jayaprakash Narayan, commenting on the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. ,quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide.

• She saw no signs of political accommodation from Yahya. India, she wrote, was “greatly embarrassed” by the recent news of fresh U.S. arms shipments to Pakistan... —she reached shocking rhetorical heights: “Would the League of Nations Observers have succeeded in persuading the refugees who fled from Hitler’s tyranny to return even whilst the pogroms against the Jews and political opponents of Nazism continued unabated?”
  This was hardly the first Indian use of Nazi imagery. Countless Indian officials had accused Pakistan of genocide; Jayaprakash Narayan spoke of a “Hitlerian junta” in Islamabad; and Haksar had privately written that Pakistan’s propaganda was “based, as always, on the pattern set by Gobbels.” But here was the prime minister of India, in a formal letter to the president of the United States, comparing a U.S. ally to Nazi Germany.
  • Indira Gandhi commenting on the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. as quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide. ch 14

• In London, exhausted, Gandhi seemed close to breaking under the strain. She once again went clangingly heavy on the Nazi analogies, saying that she could no more meet with Yahya before the woes of the Bengali refugees were addressed than Winston Churchill could have met with Adolf Hitler before the end of World War II. When a British reporter challenged her for supporting the Mukti Bahini, for a moment she seemed almost overcome with anger and grief, blinking rapidly and swallowing hard, but not faltering. Did quieting the situation “mean we support the genocide?” she shot back with steely fury. “When Hitler was on the rampage, why didn’t you tell us keep quiet and let’s have peace in Germany and let the Jews die, or let Belgium die, let France die?”
  • Indira Gandhi commenting on the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. quoted in Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide. ch 16

• But the torment of Bangladesh suggests a simpler truth: he meant what he said. In the spring of 1971, he and Nixon were faced with mass atrocities on a scale that, at least for Nixon, called to mind Hitler’s extermination of German Jews. To be sure, Pakistan had no gas chambers; Yahya was not Hitler; this was not the Holocaust. Still, although Nixon and Kissinger stood behind many dictatorships—in Brazil, Greece, Portugal, Indonesia, Iran, Spain, South Korea—this was an enormity that went beyond the workaday cruelties of statecraft, as Nixon himself understood. And yet in that dire circumstance, Nixon and Kissinger, in word and in deed, stood resolutely behind Pakistan’s murderous generals.
  • Bass, G. J. (2014). The Blood telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a forgotten genocide. Epilogue

• The Hindus among the Bengalis were as Jews to the Nazis: scum and vermin that [should] best be exterminated.
  • R.J. Rummel, DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, by R.J. Rummel New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994