Avoid using the H-word at all times
WHY do they do it? Why do they never, ever learn? Invoking the name of Hitler in a contemporary debate about warfare, persecution politics (and pretty much anything else) always, but always, backfires.
Ken Livingstone is still embroiled in a mutually damaging row with Labour about antiSemitism after his crass comment declaring that Hitler once supported Zionism.
This week Donald Trump’s press spokesman Sean Spicer let off his own H-bomb in a statement about Assad’s use of the poison gas sarin against his own people, when he declared: “Someone as despicable as Hitler didn’t even sink to using chemical weapons.”
Ouch, and double ouch. For a start it was Nazi scientists who invented sarin, although Hitler didn’t dare use it on the battlefield or in bombing raids in case of devastating retaliation in kind. And it was Hitler’s SS which murdered countless Jews with the gas Zyclon B in their death camps.
But the real idiocy was to try and make a moral distinction between Adolf and Assad. Hitler was not in some way morally superior to the Syrian dictator: he would have used chemical weapons against allied troops and during the Blitz if he had thought he could get away with it. The point is that Assad knew he could get away with it (at least until now) so he went right ahead.
The hapless Spicer was immediately branded a Holocaust denier because of his cack-handed remarks for which he has now unreservedly aplogised.
But after watching the video of his press conference I think he spoke without thinking. I don’t believe that he’s a wilfully Holocaust denying anti-Semitic. I just think he’s a bit thick.
But the lesson is as transparent as a Tiger tank wasn’t. Never, ever bring Hitler into it.
Seventy-two years after Adolf blew his own brains out, he’s as toxic dead as he was when he was alive.