RickLewis wrote: ↑Sun Mar 29, 2026 6:14 pm
And yes, I am similarly against people calling Trump a Nazi - that really is lazy ...
I share your antipathy to the mudslinging, the
ad hominem attacks, and other forms of obscurantism that has been common here. It's bad enough that it's ridiculous and puerile, as well as very, very boring...but the worst of it is that it stultifies any discussion. The minute that person X disagrees with person Y, person Y starts hurling the mud, and the discussion is totally derailed into brainless name-calling. If anything can reduce this trend, I'm in favour. It wastes far too much time and wrecks discussion.
Yet there is also a sinister undertone to some of it, particularly to the epithet "Nazi." Today, it's being raised not because there's some danger of
der Fuhrer rising from his crispy, toasty tomb and retaking the world, but because it's the substitute word for "evil" and implies "undeserving of even being admitted to the public forum." In other words, those who are using it are being censors...something
der Fuhrer would no doubt have found very winsome indeed.
There's a particular reason, too, that the Left is more fond of that slander than any alternative, such as "too conservative," or "right wing," or "libertarian," or whatever. And that is because it positions the debate as a conflict between two Left-wing ideologies...so whichever wins, the Left-winger still get what they want...big government, only one party, Socialist economics, thought-control, the right to pillage private property, authoritarianism, and so on. It doesn't much matter whether it's the Nazis or the Communist Reds...they're essentially the same thing, and their apparent "war" is actually nothing but a family squabble. Whether it's the National Socialists or the International Socialists, we still end up with Socialism. And we've totally missed the point that neither was the only -- or anything close to the best -- of the available choices for a political system.
It reminds me of an old thing that the soda companies produced back in the mid 1970s. It was framed as "the Pepsi Challenge." Remember it? Maybe it never made it to the UK, but it was big on the other side of the pond. Anyway, the scam went like this: the Pepsi company set up a series of blind taste tests in which one cup was filled with Pepsi and the other with Coke. Then they filmed people choosing the Pepsi, and then banged away on the message that most people, if given the chance, would end up choosing the Pepsi.
For a while, the marketing ploy was quite successful. It raised Pepsi sales somewhat, and even stimulated Coke into inventing a marketing disaster called "New Coke," which mimicked the sweeter taste of Pepsi.
But here's the one things the Pepsi Challenge hid from consumers: that nobody needs to be drinking ANY caramel-flavoured sugar beverage. Its unhealthy, whichever one chooses, and there are much better things to be drinking. Yet by distracting consumers, and getting them to allign as "I'm a Coke," or "I'm a Pepsi," they made people think the most important kind of decision had been settled, whereas in point of fact, they were increasing public dependence on and unawareness of sugar beverages. It didn't much matter whether you were on Coke's side or Pepsi's: you were still going to be paying too much for a lousy product that made you fat and sick. But nothing in the Pepsi Challenge raised any of the really important issues or offered an alternative.
Here's the fiendishly clever part of all that: by repositioning the debate to a war over only two options that were essentially the same, they increased the loyalty of people to their relative brands, while simultaneously distracting consumers from any thought about the actual value of the product they were pushing on the public. It was brilliant and wicked at the same time.
Now, Socialists are up to the same game. As you probably know already, The
Fascist Manifesto of Mussolini came directly from the
Communist Manifesto, often word-for-word. And no wonder: Mussolini had been a member of the Italian Communist Party before he became
Il Duce. His program may have been more nationalistic than that of the Communists, but the key thing they disagreed on was not the need for things like a totalitarian government, control of industry, the subordination or theft of private property, and the need to militarize their creed and acquire territory, and a utopian dream of a monolythic, universal political future. Both sides agreed on all of that. They only fought over
who would get to control the final product.
No wonder, then, that even Stalin started out with a happy little pact with Hitler, as you will recall. They were both Socialists, totalitarians, megalomaniacs and war-mongers with aggressive territorial ambitions, obviously. Dividing up the world would give wins to them both, at least at first. Their eventual rupture,as you probably also know, was not going to be over political ideology, but on who would control territory they both wanted, and who would master the post-war world order. But the family resemblance between the Stalins, the Maos, the Hitlers, the Mussolinis, the Castros, the Kim Jongs, and such of the world is natural. They're all the same thing...Coke and Pepsi. There really isn't a choice being offered, and far too many of us are distracted by the superficial conflict between them, not realizing that they are doing essentially the same thing to us, either way.
So I think we have to reject the present tendence to throw about the "Nazi" label for a second reason. Not only because it's anachronistic and silly, but also because it obscures the real choice people have today: whether to opt for some Socialist-utopian political scheme, or to choose a different option altogether such as parliamentary democracy, republican representational democracy, classical liberalism, or something else...something new, maybe. And I think whenever the "Nazi" epithet rears its ugly head, we can be pretty much guaranteed that the speaker is not interested in the issues anymore, but rather either on cheap and unwarranted insults, or on the Coke-Pepsi obscurantist technique. Neither is particularly helpful to dialogue, obviously.
Yes, the resorting to the "Nazi" epithet is intellectually "lazy" as you say. But I think it may well be a good deal worse than just that, and a lot more destructive to careful thought than many may imagine. At least on the part of some or Leftism's more-aware advocates, it's an attempt to reposition the whole argument in a Coke-Pepsi way and to subvert public awareness of key issues.
Sometimes it's perfectly appropriate to mention Hitler and the Nazis. Nazism is looked upon as the most evil ideology in known history, not least of all because it occurred post-enlightenment and very recently from a historical perspective, and in a country that was considered very civilised and liberal for the time. People will naturally use it as a measuring stick.
