posted October 04, 2007 08:18 PM            

Example:
[T]he ideas of ecologists about invasive species—alien species as they are often called—sound…similar to anti-immigration rhetoric. Green themes like scarcity and purity and invasion and protection all have right-wing echoes. Hitler's ideas about environmentalism came out of purity, after all.

Source: Interview of Betsy Hartmann by Fred Pearce, "The Greening of Hate", New Scientist, 2/20/2003

Forms

Adolf Hitler accepted idea I.
Therefore, I must be wrong.

The Nazis accepted idea I.
Therefore, I must be wrong.

Examples

Hitler was in favor of euthanasia.
Therefore, euthanasia is wrong.

The Nazis favored eugenics.
Therefore, eugenics is wrong.

Counter-Examples

Hitler was a vegetarian.
Therefore, vegetarianism is wrong.

The Nazis were conservationists.
Therefore, conservationism is wrong.

Exposition:
In almost every heated debate, one side or the other—often both—plays the "Hitler card", that is, criticizes their opponent's position by associating it in some way with Adolf Hitler or the Nazis in general. This move is so common that it led Mike Godwin to develop the well-known "Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies": "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

No one wants to be associated with Nazism because it has been so thoroughly discredited in both theory and practise, and Hitler of course was its most famous exponent. So, linking an idea with Hitler or Nazism has become a common form of argument ascribing guilt by association.

Some instances of the Hitler card are factually incorrect, or even ludicrous, in ascribing ideas to Hitler or other Nazis that they did not hold. However, from a logical point of view, even if Hitler or other Nazis did accept an idea, this historical fact alone is insufficient to discredit it.

The Hitler Card is often combined with other fallacies, for instance, a weak analogy between an opponent and Hitler, or between the opposition political group and the Nazis. A related form of fallacious analogy is that which compares an opposition's actions with the Holocaust. This is a form of the ad Nazium fallacy because it casts the opposition in the role of Nazi. Not only do such arguments assign guilt by association, but the analogy used to link the opposition's actions with the Holocaust may be superficial or question-begging.

Other arguments ad Nazium combine guilt by association with a slippery slope. For instance, it is sometimes argued that the Nazis practised euthanasia, and therefore even voluntary forms of it are a first step onto a slippery slope leading to extermination camps. Like many slippery slope arguments, this is a way of avoiding arguing directly against voluntary euthanasia, instead claiming that it may indirectly lead to something admittedly bad.

Playing the Hitler Card demonizes opponents in debate by associating them with evil, and almost always derails the discussion. People naturally resent being associated with Nazism, and are usually angered. In this way, playing the Hitler Card can be an effective distraction in a debate, causing the opponent to lose track of the argument. However, when people become convinced by guilt by association arguments that their political opponents are not just mistaken, but are as evil as Nazis, reasoned debate can give way to violence. So, playing the Hitler Card is more than just a dirty trick in debate, it is often "fighting words".

Exposure:
Germany today bans capital punishment, but the history of this ban is surprising: The government of the former West Germany adopted the ban in 1949 and it continues in effect today in the reunited Germany. The law which banned the death penalty was proposed by a politician sympathetic to the Nazi war criminals who were being executed after World War 2, and was intended to block such executions. Should the disreputable historical origins of the ban influence those Germans who today oppose capital punishment to reconsider their views? Should the ban be repealed simply because it was the brainchild of a Nazi sympathizer? Capital punishment is either right or wrong. If it is right, then the ban should be repealed, regardless of its origins; if it's wrong, then the ban should be continued, despite its origins. While the history of the origins of Germany's ban on capital punishment is interesting, it is irrelevant to the moral and legal question of whether the ban should continue. Those Germans who support capital punishment should resist the temptation to play the Hitler card.

Sources:
Mike Godwin, "Meme, Counter-meme", Wired, Issue 2.10, 10/1994
Charles Lane, "The Paradoxes of a Death Penalty Stance", Washington Post, 6/4/2005
Resources:
Josie Appleton, "I'm right because…you're a Nazi", Spiked, 1/24/2002
Arthur L. Caplan, "Editorial: Misusing the Nazi Analogy", Science Vol. 309, 7/22/2005 (PDF). Registration required.
Nigel Warburton, Thinking from A to Z (Second Edition) (Routledge, 2001), "Bad Company Fallacy".
Related Fallacy Files weblog entries:
Was Hitler an Environmentalist?, 3/9/2003
Playing the Hitler Card, 3/22/2003
Springtime for Hitler Analogies, 1/7/2004
Was Hitler a Vegetarian?, 2/29/2004
Reader Response, 5/2/2005

Acknowledgments:
Thanks to Michael Koplow for the Example, to Dominic Sisti for pointing out the Caplan editorial, and to Joanna Roberts for reminding me about Godwin's Law. The poster for Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator" is available from AllPosters. http://www.fallacyfiles.org/adnazium.html

******

posted October 04, 2007 11:11 PM            

Wonderful input Elenore:

That's not all though; Notice that another common fallacy that goes around in most forums is the "ad hoc" fallacy.

Goes something like this:

If A behaves like C
and B behaves like C

Then A is C.

Now the logic in this structure is clarly lost. To put it in a sentence:

GW likes Bananas.
Monkeys like Bananas.
GW is a Monkey.

posted October 05, 2007 01:30 AM            

In your examples, the logic can go either way.

John acts like a Canadian
Jane acts like a Canadian
John is a Canadian

John acts like a Canadian
Jane acts like a Canadian
John is Jane?

John could be a Canadian, or he could merely appear to be a Canadian due to some cultural similarity to Canadians. The premise isn't clearly logical.

In the second one John could be Jane, but it's obviously likely that John isn't Jane.

The mathematic premise you're trying to copy is the Transitive Property. If A = B, and B = C, then A = C. That's logical in mathematical terms. Trying to extrapolate that out to people isn't the most logical, though.

If

Jane = John because they share a love of books, and
John = Kenny because they share a love of baseball, then
Jane = Kenny may or may not be true

posted October 05, 2007 01:23 PM              

George W. Bush's grandfather helped finance the Nazi Party. Karl Rove's grandfather allegedly helped run the Nazi Party, and helped build the Birkenau Death Camp. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Austrian father volunteered for the infamous Nazi SA and became a ranking officer.

Together, they have destabilized California and are on the brink of bringing it a new Reich. With the Schwarzenegger candidacy they have laid siege to America's largest state, lining it up for the 2004 election.

The Bush family ties to the Nazi party are well known. In their 1994 Secret War Against the Jews, Mark Aarons and John Loftus use official US documents to establish that George Herbert Walker, George W. Bush's maternal great-grandfather, was one of Hitler's most important early backers. He funneled money to the rising young fascist through the Union Banking Corporation.

In 1926, Walker arranged to have his new son-in-law, Prescott Bush---father of President George Bush I, grandfather of George Bush II---hired as Vice President at W.A. Harriman and Company. Prescott became a senior partner when Harriman merged with a British-American investment company to become Brown Brothers Harriman. In 1934 Prescott Bush joined the Board of Directors of Union Banking.

The bank helped Hitler rise to power. It also helped him wage war. As late as July 31, 1941---well after the Nazi invasion of Poland---the U.S. government froze $3 million in Union Banking assets linked to Fritz Thyssen. Thyssen was noted in the American press as a "German industrialist and original backer of Adolph Hitler."

Loftus writes that Thyssen's "American friends in New York City [were] Prescott Bush and Herbert Walker, the father and father-in-law of a future President of the United States." That would be the current president's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, also the former CIA director.

On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi Germany's banking operations in New York City, which were under the direction of Prescott Bush. The government seized control of Union Banking Corporation under the Trading with the Enemy Act. The liquidation yielded a reported $750,000 apiece for Prescott Bush and George Herbert Walker. The book, The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide, goes into exhaustive detail on Bush-Harriman Nazi money laundering. More recently, Michael Kranish covers the same Bush-Nazi relationships in The Rise of the Bush Family Dynasty published in the Boston Globe. Loftus documents that "Prescott Bush knowingly served as a money launderer for the Nazis. Remember that Union Bank's books and accounts were frozen by the U.S. Alien Property Custodian in 1942 and not released back to the Bush family until 1951."

Often ignored are the Bush family's post-World War II dealings with former Nazis. John Foster Dulles, who had worked with the Bush family in the Harriman Company in laundering money for Nazi Germany, was Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of State. His brother Allen became CIA director.

As Martin Lee documents in The Beast Reawakens, American intelligence recruited numerous top Nazis to spy on the Soviets during the Cold War. Many established connections to the Bush family that had helped finance their original rise to power. In 1988 Project Censored, in its top award, noted "how the major mass media ignored, overlooked or undercovered at least ten critical stories reported in America's alternative press that raised serious questions about the Republican candidate, George Bush, dating from his reported role as a CIA 'asset' in 1963 to his presidential campaign's connection with a network of anti-Semites with Nazi and fascist affiliations in 1988."Investigative reporter Russ Bellant established ties between the Republican Party and former Axis Nazis and fascists.

In 2000 and 2001 the Columbus Alive published a series of articles documenting further links between Bush, Sr. and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his own fascist networks in Japan and Korea.

Karl Rove has parallel ties. The shadowy Rove serves as "Bush's Brain" in the current White House. He is the political mastermind behind the California coup, and is now in the headlines for outing Valerie Plame, the CIA wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson. A consummate strategist, Rove may have outed Plame in retaliation for Wilson's failure to back up the Bush claim that Saddam Hussein was buying nuclear weapons materials in Africa. According to some published reports, as many as seventy CIA operatives have been put at risk by Rove's retaliatory strike.

According to Wilson, and to Retired U.S. Navy Lt. Commander Al Martin (www.almartinraw.com), Rove's grandfather was Karl Heinz Roverer, the Gauleiter of Oldenburg. Roverer was Reich-Statthalter---Nazi State Party Chairman---for his region. He was also a partner and senior engineer in the Roverer Sud-Deutche Ingenieurburo A. G. engineering firm, which built the Birkenau death camp, at which tens of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, dissidents and other were slaughtered en masse.

Rove, who has been based in Utah and associated with the Mormon Church, is widely viewed as the chief engineer of the current Bush administration. He and Tom DeLay are attempting to force the Texas legislature to redistrict its Congressional delegations, adding seven sure seats to the Republican column. By controlling the state houses in New York, Florida, Texas and California, the GOP would have a lock on the four largest states in the union, and thus the ability to manipulate vote counts and strip voter registration rolls in the run-up to the 2004 election.

Rove is a prime behind-the-scenes mover in the Schwarzenegger campaign. On May 1, 1939, a year after the Nazis took control of Schwarzenegger's native Austria, his father Gustav, voluntarily joined Hilter's infamous Strumabteilung (SA), "brown shirt" stormtroopers. This was just six months after the brown shirts played a key role in the bloody Kristallnacht attacks on Germany's Jewish community.

The Vienna daily Der Standard noted recently that "Gustav, a high-ranking Nazi, brought up the bespectacled, rather frail boy with an iron fist and quite a few slaps in the face." Arnold's father favored a Hitler-style mustache in photos.

On October 3, ABC News broke the story of Schwarzenegger's 1977 interview in which he was asked whom he admired. Schwarzenegger replied, "I admire Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it."

To cover himself, Schwarzenegger has made substantial donations to the Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center, which tracks down ex-Nazis. Arnold has also renounced Hitler.

But he has not renounced his friendship with fellow Austrian Kurt Waldheim, the one-time head of the United Nations with known Nazi ties. The book Arnold: An Unauthorized Biography, documents Arnold toasting Waldheim, who had participated in Nazi atrocities during World War II, at his wedding to Maria Shriver. "My friends don't want me to mention Kurt's name, because of all the recent Nazi stuff and the U.N. controversy," Arnold said. "But I love him and Maria does to, and so thank you, Kurt."

On May 17, 2001, Schwarzenegger also met with Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay of Enron at the Peninsula Hotel in Los Angeles. Through the utility deregulation plan signed into law by Pete Wilson, Schwarzenegger's chief advisor, California was destabilized, bankrupting the state government and opening the door for Tuesday's recall election. Lay has been George W. Bush's chief financial backer, and a close associate of Karl Rove's.

According to Bob Woodward's Bush at War, Bush attended a New York Yankees game soon after the September 11 World Trade Center disaster. He wore a fireman's jacket. As he threw out the first pitch, the crowd roared. Thousands of fans stuck out their arms with thumbs up. Karl Rove, sitting in the box of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner, likened the roar of the crowd to "a Nazi rally."

He would know.

posted October 05, 2007 01:56 PM            

You'd know that...if you knew the connection came merely through a client of a bank a Bush ancestor was involved with.

Thyssen Industries was the banks client, not the Nazi Party or Hitler.

In the mid 1930's Thyssen broke off relations with Hitler...AND Hitler then confiscated the holding of Thyssen Industries.

Some support of Hitler by the Bush family.

God, if only 2% of what loony leftists take as absolute gospel truth was really true it would be a giant step up for their intellectual awareness.

posted October 06, 2007 12:57 PM            

Thyssen Industries did have an account in the US but Thyssen was not in control of that account, the whole of Thyssen Intustries...including bank accounts had been seized/confiscated by Hitler when Thyssen broke with and opposed Hitler and the Nazis. Thyssen was a German citizen...not a citizen of the US.

Now, leftists can wheeze and screech about Prescott Bush...and his fictitious association with Hitler and the Nazi party. But, as usual, it's just more leftist bullshiiit.

So, what is it leftist believe? Should Bush have closed the account...and sent the funds in the account to Hitler the Socialist? That's one possibility but that would have helped Hitler's war effort.

Should Bush have turned over the funds of the account to the US government? Under what authority could Bush even do that? Any of you leftists ever read the 5th Amendment to the Constitution..answer NO. Any of you leftists ever read anything about "due process"...answer NO.

How about an answer from leftists here...about what alternatives Prescott Bush had...considering the banks client, Thyssen Industries had it's entire industrial empire confiscated by Hitler...including any and all bank accounts in Germany or around the world.

Leftists are real big on making accusations. Let's see how much leftists actually know about US law and what legal options could have been employed by Prescott Bush and/or Union Bank.

posted October 06, 2007 06:29 PM            

quote:

---

just because our fascist administration has adopted much of Hitler's nazi fascism, doesn't mean that they're at all like hitler. i get it.

---

Personally, I like the Hitler/Nazi analogy, when it is used properly. It is a dramatic and powerful way of alerting a person to the seriousness of an offense (sometimes people's consciences are so woolly and weak, you have to draw the Hitler card just to get any reaction at all), or of indicating the ultimate ends of a certain viewpoint, when taken to its logical conclusion. Just because people overplay and misplay the card does not mean it has no place in the deck. I'd say that calling all Hitler comparisons odious, on the grounds that some are positively rank, would be a good example of "guilt by association", wouldn't you?

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