Until Residence Life creates a totalitarian state with the explicit goal of militarily dominating the globe to create absolute racial purity through mass murder, then we suggest that none of their actions are "Nazi-like."
And for our friend Derek, our condemnation of poor Nazi analogies extends to Rush Limbaugh's use of "feminazi." For more on that issue, see Victor Davis Hanson's response to an, uh, excited reader (scroll down into the "Angry Reader" section).
5 comments:
Hanson sort of kind of condemns Limbaugh, but then pretends that he is merely a radio entertainer, which is simply utterly untrue. limbaugh is firmly within a media/cultural constallation on the right that is not the Big Tent right, but that is arguably the most important voice in the entire medium of radio. Anyone who has been able to stomach his show for moe than ten minutes knows that he is very serious about what he does. Whether Hasnon is being intentionally disingenuous or merely obtuse is up for debate, but it just goes to show the lengths that the right will go to not to tackle Limbaugh head on. He's a blowhard, but he's their blowhard.
I think it is an indication that Hanson does not take Limbaugh seriously in the least, no matter how seriously Limbaugh takes himself.
It's certainly true that people use "Nazi" (and "fascist") as an insult so often as to trivialise it, and I'm all for calling people on it when they do it thoughtlessly. But, well, I think you could argue that banning smoking is Nazi-like, since the Nazis were actually pioneers in the field of smoking restrictions ...
Mr. Holman,
Please tell me you are kidding. The Nazis also made kids participate in physical fitness, that doesn't make gym class Nazi-like. Banning smoking is not what made the Nazis Nazis, not even close.
Thanks for stopping by, and good luck with your Ph.D.
Well, I'm only half joking, or half serious, if you prefer! Yes, of course smoking bans don't exactly go to the heart of Nazism's evil. And I doubt very much whether whoever wrote the original letter was aware of the Nazis' actual policies on this matter: it was just a generic term of abuse. But the fact remains that banning smoking is Nazi-like in the very narrow and perhaps quite trivial sense that they were the first to recognise the link between smoking and cancer, and the first to start a public-health campaign to try to stamp out smoking. (Though they didn't ban it in student dorms, that I'm aware of ... )
For what it's worth, Proctor argues that the Nazi war on cancer was "fostered ... by a national political climate stressing the virtues of racial hygiene and bodily purity" (p. 174). Which would mean that (a) it was actually an authentically Nazi project, not just something they happened to do as part of running a country (like building roads or collecting taxes) and, or rather but, (b) the motivations for banning smoking in modern societies are completely different to those of the Nazis.
Put another way: in public discourse, terms like "Nazi-like" shouldn't be thrown around at people without a very good reason - that is to say, hardly ever. But academically, as historians, and provided we are very careful, surely it is part of the job to notice the similarities between societies as well as the differences - without obscuring those differences, which in this case are far greater and far more important than the similarities.
Anyway, I ended up being more serious than I intended, I really just wanted to mention Proctor's book, which is fascinating and deserves to be widely read. BTW, thanks on the well-wishes ... it's early days yet! So I should get back to it ...
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