Standort: fm4.ORF.at / Meldung: "Cheapening The Spectre of Hitler"

Chris Cummins

Letters from a shrinking globe: around the day in 80 worlds.

27. 11. 2010 - 13:17

Cheapening The Spectre of Hitler

British MEPs, German MPs, American politicians, South American presidents all seem to love using Hitler comparisons. Can it please stop now?

You sense details like facts and historical accuracy aren't very important to the UK Independence Party MEP Godfrey Bloom, a prominent denier of anthropogenic climate change and the man who, here in Strasbourg, celebrated his appointment to the European Parliament's committee on Women's Rights and Gender Equality with the infamous quote: "No self-respecting small businessman with a brain in the right place would ever employ a lady of child-bearing age."

Godfrey Bloom

EPA/THIERRY SUZAN

Godfrey Bloom

He might think he is acting as a crusader against the yoke of political correctness, and, of course, everyone is entitled their opinions, but that shouldn't be used as an excuse for imbecility.

Bloom was also filmed at last year's Copenhagen UN climate summit congratulating the French government for sinking Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 - an incident which now embarrasses France greatly and in which photographer Fernando Pereira lost his life. With such a track-record then, you might think the MEP would have lost his ability to shock. But to the delight of his tiny eurosceptic party and the consternation of almost everybody else, he has topped it all by interrupting a speech by German Social Democrat MEP Martin Schulz by shouting out "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer".

Bloom refused to apologise and bizarrely justified his remarks by referring to how his father use to fly Spitfire fighter planes during the Second World War. It's depressing that the chambers of the EU still echo with Hitler jibes in 2010. The now 27-nation bloc has its origins in a peace project aimed at leaving the tragedy of the 1930's and 1940's firmly in the past. Union Jack waving nationalists hate to be reminded of it, but, in a 1946 speech, their beloved icon of bulldog "Britishness" Winston Churchill called on Europe to "build a kind of United States of Europe" saying it was imperative to "re-create the European Family, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom."

Hitler Maske unter anderen Faschingsmasken

dpa - Zik/Epress/st

Still, this wasn't the first time that Schulz has been hit by Nazi jibes, and it's not only obscure British MEPs who seem still afflicted by what can only be described as a dangerously resistant form of Teutophobia. A couple of years back Italian MP Silvio Berlusconi told the German MEP that he would be perfect to play the film role of a concentration camp guard.

Neither is Godfrey Bloom the only politician to use the name of Hitler to make political capital. Even the Germans have been banding it about. Thomas Strobl, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's party was forced to grovel for his job this month after inappropriately comparing an opponent with the Austrian-born dictator; and this a few years after a junior minister was forced to resign after opining that George W. Bush had "acted like Hitler" by invading Iraq.

The opinion wasn't particularly original, of course, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez had been regularly denouncing Bush as Hitler for months, and Ayatollah Khameini of Iran, who presides over an openly anti-Semitic state, had been doing it for years. But the Texan can't complain since he enthusiastically used the slur himself to rally his country for a disastrous war in Iraq by likening Saddam Hussein to the demagogue from Braunau ( with the ensuing emotional appeal 'let's not fall victim to appeasement again'), while for Bush's defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld it was not his boss but rather Hugo Chavez himself who resembled Hitler. Bush had an aggressive foreign policy, Saddam was a ridiculous brutish and murderous tin-pot dictator and Chavez has a loose interpretation of democracy, but none of them can be properly compared to Hitler.

Where will it all end? Barack Obama, equally famous as infamous for his mild manner and love of consensus, is regularly likened to Hitler by Republicans (mostly from the lunatic Tea Party fringe). Here in Austria, preposterously, people trying to make inroads in protecting workers against passive smoking (a global killer of 600,000 people annually according the WHO) are likened to Hitler's henchman by a frightened tobacco lobby.

These insults are ridiculous. As Frederick H. Schümann wrote this month in the Tagesspiegel in Berlin, we should be clear on the parameters of Hitler comparisons. If your enemy started a world war and attempts to exterminate entire ethnic groups then you can compare him (or her) to Hitler. If this is not the case then you are cheapening Hitler's spectre and doing a massive injustice to his millions of victims. Grow up.