"The Nazi Card"

Chico State University grad Brian Johnson is now Assistant Professor of Humanities at Cuyahoga Community College, in Cleveland, Ohio where he teaches American literature and popular culture. 

In a new book he examines with scholarly precision the roots of what has become commonplace in the internet age, reflected in "Godwin's Law," which asserts that any online discussion (about anything at all), if it goes on long enough, will inevitably usher in some comparison to Adolf Hitler.

Johnson argues that such comparisons have lost their original meaning. "Historically," he writes, "the Nazis were defeated in 1945, but rhetorically they continue on through analogy until today. Each incarnation of their reference has altered their definition subtly so that Nazis now can refer to totalitarian politics, a drive toward world domination, racism, … irresponsible science, … feminist excesses, warlike attitudes"--the list goes on. Yet "what is the nature of Nazi evil if it isn't the Holocaust?"

"The Nazi Card" ($85 in hardcover from Lexington Books) traces "Nazi comparisons at the beginning of the Cold War," as the subtitle says, ranging not only through the age of the anti-Communist "Red Scare," and the Black Power and the Civil Rights movements, but also developments in the twenty-first century. 

Focusing primarily on Nazi analogies in American film (such as Charlie Chaplin's rendition of "Adenoid Hynkel" in "The Great Dictator" of 1940 and Peter Sellers as "Dr. Strangelove" in 1964), the book finds that even after the horror of the death camps entered public consciousness,  the Nazi analogy, representing absolute evil, has been over time sundered from the actual "egregious crimes" of the Hitler regime.

Applications of the Nazi analogy grow more and more arbitrary in popular culture, Johnson maintains, even when better analogies are available. "Why aren't Communists, better armed and a more imminent threat, a better description of a present menace than the Nazis, who were long ago defeated?" And, at times, "analogies to Nazism were employed to justify, not condemn, harassment of Jewish-Americans."

The bottom line for Johnson is that the misuse of Nazi analogies impedes careful moral reasoning. There is danger that the abundance of arbitrary Nazi comparisons may tempt us to forget what really happened.