Former Secretary of State and likely 2016 Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton recently compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler. Hawks in Israel and the U.S. were fond of likening Iran’s former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler, though it is harder to do with Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani.
You don’t have to admire a foreign leader to think the Hitler comparison is irresponsible. Hitler was a genocidal dictator bent upon world conquest. Neville Chamberlain’s celebration of the 1938 Munich agreement as “peace in our time” lives in infamy. If someone is really Hitler, the only answer can be total war.
Surely Hillary Clinton does not really believe that Putin’s annexation of Crimea, which in 1954 Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave to Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, is a first step toward Russian invasion of Europe all the way to the beaches of Normandy. I trust she also does not think the U.S. should fight Russia, since such a war would unleash a nuclear apocalypse.
Casually comparing an opponent to Hitler not only blocks needed diplomacy; it also cheapens the darkest lesson in human history. The traumas of the First World War, humiliating terms of Versailles, and the Great Depression led a civilized nation into stark pathology. We have also seen genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda. Rather than call adversaries Hitler, we should take care to avoid the shocks and stresses that can push any society to madness and murder.
