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Comment & Analysis
Reductio ad Hitlerum
Lashius Ncube
18 July 2005 07:14
Is Robert Mugabe in the same league as Adolf Hitle?
John Vidal ("The hypocrisy of Mugabe's critics", July 8) scratched the
surface of what is a bigger problem bedevilling the Zimbabwe political
debate.
The American political philosopher of German descent, Leo Strauss, called it
the reductio ad Hitlerum. Noting the increased use of Nazi analogies, he
argued that it was fallacious to refute a view simply because Hitler
happened to share it.
In an interview with John Carlin (The Sunday Independent, December 6 1998),
Nelson Mandela was asked: "Where would you put apartheid in the scale of
20th-century atrocities?"
The legend replied: "With the exception of the atrocities against the Jews
during the Second World War, there is no evil that has been as condemned by
the entire world as apartheid."
Even after spending 27 years in prison, Mandela resisted the temptation to
suggest that apartheid was a worse evil than Nazism. In a world with an
insatiable penchant for hyperbole, where we loosely and readily refer to
events as the worst ever, such admirable ability to retain a sense of
perspective is rare.
The employment of the reductio ad Hitlerum has the effect of transporting
debate to a stratum where facts, objectivity and logic are subordinate to
emotions. The language employed by exponents of this strategy is
manipulative and conspicuously insensitive, the name-calling breathtakingly
visceral.
The reductio ad Hitlerum formed part of the United States's excuse for
attacking Iraq. Saddam Hussein was portrayed as a monster who was planning
to incinerate his own people and enemies alike with weapons of mass
destruction in the same way Hitler had gassed the Jews. The same Hitler
analogies formed part of the justification for the Nato attacks on
Yugoslavia because Slobodan Milosevic had become "a modern-day Hitler".
Enter Robert Mugabe, a "monster who starves his own people and uses food as
a weapon". The Zimbabwean president has been added to the infamous pantheon
of history's worst despots.
Morgan Tsvangirai was among those who popularised the "Mugabe is Africa's
Milosevic" opinion. "We must stop Africa's Milosevic," the Movement for
Democratic Change (MDC) leader said in October 2000. "There's no difference
between the situation in Yugoslavia and the situation in Zimbabwe."
Five years later, the situation in Zimbabwe has changed to supposedly
resemble that in Cambodia under Pol Pot, with Tsvangirai, horrified by
Operation Murambatsvina, telling business leaders in Johannesburg last week
that Mugabe is "Pol Pot in slow motion".
The Zimbabwe political discourse is being sustained by an array of cowardly
tactics. In 2003, the US blamed escalating violence in Zimbabwe on Mugabe
comparing himself to Hitler. A Washington statement said that "the upsurge
in official violence is directly attributable to President Mugabe's speech
last Friday in which he said he could be a 'black Hitler tenfold' in
crushing his opponents."
Mugabe was in fact responding to reports in sections of the British press
branding him Hitler. He said: "This Hitler has only one objective: justice
for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence
of his people and their rights over their resources. If that is Hitler, then
let me be a Hitler tenfold."
Cartoonists show no compunction about inserting a Hilterist moustache on the
Zimbabwean president. As far as they are concerned "Mad Bob" is the
identikit despot. He is Hitler, Milosevic, Idi Amin and Pol Pot rolled into
one.
But are acts of violence and human rights abuses perpetrated by Mugabe's
regime the closest developments to genocide since Milosovic's ethnic
cleansing projects in Yugoslavia or Hitler's gas chambers in Auschwitz? In
Zimbabwe under Mugabe, are we beginning to see the reincarnation of
apartheid or man-made atrocities on a scale to rival Pol Pot's killing
fields in Cambodia?
Quite how the architect of Operation Murambatsvina, a project whose
admittedly callous execution caused six reported "accidental" deaths, can
evoke serious analogies with Pol Pot, who presided over the slaughter of
two-million Cambodians -- a quarter of his country's population -- beggars
belief.
These outlandish comparisons flourish because of our fear that we will be
labelled Mugabeists if we challenge them.
The point of this article is not to exonerate Mugabe or humanise him by
suggesting that he is not a patch on Pol Pot, or that he looks positively
Lilliputian compared to Hitler, but to question the validity of these
comparisons.
The MDC sees no contradiction in mooting power-sharing proposals with a
government that it claims advocates Hitlerist policies.
Ahead of the March 31 parliamentary elections, many political pundits and
the media shared and promoted the view that conditions in Zimbabwe were
analogous to those prevailing in Ukraine heading into that country's
elections in late 2004. They then predicted a Ukraine-style regime change in
Zimbabwe, when in the aftermath of a rigged election Zimbabweans would be
mobilised for a mass protest culminating in Mugabe's removal.
Confronted by accusations of a weak leadership, Tsvangirai defended himself.
"Zimbabwe is not Ukraine ...We have to be realistic," he told the Washington
Post on April 3.
How about demonstrating the same realism by jettisoning the extravagant Pol
Pot analogies and cheap Hitler invocations and focus instead on the business
of returning Zimbabwe to the rule of law?
Lashias Ncube is a Zimbabwean journalist living in Cape Town Related
articles # Zimbabwe is being hypocritically vilified by the west
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