There are excellent reasons to oppose Donald Trump, and there are excellent reasons to oppose Benjamin Netanyahu. Neither case requires Adolf Hitler, and it certainly does not require Lord Voldemort.\n<\/p>\n
One might expect people who invoke the history of Nazi Germany in contemporary political arguments to be especially careful about doing so. Instead, Hitler has become a portable unit of political measurement. A politician says or does something authoritarian, discriminatory, cruel or merely obnoxious, and somewhere between the first angry post and the fiftieth reply on social media, the Third Reich appears in meme form as if somebody has decided that ordinary political vocabulary is no longer sufficiently punitive. Netanyahu has repeatedly been compared to Hitler over the conduct of the war in Gaza. Trump has been compared to Hitler for roughly a decade. When Hitler feels too historically grave, another villain is available from popular culture: Lord Voldemort.\n<\/p>\n
The Voldemort comparison became unusually persistent during Trump\u2019s first presidential campaign. In December 2015, after Trump proposed barring Muslims from entering the United States, J. K. Rowling responded to people comparing him with her fictional villain by saying that Voldemort was \u201cnowhere near as bad.\u201d Daniel Radcliffe later entertained the analogy while making a more interesting observation: Trump appeared considerably more opportunistic, and less ideologically coherent, than Voldemort. What began as a joke became part of the political vocabulary surrounding Trump, especially among American progressives. Trump was apparently less of a true Slytherin than Voldemort. Fine. It was funny in 2015. It was not political analysis then, and it has not improved with age.\n<\/p>\n
The Hitler comparison is much worse because it converts an actual historical dictator, an actual political regime and an actual genocide into an all-purpose adjective for extreme political wickedness. The objection is not that Trump or Netanyahu should be insulated from severe criticism. Both men can be criticized in terms considerably harsher than those ordinarily used in respectable political conversation. The objection is that Adolf Hitler was a specific person operating within a particular historical system, and the contents of that system cannot be detached from his name every time someone wants to make a contemporary politician look exceptionally evil.\n<\/p>\n
National Socialism emerged from the racial nationalism, antisemitism, political violence, revanchism and social dislocation of post-First World War Germany. Hitler attempted a putsch in 1923, published Mein Kampf, developed a mass political movement organized around racial ideology and F\u00fchrer authority, became chancellor in January 1933, dismantled German constitutional government, established a one-party dictatorship, began a European war of conquest and presided over a state apparatus that murdered approximately six million Jews through an explicitly exterminatory racial project. Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, political opponents, gay men and numerous others were imprisoned, persecuted, sterilized, deported or murdered under the Nazi regime. That history is not ancillary information attached to the word \u201cHitler.\u201d It is what makes Hitler Hitler. In a period of persistent Holocaust denial, resurgent antisemitism and renewed right-wing nationalism, stripping away those particulars in order to obtain a stronger insult is especially irresponsible.\n<\/p>\n
Leo Strauss described one version of the intellectual problem in Natural Right and History in 1953, using the phrase reductio ad Hitlerum for the habit of treating Hitler\u2019s approval of a proposition as evidence that the proposition itself must be wrong. Contemporary political culture regularly performs the operation in reverse. A politician does something reprehensible; Hitler did reprehensible things; therefore the politician can be called Hitler. The association supplies a moral verdict without establishing the historical relationship supposedly necessary to justify it.\n<\/p>\n
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has repeatedly warned against careless Nazi and Holocaust analogies for much the same reason. The Holocaust becomes less historically intelligible when it is treated as an expandable metaphor for anything sufficiently terrible. People invoke Hitler because they want to signal that the political situation before them is extremely serious, but indiscriminate use of his name can have the peculiar effect of making Hitler less historically serious. He stops being the ruler of Nazi Germany and becomes a pictogram meaning BAD PERSON, often accompanied by a moustache pasted onto somebody else\u2019s face.\n<\/p>\n
None of this means historians should stop making comparisons. Historical comparison is useful because subjects can share particular characteristics without being identical. A historian can compare propaganda systems, legal mechanisms, administrative practices, forms of political violence, racial ideologies, techniques of democratic erosion or personality cults while also identifying where the comparison breaks down. Those distinctions are not pedantry. They are the substance of the work.\n<\/p>\n
Trump supplies ample material for serious comparison with authoritarian and fascist political traditions without anybody pretending that he is Adolf Hitler. His rhetoric has included the demonization of immigrants, expansive claims about presidential authority, attacks upon institutional constraints, hostility toward sectors of the press, demands for personal loyalty and the construction of a political movement heavily organized around his individual personality. His former chief of staff John Kelly said in 2024 that Trump satisfied Kelly\u2019s understanding of the general definition of fascism and described him as authoritarian. Kelly also reported disturbing remarks by Trump concerning Hitler. Scholars of fascism and constitutional government can therefore examine Trumpism against earlier political movements, establish the relevant similarities and differences, and argue about terminology on the evidence.\n<\/p>\n
Calling Trump \u201cHitler\u201d damages that inquiry because it shifts the subject away from Trump\u2019s own conduct. The critic has selected the most extreme political comparator available and must now defend an equation that cannot survive serious historical examination. Presidential power, immigration policy, the treatment of constitutional restraints, executive conduct, political violence and attacks upon democratic institutions disappear behind an argument over whether Trump has somehow reproduced National Socialism. He has not. Saying so does not acquit him of anything he has actually done. It simply refuses to make the case against Donald Trump depend upon Adolf Hitler\u2019s biography.\n<\/p>\n
Benjamin Netanyahu produces a different historical problem. Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan has said that there is effectively no difference between Netanyahu and Hitler. Iranian diplomatic accounts have circulated Hitler comparisons. Netanyahu has repeatedly appeared in Nazi imagery produced by political opponents. Such imagery does nothing necessary to establish the severity of Israeli military conduct in Gaza and should not be treated as the natural vocabulary of opposition to it.\n<\/p>\n
The International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu on November 21, 2024, after finding reasonable grounds to believe that he bore criminal responsibility for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including starvation as a method of warfare, murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. Those allegations already belong to an extraordinarily serious legal vocabulary. International humanitarian law and international criminal law contain precise terms for what governments and military leaders may do to civilian populations. Palestinian deaths have names, dates and locations. Israeli governmental decisions can be identified. Military operations can be investigated. Ministers can be quoted. Orders, command structures and policies can be examined. Courts can determine jurisdiction, evidentiary sufficiency and individual criminal responsibility. Replacing that apparatus with \u201cHitler\u201d does not make the case stronger. It removes information from it.\n<\/p>\n
There is an additional problem when Hitler imagery is placed onto an Israeli prime minister. Netanyahu does not acquire immunity from criticism because he is Jewish, because he governs Israel or because the Holocaust occurred. Israeli military and governmental conduct remains fully available for historical, political and legal scrutiny, and antisemitism should never become an excuse for pretending otherwise. But criticism of Netanyahu does not acquire greater moral force by giving him Hitler\u2019s moustache. Nazi persecution of Jews can instead become material for Holocaust inversion, in which the history of Jewish victimization is redeployed to suggest that Jews, Israelis or the Jewish state have assumed the Nazi role. That maneuver carries implications considerably beyond criticism of a particular Israeli government.\n<\/p>\n
I oppose Netanyahu and have extensively and publicly criticized Israeli military action in Palestine. None of that requires collapsing Jewishness into Israeli state policy, much less importing Hitler as a means of intensifying the indictment. A person who believes Israeli officials have committed crimes should be willing to identify the alleged crimes and prove the claim. Hitler should not have to perform evidentiary labor for them.\n<\/p>\n
The Voldemort comparison has no comparable historical gravity, but that does not make it intellectually useful. Voldemort is a fictional dark wizard created for a fantasy series whose moral architecture requires an unusually recognizable villain. He possesses supernatural powers, sorts magical people according to imaginary blood status, stores pieces of his soul inside enchanted objects, commands followers called Death Eaters and spends much of the series attempting to murder a schoolboy because of a prophecy. Whatever else can be learned from Harry Potter, this is not a model of executive government.\n<\/p>\n
The attraction of such a comparison is easy enough to understand. Fiction, especially children\u2019s literature, supplies villains whose moral status has already been settled by the author. Nobody encountering Voldemort has to conduct an inquiry into whether he is behaving badly. The story has done that work before the reader arrives. Applying the name to a politician therefore allows the speaker to import the verdict without demonstrating how the actual political system works.\n<\/p>\n
Trump is not frightening because he resembles a fictional wizard. Netanyahu is not accountable because he can be assigned the role of villain in somebody else\u2019s fantasy narrative. Real political actors operate through legislatures, executives, courts, militaries, bureaucracies, parties, donors, voters, media systems and law. Their power depends upon institutions and other human beings. Understanding those mechanisms is essential because democracies cannot defend themselves against Horcruxes, and international law has no jurisdiction over Death Eaters.\n<\/p>\n
The fictional analogy commits another intellectual offense by sneakily converting politics into a casting process that both absolves accountability and grants awards. Once somebody a person dislikes has been cast as Voldemort, the political actors opposing him inherit the position of the resistance. They become the good guys before their own conduct has been examined. Decisions that would ordinarily require scrutiny can then be interpreted through their assigned narrative function: Voldemort is evil, these people oppose Voldemort, therefore whatever they are doing belongs to the morally correct side of the story. Real political history is full of coalitions, opportunists, compromised institutions, mixed motives and rival actors who can oppose one another while behaving disgracefully in different ways. It rarely provides the clean casting required by children\u2019s fantasy.\n<\/p>\n
That problem also clarifies why comparison and equation need to remain separate. A scholar may identify similarities between Nazi propaganda and later propaganda without claiming that the later government is Nazi Germany. A constitutional historian can compare democratic erosion under different governments. Historians of genocide can examine recurring administrative mechanisms of persecution. Scholars of fascism can disagree, sometimes ferociously, over whether contemporary political movements satisfy competing definitions of fascism. Such arguments require evidence because their conclusions have not been determined in advance. Someone who begins with the verdict and raids either twentieth-century history or fantasy literature for the appropriate villain is doing something else.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cTrump is Hitler,\u201d \u201cNetanyahu is Hitler\u201d and \u201cStephen Miller is the Dark Lord Voldemort\u201d therefore do not become serious arguments merely because the people making them feel serious about the politics involved. Political invective has a legitimate place, and nothing here requires anyone to become more polite toward powerful men. Racist policies can be identified as racist by examining their substance and effects. Authoritarian conduct can be established by identifying the authority claimed, the institution attacked and the legal or constitutional restraint being circumvented. Alleged war crimes can be investigated through evidence, command responsibility and international law. Lies can be documented against the record. Deliberate attacks upon democratic institutions can be traced through the people responsible, the mechanisms employed and the resulting damage. None of this language suffers from a shortage of severity.\n<\/p>\n
The available political vocabulary is considerably larger than the space between \u201cI disagree\u201d and either \u201cAvada Kedavra\u201d or \u201cHitler.\u201d Resorting to those terms often allows the actual politician to escape into an argument about the analogy instead of remaining answerable for his own conduct. Trump can be judged according to what Trump has said, ordered, attempted and enabled. Netanyahu can be judged according to what Netanyahu and his government have done and according to the legal consequences that may follow. Neither man needs to be transformed into somebody else\u2019s villain before the evidence against him becomes worthy of attention.\n<\/p>\n
Bibliography<\/p>\n
Anti-Defamation League. \u201cLet\u2019s Avoid Holocaust Analogies in the Public Square.\u201d November 18, 2020.\n<\/p>\n
Anti-Defamation League. \u201cNo, Donald Trump Is Not Adolf Hitler.\u201d March 16, 2016.\n<\/p>\n
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.\n<\/p>\n
Browning, Christopher R. The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939\u2013March 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.\n<\/p>\n
Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin, 2004.\n<\/p>\n
Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin, 2005.\n<\/p>\n
Evans, Richard J. The Third Reich at War. New York: Penguin, 2009.\n<\/p>\n
Friedberg, Edna. \u201cWhy Holocaust Analogies Are Dangerous.\u201d United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.\n<\/p>\n
Godwin, Mike. \u201cMeme, Counter-Meme.\u201d Wired, October 1994.\n<\/p>\n
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf. 1925\u201326.\n<\/p>\n
International Criminal Court. \u201cNetanyahu.\u201d Case information and arrest-warrant summary.\n<\/p>\n
International Criminal Court. \u201cSituation in the State of Palestine: ICC Pre-Trial Chamber I Rejects the State of Israel\u2019s Challenges to Jurisdiction and Issues Warrants of Arrest for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.\u201d November 21, 2024.\n<\/p>\n
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1889\u20131936: Hubris. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.\n<\/p>\n
Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1936\u20131945: Nemesis. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.\n<\/p>\n
Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.\n<\/p>\n
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher\u2019s Stone. London: Bloomsbury, 1997.\n<\/p>\n
Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. London: Bloomsbury, 2007.\n<\/p>\n
Strauss, Leo. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.\n<\/p>\n
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Holocaust Encyclopedia. Washington, DC: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.\n<\/p>\n
Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.\n<\/p>\n
Notes<\/p>\n
[1] Contemporary reporting records Rowling\u2019s December 2015 response to the Trump\/Voldemort comparison and Radcliffe\u2019s September 2016 comments distinguishing Trump\u2019s apparent opportunism from Voldemort\u2019s ideological commitment.\n<\/p>\n
[2] Leo Strauss popularized the expression reductio ad Hitlerum in Natural Right and History (1953). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has separately warned that indiscriminate Holocaust analogies replace historical specificity with simplified moral symbolism.\n<\/p>\n
[3] John Kelly, Trump\u2019s former White House chief of staff, described Trump in 2024 as authoritarian and as fitting his understanding of the definition of fascism. Trump\u2019s campaign disputed reports concerning Trump\u2019s alleged remarks about Hitler.\n<\/p>\n
[4] Erdo\u011fan publicly compared Netanyahu with Hitler in December 2023. Nazi and Hitler imagery has also appeared in other political attacks upon Netanyahu, including material condemned by the Anti-Defamation League.\n<\/p>\n
[5] International Criminal Court, Pre-Trial Chamber I, warrant concerning Benjamin Netanyahu, issued November 21, 2024. An arrest warrant and judicial finding of reasonable grounds are not a criminal conviction.\n<\/p>\n
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