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Reductio
ad Hitlerum
Lashius Ncube
Extracted from the Mail & Guardian (Print Edition)
July
15, 2005
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
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 of violence in Zimbabwe
on Mugabe comparing himself to Hitler. A Washington statement said,
“the upsurge in official violence is directly attributed 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 Milosevic’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 manmade 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
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