Are these the worst political comparisons ever made?
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Version 0 of 1. Analogies can be great if you want to explain how something works. The heart is like a pump. No problem there. Analogies can be very bad, however, when you use them to trash someone or something you disagree with. Tax rises are like Hitler’s invasion of Poland? Not totally convinced that works. You’d be surprised how often public figures feel the need to use Hitler, the Nazis or the Holocaust to drive home a point, however. And they don’t stop there, as you’ll find out in the following list of cautionary tales. I apologise in advance for any forehead injuries sustained as a result of repeated facepalming. Jobs in the nuclear industry are like labour at Auschwitz Yesterday the Welsh politician Dafydd Wigley found himself comparing the UK’s nuclear weapons programme to a Nazi concentration camp. “Look, this week we have been remembering what happened in Germany before the war,” he told the BBC. “No doubt there were many jobs provided in Auschwitz and places like that but that didn’t justify their existence and neither does nuclear weapons justify having them in Pembrokeshire.” Auschwitz may have been on his mind, but it should not have made it to his lips. The US national debt is like slavery At a 2013 fundraising event, the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin railed against the amount of money borrowed by the federal government. “When that money comes due – and this isn’t racist – but it’ll be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to beholden to the foreign master.” For future reference, anyone who needs to reassure an audience that what they’re about to say isn’t racist is probably going to say something racist. US national debt is like the Nazi regime Republican politicians really don’t like the national debt. In 2011, the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee “seemingly compared silence in the face of mounting debt in modern America to those who said nothing about the rise of the Nazis” according to the Washington post. This earned him a strongly-worded reprimand from the Anti-Defamation League. A rape conviction is like the Hillsborough inquiry Not political exactly, but definitely impolitic: as controversy raged over whether it was appropriate for Ched Evans to play professional football after being convicted of rape, PFA chief Gordon Taylor said: “He would not be the first person or persons to have been found guilty and maintained their innocence and then been proved right. If we are talking about things in football we know what happened, what was alleged to have happened at Hillsborough and it’s now unravelling and we are finding it was very different to how it was portrayed at the time.” Taylor has since apologised unreservedly. Vladimir Putin is like Hitler Whatever you think of the Russian president, comparing him to the Führer is of dubious usefulness. It’s also a great offline example of Godwin’s law – to which even members of the royal family aren’t immune: during a recent visit to Canada, Prince Charles is reported to have told a woman that “Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler”. Tax rises are like the invasion of Poland In 2010 businessman Steve Schwarzman went a bit Godwin over tax rises planned by the Obama administration. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939,” he said at a board meeting, and his comments were leaked. He later said: “I apologise for what was an inappropriate analogy.” Gay marriage is like 9/11 We have the former senator Rick Santorum to thank for this gem. Reacting to the Massachusetts supreme court decision to uphold same-sex marriage, he said: “This is an issue just like 9/11. We didn’t decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when? When the supreme courts in all the other states have succumbed to the Massachusetts version of the law?” Criticism of the wealthy is like the rise of Hitler Nazis again. When asked what he thought of political attacks on the rich, the founder of Home Depot, Ken Langone, said: “If you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany.” A charge that could be levelled at anyone everywhere, so long as their words were different to Hitler’s. Langone apologised. Hearing yourself talk nonsense is like being waterboarded Steven Emerson, a Fox news pundit who was pilloried after describing Birmingham as a “no-go area for non-Muslims” (even David Cameron called him an idiot) didn’t really help himself when, after listening to the clip on Sky, he said: “Hearing it over when you played it was like waterboarding, I guess.” |