There is something I would like to make clear to my readers, in the wake of a recent discussion with my wife. She had me discover the existence of a concept called Godwin’s Law. This is the fallacious use of comparisons of anything to Hitler and the Nazi regime (1933-1945) in order to discredit the opposing argument or any kind of authoritarianism. Invariably, one who uses such an argument fallaciously – for example comparing a policeman booking you for parking your car in the wrong place with the SS or the Gestapo – himself gets discredited. Rightly so.

Hitler was not wrong because he was authoritarian or insisted on discipline, but because he killed people or denied them their fundamental rights to freedom and happiness.

It can happen that comparisons with Nazism are justified, but on the basis of precise criteria. I would certainly recommend a cover-to-cover reading of William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Totalitarianism needs to be studied and understood both historically and philosophically. It is appropriate to study the history of both Nazism and Marxist-Leninist Communism to understand the reductio ad absurdam of concepts like genocide, racial superiority, eugenics and totalitarianism in general. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley both lived through World War II and the Cold War, and the ideologies inspired their dystopian novels, respectively Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World.

It has to be understood that these ideologies did not sprout up out of nothing. There was a philosophical background to the movements for trying to improve the genetic quality of the human species and remove human moral defects from society. It is essentially the attitude consisting of believing that the world belongs to the strongest. We find Darwin’s survival-of-the-fittest theory and Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. The Protestant Work Ethic also had no small part to play. All these were essential elements of the totalitarian ideology, which were taken to their logical conclusion in the 1940’s in places like Auschwitz.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. There are no signs at present of the coming of something like a “Fourth Reich”. Bush or Obama, or any other present-day political leader, is not a new Hitler or Stalin. The evil is within each one of us. This is how analogies of the ideology can spread out into society. The ideology is a constant, arising from the problem of human sin, mental illness and physical deformity. How do the strong deal with the weak? The questions arise anew with current issues like genetic engineering, abortion and euthanasia – and even with religious freedom. Any permissive legislation is such areas always gives a loophole for evil and the slippery slope.

Christianity chooses a “preferential option” for the poor, the sick, the stranger, the orphan, elderly people, the dying and anyone who is weak or handicapped. This is the state of human weakness and the mystery of the Incarnation. Christ chose weakness over strength in order to redeem us and give us hope in spite of our weakness. He did not take the weakness away. We still have physically and mentally handicapped people with us, often the results of genetic defects – but those people have as much right to live as those of us who are apparently more healthy. Who is perfect? I have a couple of twisted toes, and hernias that required the attention of a surgeon.

I have visited medical museums that make toes curl as we see the contents of the rows of formaldehyde jars, generally stillborn children with horrifying defects. We can be thankful these babies did not survive birth, but they died naturally. Such a visit is a sobering experience, and the old debate is fired up within us. Do we kill horribly deformed children, or do we find ways for them to live as best as possible despite their handicap? It is the yardstick of civilisation and the authenticity of our Christian faith. Why does God allow such genetic errors, or any other evil or catastrophe? It is the mysterium iniquitatis that we will never fathom. That is our condition. We have to live with it.

The real objective of this post, as with many others, is to make people conscious of this temptation and sin within each one of us. It can be expressed through the totalitarian regime that actually kills people. It can also be expressed in the desires of any one of us to eliminate the opposition to our desired perfection. We have to strive for the better in spite of the imperfection in our way.

George Santayana is quoted as having said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“. This quotation has a number of variants, for example:

• Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
• Those who do not remember their past are condemned to repeat their mistakes.
• Those who do not read history are doomed to repeat it.
• Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors are destined to repeat them.
• Those who do not know history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them.

This is always my concern. There may be nothing in the present-day world that could be remotely construed as a serious revival of Nazism. We can be thankful that the various bands of thugs and bullies here and there, often languishing for a very long time in maximum-security prisons or having been executed – when they committed a crime and got caught by the law – have no political credibility in society at large. They represent sub-cultures that are carefully watched by police forces and security agencies around the world. The real threat comes from an insidious repeat of the various themes around the notion of making the human species perfect by denying the right of life to the weak and deformed, or those who do not belong to the “master race”.

We can be rightly concerned when we read the same kind of anti-Semitic polemics that set off the Dreyfus affair a century ago. For such writers, it is not so much that Jewish people are evil, but that Judaism is just too different and too foreign to our culture. Others say the same thing about Muslims, even those who tolerate other religions and do not resort to violence or oppression of their own kin. In our own conservative Christian polemics, we tend to abhor conservatives or liberals depending on whether we are conservative or liberal ourselves. The opposing side has to be eliminated rather than being seen as a legitimate challenge to our own certitudes.

I find this with church people (perhaps more appropriate than “Christian”) who refuse difference, who refuse to accept people into their churches because there are still differences and they are only “half-converted”. I won’t point fingers, but simply point out a recurring theme found just about everywhere and in all churches. It is the most serious problem, which gives ammunition to men like Dawkins to argue for atheism: religion is harmful for mankind, so we’re better off without it.

It is a matter of degree, but with the same underlying thought that goes more or less far towards the logical outcome. Study your history and your philosophy, and you will see where comparisons and warnings are appropriate or fallacious.