I think it’s even simpler than that–Nazis and Hitler have become caricatures of pure evil in our popular culture, not real historical people who did real things. It is easy to equate something you don’t like as being “naziesque”, because most of us don’t read histories of the Nazis and Germany during that period–at least not real histories that delve into the complexity of what was actually happening. We get our history of Nazi Germany from Goldhagen and Schindler’s List, not from Christopher Browning and Primo Levy. Our image of the Nazis is Ralph Fiennes, nazi zombies, nazis as cats to Jewish mice, or nazis on the moon–not human beings actively slaughtering people or supporting a regime that slaughtered people, that took their neighbors away and left their wealth, that awarded people for their “pure genetic lineage”, not a system of rule over a modern state, etc. We’ve utterly disconnected it from its historical context in our culture, and from any sense of why this happen anyway and the debates about why this happened. As long as the nazis are not real historical actors, but a short hand for “evil” (and we can say the same about Stalin and the Soviet Union, too), we’ll keep getting lazy comparisions like this in part because it has such a powerful emotional punch.
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