Thursday 13 April 2017

Don’t drop the ‘H-bomb’


It is a temptation that is all too easy to give in to.  You either cannot be bothered, or are intellectually incapable of arguing your case on its own merits.  Instead you look for a single world that can be deployed to demonstrate just how important your case is.

Sean Spicer – the man charged with keeping a straight face while announcing the latest twists and turns that pass for Donald Trump’s policies – is merely the latest high profile individual to come unstuck.  Rather than resist temptation, Spicer dropped the H-bomb

Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Spicer told journalists, was worse than Hitler, because – in the alternative universe of the Trump White House – Hitler never gassed his own people.

Even the most rabidly Trump-supporting, Fox News journalists’ jaws dropped to the floor at this point; since it is precisely because Hitler did gas an awful lot of his own and especially other countries’ people that he is treated as the yardstick against which evil is measured.  After all, there are plenty of dictators who were/are adept at murdering their own people – Stalin may even have beaten Hitler on absolute numbers, while you would have to go a long way to beat Pol Pot on percentages.  Starting wars of aggression is no big deal either – even the freedom-loving USA has engaged in wars of aggression when its economic interests were threatened.  No, what marks the Nazi regime out as uniquely evil was the ruthlessly organised rounding up and industrial slaughter of Germany's and Europe’s Jews, Poles, Slavs, Gypsies, political opponents, disabled people and the mentally ill.

That’s the point.  You cannot trump Hitler.  Whichever regime or dictator you are seeking to vilify, whatever crime you are accusing them of having done, the fact is that it was nowhere near as bad as the organised atrocities carried out by the Nazis.  To suggest otherwise automatically means that you belittle and trivialise the Holocaust.

Unlike many on the left, I do not believe that Sean Spicer intended to deny the Holocaust.  His remarks were simply unthinking and ill-advised.  In the same way, I do not believe that Ken Livingstone was being intentionally anti-Semitic when he made the historically contentious claim that Hitler had once aligned himself with Zionists.  The point is that Livingstone’s comments had no bearing on the argument he was trying to make, which boil down to “anti-Semitism is not the same as anti-Zionism;” which I guess we already knew.  And clearly, even an unintended implication that what Israel (and Egypt, by the way) is doing to Palestinians in Gaza is on a par with murdering at least six million people and launching a war of aggression that resulted in perhaps 80 million deaths, is simply inflammatory.

The backlash is inevitable.  Instead of looking at the alleged crimes of Assad or the Israeli state, the media spotlight is immediately focussed on the motives of the person who dropped the H-bomb.  Livingstone’s alleged anti-Semitism looks set to cast a shadow over the British Labour Party right up to the next General Election.  The best Spicer can look forward to is to be a figure of ridicule from now on – how on earth are we to give credence to anything that issues from the mouth of someone who apparently didn’t even know that the Holocaust was a thing?  More likely, Spicer will be asked to resign, and will be lucky to get a position in United Airline’s PR department.

These are just the high profile cases.  But they are an echo of a much deeper seated malaise in our modern discourse.  Although for the most part we avoid dropping the H-bomb directly, far too many of us are in the habit of doing so obliquely.  As George Orwell observed as early as 1944:

“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else…

“All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”

Things have only got worse since then.  In 2017, dropping the H-bomb or its F-bomb cousin has become no more than a foolish ad hominem attack.  As with Spicer and Livingstone, the result is that it detracts from the case you are trying to make.  In a sense, it serves to trivialise the horrors committed by the Nazi regime.  At the same time it lets your opponent off the hook.  Farage, Cameron, May and Trump can quite reasonably profess outrage at being compared to Hitler; and their outrage becomes the story.

If you are going to call people names, at least take the trouble to find out what those names mean.  Because people stop listening when it is all too clear that:

“On the Left, the word “fascist” is frequently used to mean “authoritarian-seeming person I don’t like,” or sometimes “militant racist.” It’s just a term of abuse, and the Left has plenty of those already. Maybe if people read the definition, they’ll realize the absurdity of using the term in connection with perfectly lovely people like Pope Benedict XVI.”

As should be patently obvious to anyone on the left at this point, dropping the H-bomb is simply bad tactics.  Not only doesn't it work, it is counterproductive.  It drives the very people we need to win over into the arms of the very people we seek to defeat.  How do we know? Because Donald Trump.  Because Theresa May.  Because Brexit.  Because who knows what in 2017?

So next time you are tempted to drop an H-bomb or an F-bomb, remember what happened to Sean Spicer and Ken Livingstone, and just don't do it.