Reductio ad Hitlerum

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Reductio ad Hitlerum, also argumentum ad Hitlerum, or reductio (or argumentum) ad Nazium – dog Latin for "reduction (or argument) to Hitler (or the Nazis)" – is a modern informal fallacy in logic. It is a variety of both questionable cause and association fallacy. The phrase reductio ad Hitlerum was coined by an academic ethicist, Leo Strauss, in 1950. Engaging in this fallacy is sometimes known as playing the Nazi card.^[1][2]

The fallacy most often assumes the form of "Hitler (or the Nazis) supported X, therefore X must be evil/undesirable/bad".^[2] The argument carries emotional weight as rhetoric, since in many cultures anything to do with Hitler or Nazis is automatically condemned. The tactic is often used to derail arguments, as such a comparison tends to distract and to result in angry and less reasoned responses.^[2] A subtype of the fallacy is the comparison of an opponent's propositions to the Holocaust.^[2] Other variants include comparisons to the Gestapo (the Nazi secret police), to fascism and totalitarianism more generally,^[1] and even more vaguely to terrorism.^[3] An inverted variant can take the form "Hitler was against X, therefore X must be good."

Contents 1 Fallacious nature of the argument 1.1 Countering the fallacy 2 History of the term 3 Examples 3.1 Equating Israelis with Nazis 3.2 Linking acceptance of evolution with Nazism 4 In popular culture 5 See also 6 References

[edit] Fallacious nature of the argument

Reductio ad Hitlerum is rationally unsound for two different reasons: As a wrong direction fallacy (a type of questionable cause), it inverts the cause–effect relationship between why a villain and an idea might be criticized; conversely, as guilt by association^[2][4] (a form of association fallacy), it illogically attempts to shift culpability from a villain to an idea regardless of who is espousing it and why. Specific instances of reductio ad Hitlerum are also frequently likely to suffer from the fallacy of begging the question or take the form of slippery slope arguments, which are frequently (though not always) false as well.^[2]

Those policies advocated by Hitler and his party which are generally considered evil are all condemned in and of themselves, not because Hitler supported them. In other words, genocide and race supremacism, as two examples, are considered evil on the merits, while Hitler is considered evil for numerous reasons largely because he advocated them. A common example of the fallacy in action is, "The Nazis favored eugenics, therefore eugenics is wrong."^[2][4] But the ethical debate over eugenics has nothing to do with Hitler or the Nazis in particular; both eugenics and criticism of it considerably predate Nazism, and have gone well beyond it, into concerns about modern genetic engineering, unknown to Hitler. Used broadly enough, ad Hitlerum can encompass more than one questionable cause fallacy type, as it does in the eugenics example, by both inverting cause and effect and by linking an alleged cause to wholly unrelated consequences. The fallacy of guilt by association can readily be seen by noting that Hitler claimed to be a vegetarian and was fond of dogs and children; arguments that because of this, vegetarianism or affection for dogs and children are evil do not convince.

Ad Hitlerum can also be combined with ad hominem or personally-attacking arguments. Reasoning such as "you are wrong because Hitler said something similar, and Hitler was evil, so you must be evil too" is doubly false, and as such is also related to the fallacy of appeal to emotion.

The argument being false, however, does not prove that X or its supporters are not evil (assuming so would be another fallacy, namely affirming the consequent). Moreover, recall that the argument is false in itself, no matter whether X is actually good or evil.^[2] So, "Hitler killed human beings, therefore killing is wrong", is nonetheless a fallacy, however truthful the premise and conclusion may be, because there is no logical connection between the two. It would be akin to "I wear trousers, therefore tomorrow it will rain". This sentence is logically faulty, even if the speaker does wear trousers, and the next day does turn out rainy.

Various criminals, controversial religious and political figures, regimes, and atrocities other than Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust can be used for the same purposes. For example, a reductio ad Stalinum could assert that corporal punishment of wayward children is necessary because Joseph Stalin enacted its abolition, or that atheism is a dangerous philosophy because Stalin was an atheist.^[5] Similarly, one example of a reductio ad Cromwellium would be to equate enjoying chamber music with hating the Irish, while a reductio ad Ladenium might equate making propaganda or non-mainstream media in general with terrorism. Such constructions, as a class, make no more sense than saying moustaches are evil because Hitler and Stalin had moustaches.

[edit] Countering the fallacy

The fallacious nature of reductio ad Hitlerum is, however, most easily illustrated by identifying X as something that Adolf Hitler or his supporters did promote but which is not considered unethical, such as watercolor painting, owning dogs, or vegetarianism. It may be refuted through counterexamples using figures with reputations generally opposite that of Hitler:

• Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill, Hitler's British opponent, also painted.
• President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman, Hitler's American opponents, also owned dogs.
• India's celebrated, pacifist reformer Mahatma Gandhi was also a vegetarian.
• Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a masterful orator and organizer who acted with consummate personal courage.

The fallacy is common enough that the counter-example can be used without a proper explanation; for example, dismissively saying, "yeah, and the Fascists made the trains run on time", and expecting the listener to understand the reference to reductio ad Hitlerum.

Many of Hitler's qualities and talents were admirable if seen in isolation. He is generally considered an excellent orator and a political organiser of first rank; the purposes to which he used those talents make him the one of the most appalling persons in history.

In addition to this, it must be remembered that not all arguments involving Hitler or Nazism are reductio ad Hitlerum, although they may be otherwise fallacious.

[edit] History of the term

The phrase reductio ad Hitlerum is first known to have appeared in University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss's 1950 book, Natural Right and History, Chapter II:

In following this movement towards its end we shall inevitably reach a point beyond which the scene is darkened by the shadow of Hitler. Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that in our examination we must avoid the fallacy that in the last decades has frequently been used as a substitute for the reductio ad absurdum: the reductio ad Hitlerum. A view is not refuted by the fact that it happens to have been shared by Hitler.

The phrase was derived from the better known (and sometimes valid) logical argument called reductio ad absurdum. The argumentum variant takes its form from the names of many classic fallacies, such as argumentum ad hominem. The ad Nazium variant may be further derived, humorously, from argumentum ad nauseam.

[edit] Examples

[edit] Equating Israelis with Nazis

Further information: New antisemitism

In recent years, there have been comments, cartoons, and editorials in the Middle East, Europe, and the United Nations which have equated the actions of the Israeli government and Israel's supporters abroad with the actions of the Nazi Party during the the Holocaust.^[6][7] The European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia describes this comparison as an example of how criticism of Israel crosses the line into outright anti-Semitism.^[8] Critics of the analogy argue that there is an obvious difference between a country defending its own citizens against international terrorism, and carefully planned programs of genocide against civilians for no reason other than their race, religion, sexuality, health, politics, or geographical location in areas associated with resistance. This use of the Reductio Ad Hitlerum involves increasing the emotional weight of an argument beyond the intrinsic strength of the argument itself.

In addition, the emotional draw of the Reductio Ad Hitlerum can obscure, blur and complicate arguments intended to be focus on a specific similarity with Nazi Germany. To give two examples, Israeli politician Yosef Lapid's comparison of the suffering of Palestinian and European Jewish civilians caught in war, leading to unintended controversy ^[9], and UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk's criticism of policies involving indiscriminate actions against broad social groups justified using national security, intended to be provocative, but resulting in a highly emotional debate in which his original point was lost ^[10].

Scholars explain this phenomenon in different ways depending on which individual or group is using the false analogy. Bernard Lewis explains that Middle Eastern Arabs use it as an attempt to rewrite the history of the Holocaust by placing Arabs in the Jews' roles and Jews in the Nazis' roles.^[11] Mitchell G. Bard explains that Europeans use it to shift the focus away from the crimes of the Holocaust they committed in their own past to the alleged crimes that their past victims (Jews) are committing in the present.^[12]

[edit] Linking acceptance of evolution with Nazism

After World War II, some people on the creationist side of the creation-evolution debate, most of whom are politically conservative, religious Christians in the United States, began alleging that acceptance of evolution as a scientific theory leads to Nazism.^[13] The argument is that social Darwinism was inspired by Charles Darwin's discovery of natural selection, and that Hitler's evil philosophy can be explained in terms of social Darwinism, and therefore evolution is evil. This was carried out in 2008 documentary film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which the evolutionary biologists are juxtaposed with images of Nazis.^[14][15] Richard Dawkins and Eugenie Scott, two scientists that were interviewed in the film, have been among the most vocal critics of many statements contained in the film. After a viewer of the film wrote to Dawkins that he accepted the film's argument, Dawkins wrote back that the film did not consider the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe that preceded Nazism that Hitler took advantage of and that evolution is a scientific theory, that "whether or not we like it politically or morally is irrelevant," and that "[s]cientific theories are not prescriptions for how we should behave."^[16]

This movie also tried to equate an understanding of biological evolution with the rise of communism in the 20th century and the Berlin Wall was used as a double entendre in many parts of the film (part implying evolution and atheism are to blame for communism, part implying that academics in 21st century America are silenced for questioning Darwinian evolution).

[edit] In popular culture

The relative frequency of such comparisons in Usenet discussions led to the formulation of an adage called Godwin's Law in 1990, which posits that analogies involving Hitler or the Nazis become increasingly likely the longer an online discussion takes place.^[2]

The concept behind reductio ad Hitlerum sometimes makes appearances in the mass media. For example,

• In a Dilbert cartoon (published October 28, 2006), the character Ratbert says that he is winning all his debates on the Internet by asking, "How would you like it if Hitler killed you?"

• In the movie Office Space, Peter Gibbons notes that "the Nazis had pieces of flair that they made the Jews wear," in reference to the waitstaff's uniforms at a local restaurant.

• In the South Park episode Chef Goes Nanners, the town wants to change their town flag for depicting blatant racism. Ned and Jimbo convince the local Ku Klux Klan group to take position against the town flag in the hopes that the townspeople reverse their position, not wanting to support anything that the KKK supports.

• In the episode of Daria "Pinch-Sitter", the children Daria is babysitting for tell her that "Sugar is bad. Sugar rots your teeth. Sugar makes you hyper. Hitler ate sugar."

• In the "Atomic No. 33" episode of Numb3rs, the character Susan Doran criticizes science because it was embraced by the Nazis.

• On a skit lampooning Anti-Smoking Public Service Announcements on Late Night With Conan O'Brien, Adolf Hitler is shown in a bunker being offered a cigarette by an aide, to which he answers "NEIN!!". The scene cuts to a caption reading, "BE LIKE HITLER. DON'T SMOKE."

[edit] See also

• Godwin's Law
• List of fallacies
• Wisdom of repugnance

[edit] References

v • d • e Fallacies of relevance General Absurdity • Accident • Ad nauseam • Argument from ignorance • Argument from silence • Argumentum ad populum • Base rate fallacy • Compound question • Fallacy of many questions • Argument to moderation • Naturalistic fallacy • Proof by assertion • Irrelevant conclusion • Special pleading • Straw man • Style over substance fallacy • Two wrongs make a right Appeals to emotion Fear • Flattery • Nature • Novelty • Pity • Ridicule • Repugnance • Spite Genetic fallacies Ad hominem (Ad hominem tu quoque) • Appeal to authority • Appeal to motive • Appeal to tradition • Appeal to wealth • Appeal to poverty • Association fallacy • Bulverism • Chronological snobbery • Ipsedixitism • Poisoning the well • Appeal to Etymology • Reductio ad Hitlerum Appeals to consequences Appeal to force • Wishful thinking