(JNi.media) When it comes to evil, the Nazis still rank highest in the minds of many, and are considered to be the epitome of evil, at least for the previous century—until today. There is a bizarre paradox that plays out in the media, a tension between condemning comparisons of ISIS to the Nazis as trivializing the evil they perpetrated, and an almost irresistible tendency of politicians and other high profile figures to do exactly that. Such comparisons are regularly criticized and apologies often result, but the constant repetition of this pattern raises the question: will some group someday outdo the Nazis for evil? Will the Nazis ever be eclipsed in their role as the symbol of evil? And if this happens, will it trivialize their crimes and consign them to mere history?
Before Godwin’s law, a principle developed by lawyer Mike Godwin that “as online discussions grow longer, the probability of a comparison to the Nazis or Hitler approaches 1″ (meaning Almost surely)—there was political philosopher Leo Strauss’ principle, developed in 1951, not long after the Holocaust, “reductio ad Hitlerum,” a variation of “reductio ad absurdum” when an interlocutor in a discussion compares something to Nazi evil when he or she doesn’t have a sound argument to rely upon. One wonders why evil has to be ranked and compared at all, but perhaps that is a question best left to psychologists, along with the question of why people, most notably politicians, who know they are going to get heat for such comparisons, continue to make them.
Australian PM Tony Abbott said last week that ISIS was worse than the Nazis, because the Nazis at least tried to hide the evil they committed. “I mean, the Nazis did terrible evil but they had sufficient sense of shame to try to hide it. These people boast about their evil,” Abbott told a Sydney radio station. “This is the extraordinary thing — they (ISIS) act in the way that medieval barbarians acted — only they broadcast it to the world with an effrontery which is hard to credit and it just adds a further dimension to this evil.” Robert Goot, head of the Executive Council on Australian Jewry, said Abbott’s comments were “injudicious and unfortunate.” He argued that while ISIS’ actions are horrific, it is not the same as the systematic murder of millions. He added that ISIS attacks in the open for a propaganda effect and to spread fear, and that the Nazis did not hide their actions out of shame, but because they feared being prosecuted for their crimes. Following the criticism, the Prime Minister clarified his remarks, telling a press conference he was not in the business of ranking evil.
Australia’s military jets joined the US-led campaign against ISIS in Iraq in 2014. During Operation Defensive Edge, in which Israel received scathing criticism from many countries for its war with Hamas, Prime Minister Abbott sent Education Minister Christopher Pyne who said Israel was a “beacon of liberty and freedom in the Middle East.” He added that Australia and Israel were “two sister nations believing in the same thing.” One thing they have in common is that their heads of state believe that there is at least one regime in the world that is as bad as the Nazis. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Netanyahu said in a speech, “Just as the Nazis aspired to crush civilization and establish a ‘master race’ to replace it in controlling the world while annihilating the Jewish people, so too does Iran strive to gain control over the region, from which it would spread further, with the explicit intent of obliterating the Jewish State.”