Herr No-No

Almost all references to Adolph Hitler and the NAZIS are considered out of bounds unless you are teaching the history of WWII and/or the holocaust. This is true regardless of whether you are an idiot, like Rush Limbaugh, saying Obama is acting like Hitler or you are Hillary Clinton saying that Putin’s seizure of another sovereign nation’s territory was like something Hitler did. The latest person to get in trouble for saying Putin is acting like Hitler is Prince Charles. The comparison of Putin’s behavior and Hitler’s behavior is understandable given Putin’s usage of the alleged threat to ethnic Russians as a pretext for taking over the Crimea and threatening eastern Ukraine, but there is another comparison that is as valid and less loaded. During the years leading up to WWI there was the Pan Germanic movement and the Pan Slavic movement. There were also extreme nationalistic movements caused by smaller ethnic groups wanting to break away from empires that had dominated the European continent for so long. Hitler’s contentions about racial and ethnic superiority were not formed in a vacuum; they were shaped by events during this turbulent period when culture and language were used to unify and expand nations and when all of the major powers felt so superior to each other. The bottom line is that the jingoism of the large nations combined with the aspirations of ethnic groups that felt oppressed created a powder keg which was set off when a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The fact that 17 million people died as a direct result of WWI should be enough to tell us how dangerous it is to use ethnic concerns as an excuse for armed aggression. I will grant you that Herr No-No is the most infamous example of that danger, but the unspeakable evil of the holocaust makes that example too horrible to cite.