about the culturally present trope to make Trump Hitler.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/red-herring.html wrote:Also Known as: Smoke Screen, Wild Goose Chase.
Description of Red Herring
A Red Herring is a fallacy in which an irrelevant topic is presented in order to divert attention from the original issue. The basic idea is to "win" an argument by leading attention away from the argument and to another topic. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:
Topic A is under discussion.
Topic B is introduced under the guise of being relevant to topic A (when topic B is actually not relevant to topic A).
Topic A is abandoned.
This sort of "reasoning" is fallacious because merely changing the topic of discussion hardly counts as an argument against a claim.
Examples of Red Herring
"We admit that this measure is popular. But we also urge you to note that there are so many bond issues on this ballot that the whole thing is getting ridiculous."
"Argument" for a tax cut:
"You know, I've begun to think that there is some merit in the Republican's tax cut plan. I suggest that you come up with something like it, because If we Democrats are going to survive as a party, we have got to show that we are as tough-minded as the Republicans, since that is what the public wants."
"Argument" for making grad school requirements stricter:
"I think there is great merit in making the requirements stricter for the graduate students. I recommend that you support it, too. After all, we are in a budget crisis and we do not want our salaries affected."
Obama isn’t the first U.S. president or world leader to be compared to Hitler, and he won’t be the last. But the persistence of the Obama/Hitler comparison, the way it permeates the bottom rungs of political discussion, is unique.
Long before the partisan discourse in America had become as polarizing as it is now, people on both sides of the aisle loved to namedrop Hitler. All the way back in 2008, Rose-Anne Clermont of The Root decreed, “Comparing politicians to Adolf Hitler is a tired, cheap trick that has been used to demonize George W. Bush, John McCain, and even Barack Obama.”
As Clermont astutely notes, there was a time, pre-Obama administration, when politicians on the right were actually far more likely to be compared to Hitler than those on the left. In 2012, Joe Gandelman, editor-in-chief of The Moderate Voice observed,
Billionaire George Soros said a ‘supremacist ideology’ guided the Bush White House and: When I hear Bush say, ‘You’re either with us or against us,’ it reminds me of the Germans. Moveon.org had an online video contest online that produced a commercial with the Hitler comparison. Some anti-Bush websites and celebrities used the comparison. Google has many images of Bush photoshopped as Hitler. A whole website is devoted to the references.
It is true that Bush was compared to Hitler a lot. In 2004, Duncan Campbell at The Guardian went so far as to make intricate links between Bush’s grandfather and the Third Reich. In fact, if Obama and Bush have one thing in common, it’s that the one way for them to escape such comparisons may be in leaving the Oval Office.
Hitler comparisons extend beyond U.S. policy, too. It was just this March that Rahul Gandhi, of India’s most famous political dynasty, likened his opponent Narendra Modi to Hitler leading up to the country’s general elections (Modi would go on to win and become Prime Minister.)
Comparing someone to Hitler also seems to have become all the easier in the age of Internet trolling, where outrageously offensive opinions have gotten that much more visible, if not more prevalent. As Viju Cherian of the Hindustan Times wisely posited, “Gandhi has made the political equivalent of an Internet truism—Godwin’s Law, which states that ‘if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism.’”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/can-donald-trump-be-called-a-fascist-a-1122035.html
wrote:But as abhorrent as Trump's election campaign was, calling him a fascist at this early stage also implies that his voters stooped to the level of fascism. Half of America. Basically, it means lumping half of Americans into the same camp as Hitler and Mussolini. In Germany, especially, people should consider very carefully before making such comparisons.
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