PRINCE CHARLES’S GRATUITOUS COMPARISON OF PUTIN TO HITLER: ROBIN SHEPHERD
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/4962/prince_charles_putin_and_hitler_dangerous_references
Prince Charles, Putin and Hitler: Dangerous references Nazi Germany was not a traditional, expansionist power. Its expansionism was directly tied up with a genocidal, totalitarian ideology. Putin is bad, but he’s not like Adolf Hitler
It is all over the British media. Prince Charles, on a visit to Halifax, in the Canadian Maritime province of Nova Scotia, has stirred controversy by comparing Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler over Russia’s recent annexation of Crimea. That, at least, according to the Daily Mail.
“And now Putin is doing just about the same as Hitler,’ the Prince of Wales is alleged to have said. It’s not being denied, so having let it run in the public domain for this long, we are entitled to assume that the quotation is accurate.
Back in Britain, opinions range from suggesting the Prince had missed a good opportunity to keep quiet and stay above the political fray, domestic and international, to the view that he’s entitled to his opinion.
Either way, it was a silly and irresponsible remark which serves as a timely reminder of the dangers of trivialising who Hitler was and what he stood for.
To be fair to Prince Charles, he is not alone in making this comparison. Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others have made reference to Hitler’s use of German minorities outside Germany’s borders — in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia for example — and compared that with Putin’s use of Russian minorities in places such as Ukraine, Georgia, and also (without military aggression as yet) in the Baltic states.
It’s a seductive comparison, but it is deeply flawed.
For one thing, we should be smart enough to have other historical (and contemporary) reference points for bad things that happen in the world without resorting to the use of incendiary references to Adolf Hitler, unless it is absolutely necessary and unless it is accurate, which it isn’t in this case.
This brings us to the key issue: Nazi Germany was not a traditional, expansionist power. Its expansionism was directly tied up with a genocidal, totalitarian ideology. That, so to speak, was the package.
You can’t just take one component of that package, divorce it from the rest, and than re-use it for your own purposes. At the most critical end of the spectrum of complaints against Prince Charles’s remarks, one could all too easily argue that they do indeed trivialise the full horror of what Hitler and Nazism were all about.
Vladimir Putin is an aggressive, neo-imperialist, authoritarian leader. And he’s dangerous. But he’s not a Nazi and he’s not Adolf Hitler.
The Prince’s supporters may well argue that he would never suggest Putin is exactly like Hitler, nor that the Russian leader is promoting Nazi ideology. Nonetheless, if he says that Putin is “doing just about the same as Hitler” he can’t be surprised if some people take it as read.
We live in world where the memory of the Holocaust is being significantly challenged, especially in Muslim countries. Some of that is going on in the West too.
Prince Charles has nothing to do with such behaviour. He would oppose it, heart and soul.
But he would still do well to remember that he is an enormously respected and influential man, and does not live in a vacuum. He should beware of dangerous references.
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