Michael Deacon has written a piece on the Left’s favourite ad hominem in the Telegraph. Here’s an excerpt:
When I am finally appointed Secretary of State for Education, the first thing I will do is launch a radical overhaul of the way we teach history. Above all, I will ensure that the curriculum becomes far more varied – for one very simple reason.
We desperately need to provide the progressives of the future with some new insults.
For decades now, our history curriculum has been dominated by the Second World War. There are of course good reasons for that. It’s an extremely important period. But this constant focus on it has had one downside. Which is that whenever progressives want to smear their political opponents by likening them to monsters from the past, the only ones they can ever think of are the Nazis.
They liken U.S. Republicans to the Nazis. They liken gender-critical feminists to the Nazis. And right now they’re likening Rishi Sunak’s Government to the Nazis. Practically everyone who dares disagree with them reminds them of the Nazis.
Or so they claim. Personally, though, I’m not convinced they believe it. I think the reason they always call their opponents Nazis is that it’s the only historical reference point they’ve got. It’s all they can remember learning at school. Nazis, Nazis, Nazis.
Calling your opponents Nazis all the time, however, isn’t just crass. It’s also stupendously lazy. So predictable. So boring.
Therefore, I urge the Government to start teaching our children about other great monsters from history. If only to ensure that, when they grow up, they can smear their political opponents in a more imaginative way.
Take the current target of the Left’s righteous ire, Suella Braverman. Wouldn’t it at least make a nice change if they likened the Home Secretary to, say, the brutal Tang dynasty empress Wu Zetian, or the murderous 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory? Alternatively, perhaps Isabella I of Castile, who established the Spanish Inquisition, or Irene of Athens, who declared herself Empress of the Byzantine Empire after having the previous emperor – her own son – imprisoned and blinded.
Obviously Mrs Braverman has no more in common with any of these women than she has with the Nazis. But then, to her progressive foes, accuracy is beside the point. All they want is a good strong insult. And likening her to the tyrants above would be much more original.
Deacon has a point. As if on cue, Alastair Campbell has just made the Nazi analogy about *checks notes*… cuts to BBC orchestras.
Worth reading in full.
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