Godwin In London?
Godwin’s Law says that the longer a comment thread continues the probability that someone will make a comparison involving Hitler or Nazis approaches 1, i.e. a certainty. Apparently if you are a former mayor of London you start out very near 1.
First it was Labour’s Ken Livingstone who repeated a claim by Netanyahu that Hitler was a Zionist wanting all Jews sent to Israel until the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem convinced him to adopt the “final solution”. Netanyahu was accused of trivializing the Holocaust for making the statement. Livingstone should really know that you never repeat claims made by Bibi.
Now you have the former Tory mayor of London and Donald Trump stand-in, Boris Johnson, claiming that the European Union is trying to emulate Hitler by unifying Europe. Sorry, but I think the British Empire was a bit bigger and more global than the Third Reich. There is no ‘European Army’ and countries can leave without revolutions.
Hyperbole is a form of political speech defect – they can’t help themselves…
4 comments
Grand Mufti whut? Hitler couldn’t send anybody to Palestine. He didn’t control the place. Great Britain did, and the Brits didn’t want any more Jews there because the Jews they had there were busy running around bombing and shooting shit, mostly Muslims (which they didn’t care about) but some British-owned properties too, which they did care about. But yeah, Eichmann did ask a bunch of nations to take Europe’s unwanted Jews, and those nations all refused. But that was more as a propaganda exercise to justify the Final Solution than anything that was done in all seriousness.
Ethnic cleansing by any other name …
Yes, the Grand Mufti opposed any more Jews in Palestine, vehemently, but no one really listened. The Brits had their own reasons for blocking more immigrants to Palestine. The Mufti also opposed the creation of Israel with land taken from Palestine. He was equally effective in opposing all kinds of things, because the people with the power to take action didn’t really care what he thought or said.
Or as Stalin is reputed to have said when told the Pope opposed something he desired to do, “and so how many divisions has the Pope?”. Same applies to the Grand Mufti.
Though I must point out that what the Pope wanted — for Stalin to leave Poland Catholic rather than come in and suppress the church after WW2 — was what Stalin ended up doing. Sometimes moral power trumps temporal power after all. But the Grand Mufti had no such worldwide constituency to apply moral power to the issue of Jewish immigration to Palestine. What he had was British authorities who were heartily sick of all the unrest in Palestine and who viewed restricting Jewish immigration as the best way to prevent further unrest.
Stalin invoked the Church and ‘Mother Russia’ in World War II and, as a former seminary student knew how to deal with and use the Church. Peter the Great eliminated the position of Patriarch of Moscow and the Communists reinstated it. When it comes to controlling the masses there is nothing like religion. Marx said it and the Bolsheviks believed and used it.
The Mandate was a major PITA for the Brits and they wanted to be rid of it.