John Vidal (”The hypocrisy of Mugabe’s critics”, July 8) scratched the surface of what is a bigger problem bedevilling the Zimbabwe political debate.
The American political philosopher of German descent, Leo Strauss, called it the reductio ad Hitlerum. Noting the increased use of Nazi analogies, he argued that it was fallacious to refute a view simply because Hitler happened to share it.
In an interview with John Carlin (The Sunday Independent, December 6 1998), Nelson Mandela was asked: ”Where would you put apartheid in the scale of 20th-century atrocities?”
The legend replied: ”With the exception of the atrocities against the Jews during the Second World War, there is no evil that has been as condemned by the entire world as apartheid.”
Even after spending 27 years in prison, Mandela resisted the temptation to suggest that apartheid was a worse evil than Nazism. In a world with an insatiable penchant for hyperbole, where we loosely and readily refer to events as the worst ever, such admirable ability to retain a sense of perspective is rare.
The employment of the reductio ad Hitlerum has the effect of transporting debate to a stratum where facts, objectivity and logic are subordinate to emotions. The language employed by exponents of this strategy is manipulative and conspicuously insensitive, the name-calling breathtakingly visceral.
The reductio ad Hitlerum formed part of the United States’s excuse for attacking Iraq. Saddam Hussein was portrayed as a monster who was planning to incinerate his own people and enemies alike with weapons of mass destruction in the same way Hitler had gassed the Jews. The same Hitler analogies formed part of the justification for the Nato attacks on Yugoslavia because Slobodan Milosevic had become ”a modern-day Hitler”.
Enter Robert Mugabe, a ”monster who starves his own people and uses food as a weapon”. The Zimbabwean president has been added to the infamous pantheon of history’s worst despots.
Morgan Tsvangirai was among those who popularised the ”Mugabe is Africa’s Milosevic” opinion. ”We must stop Africa’s Milosevic,” the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader said in October 2000. ”There’s no difference between the situation in Yugoslavia and the situation in Zimbabwe.”
Five years later, the situation in Zimbabwe has changed to supposedly resemble that in Cambodia under Pol Pot, with Tsvangirai, horrified by Operation Murambatsvina, telling business leaders in Johannesburg last week that Mugabe is ”Pol Pot in slow motion”.
The Zimbabwe political discourse is being sustained by an array of cowardly tactics. In 2003, the US blamed escalating violence in Zimbabwe on Mugabe comparing himself to Hitler. A Washington statement said that ”the upsurge in official violence is directly attributable to President Mugabe’s speech last Friday in which he said he could be a ‘black Hitler tenfold’ in crushing his opponents.”
Mugabe was in fact responding to reports in sections of the British press branding him Hitler. He said: ”This Hitler has only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources. If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold.”
Cartoonists show no compunction about inserting a Hilterist moustache on the Zimbabwean president. As far as they are concerned ”Mad Bob” is the identikit despot. He is Hitler, Milosevic, Idi Amin and Pol Pot rolled into one.
But are acts of violence and human rights abuses perpetrated by Mugabe’s regime the closest developments to genocide since Milosovic’s ethnic cleansing projects in Yugoslavia or Hitler’s gas chambers in Auschwitz? In Zimbabwe under Mugabe, are we beginning to see the reincarnation of apartheid or man-made atrocities on a scale to rival Pol Pot’s killing fields in Cambodia?
Quite how the architect of Operation Murambatsvina, a project whose admittedly callous execution caused six reported ”accidental” deaths, can evoke serious analogies with Pol Pot, who presided over the slaughter of two-million Cambodians — a quarter of his country’s population — beggars belief.
These outlandish comparisons flourish because of our fear that we will be labelled Mugabeists if we challenge them.
The point of this article is not to exonerate Mugabe or humanise him by suggesting that he is not a patch on Pol Pot, or that he looks positively Lilliputian compared to Hitler, but to question the validity of these comparisons.
The MDC sees no contradiction in mooting power-sharing proposals with a government that it claims advocates Hitlerist policies.
Ahead of the March 31 parliamentary elections, many political pundits and the media shared and promoted the view that conditions in Zimbabwe were analogous to those prevailing in Ukraine heading into that country’s elections in late 2004. They then predicted a Ukraine-style regime change in Zimbabwe, when in the aftermath of a rigged election Zimbabweans would be mobilised for a mass protest culminating in Mugabe’s removal.
Confronted by accusations of a weak leadership, Tsvangirai defended himself. ”Zimbabwe is not Ukraine …We have to be realistic,” he told the Washington Post on April 3.
How about demonstrating the same realism by jettisoning the extravagant Pol Pot analogies and cheap Hitler invocations and focus instead on the business of returning Zimbabwe to the rule of law?
Lashias Ncube is a Zimbabwean journalist living in Cape Town