"Your Hitler analogy is wrong, and other complaints from a history professor"

"Recently, writers and pundits have been on a quest to find historical analogs for people, parties, and movements in our own times. Trump is like Hitler, Mussolini, andNapoleon; the imploding GOP getting rid of one ill-suited candidate after another is like Robespierre in the French Revolution, who stuck the executioner in the guillotine because there was no one left to behead. The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was like Robert E. Lee...

Hitler comparison has become so common over the years that it has its own probability factor known as Godwin's Law...

Too often, people grab a quick, sexy, polemical, historical analogy to make a point or further their cause. The problem is these easy analogies are extremely shallow and based on a superficial knowledge of the past.

History is not a deck of cards from which to randomly draw for comparative purposes. It is an immense repository of human thinking, doing, and being that can and should help us be slightly less narrow-minded and shortsighted than our forefathers and foremothers sometimes were. Good uses of history require more substance, unpacking, and analysis than a few quick sound bites can provide...

Simplistic historical analogies do a sort of epistemic violence to the past and to ourselves... Flippant comparisons also belittle and ignore the way that historical trauma creates immense ongoing psychological pain and tangible collective struggle that continuesthrough generations, even up through the present...

As Mark Twain supposedly said: "History doesn't repeat itself. But it rhymes." And it is in the rhyming that history still plays an important role."

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/19/11450526/trump-is-hitler?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4/19/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Super valid; we need to stop with these comparisons.

Related: woman who made nazi salute

FB: "To compare Trump to Napoleon or Hitler is to make a vacuous historical comparison that obscures more than it reveals. But it is actually constructive to try to understand Trump as a fairly logical outcome of some of the cultural impulses that drove the moral majority and the religious right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It tells us how we got here and, potentially, how to move forward."