Open Letter to the BBC and CNN*
Stop labelling the voters and supporters of Hitler between 1933 and 1945 as "Nazis". This gives the impression they were all accomplices to Hitler’s crimes! Most Hitler voters and supporters were decent people who personally never hurt a Jew, a democrat, or a liberal.
* Amin ash-Sharif, 19 June 2024
Dear BBC and CNN,
Your patient efforts to distinguish between Islam and Islamism, and between Muslims and Islamists have made me realize the wonders words can conjure. Thanks to this distinction, a brainchild of 20th century French intellectuals, hundreds of millions still believe that the teachings of Islam resemble those of Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism. Those hundreds of millions also believe that the thousands of crimes committed in the name of Islam are the work of "Islamists", a small and misguided minority as representative of Islam as Nazis and Fascists were representative of Christianity.
I will not bother to refute the Islamophobic claim that Hitler and Breivik are different from Bin Laden or Yahya Sinwar, since they didn't commit their crimes in the name of their ancestral religion. I will just argue that it is long overdue for the BBC and CNN to employ political language regarding German history that doesn't stigmatize Germans and that helps Germans feel better about their history.
Stop labelling the voters and supporters of Hitler between 1933 and 1945 as "Nazis". This gives the impression they were all accomplices to Hitler’s crimes! Most Hitler voters and supporters were decent people who personally never hurt a Jew, a democrat, or a liberal. This fact is corroborated by the fact that most Hitler supporters morphed into law-abiding citizens of a democratic West Germany after World War II.
The term "Nazi" must be restricted to Nazis who personally committed violent crimes and abuses against Hitler’s enemies. All other Hitler supporters, such as those who read Mein Kampf peaceably, and peacefully sang Nazi anthems, and peacefully cheered when the Führer’s armies conquered neighboring nations, do not deserve to be labelled Nazis. They must be re-labelled "National-Socialists."
"National-Socialists" were human beings who, with the same straight face of Jordan’s Queen Rania after October 7th, said they had known nothing of the crimes committed during the Third Reich by the ideology and the leader they loved. "National-Socialists" were those who believed, sincerely and long after the Holocaust, that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were the work of a few rotten apples who ignored the peaceful message of Nazism and the peaceful intentions of Hitler. Reformulating a popular Islamic mantra, they might have even argued that, "Nazism is perfect – Nazis are not.“
Dozens of millions of Germans still feel bad about their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, because of the semantic sloppiness of journalists and historians who lump together completely different people just because they revered the same book and the same leader. Since you distinguish so carefully between cuddly Muslims and horrible "Islamists," although both agree that the Quran and Mohammed are paradigms of perfection, surely you can start to distinguish between peace-loving National-Socialists and violent "Nazis" whose sole common denominator was love, faith, and trust in Hitler and Mein Kampf.
Picture credits:
Matt Brown from London, England - George Orwell statue, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64282843
Alexander Svensson - New Broadcasting House, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110007702
https://www.flickr.com/photos/hyku/ - https://www.flickr.com/photos/hyku/389755875/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5668512