In 1990 a little-known lawyer called Mike Godwin noticed that in the early days of the internet, people in online forums would eventually resort to calling the other side Nazis. Today we have Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
Of course, you do not need the internet to observe the descent of a public debate or university lecture that compares a local problem to the Nazi genocide represented by the monstrous Adolf Hitler. The question I have been struggling with in the South African context is why?
When, in 2015, Johannesburg’s Wits university student Mcebo Dlamini declared “I love Hitler”, that he admired the man’s organisational skills and that “in every white person there is an element of Hitler”, there was an outcry and then we forgot about this dangerous and reckless statement by a student leader. Fast forward to 2021 and a University of Cape Town (UCT) lecturer would make the astounding claim that “Hitler committed no crime. All Hitler did was to do to white people what white people have reserved for us black people. And so his crime, if he had a crime, was to do unto white people what white people had thought was right to do only to black people” (emphasis added).
In a mealy mouthed statement bereft of moral consciousness the executive of UCT’s Faculty of Humanities, in which the lecturer, Lwazi Lushaba, works, says he was “taken out of context” and encourages people “to listen to the full lecture”. I did that, three times. I transcribed the lecture to make sure I was not missing anything in a contextual reading of the text. Lushaba was definitely not quoted out of context; he in fact drifts away from his argument to make these strangely detached, provocative statements about Hitler’s innocence in a false equivalence with the role of whites under apartheid.
It is, to be frank, a substandard lecture in university teaching. If I were the parent of a student in this course I would ask for my money back. There are errors of fact, mindless repetition, clumsy argument and, as I will demonstrate, empty provocation.
But since political science is not my primary discipline, I asked leading scholars in this field for their views of the lecture and my reading thereof.
Lushaba’s basic argument, that the institutional approach to the study of politics is Eurocentered and inattentive to the lived experiences of black people, is neither novel nor surprising. Knowledge and Power: Critical perspectives across the disciplines, my first book, in the final months of my PhD, makes this point. But there is a sleight of hand here. Political science for the first half of the previous century was not about people, black or white. It was about structures, systems and institutions. That tradition was not founded on people, period. So to offer students his narrow, racialised account on the formation of disciplines is disingenuous.
With this narrow racial lens in mind he cherry-picks his cases. At about the same time as the Queenstown Massacre of 1921, Jan Smuts was firing on white workers in the Rand Rebellion of 1922. The real shake-up in political science happens in the wake of the 1960s revolts around the world, such as the Poor People’s Movement and, of course, the genocide of World War 2. In short, a class analysis of the politics would render an equally powerful account of the development of the disciplines.
Still, why Hitler? There are two main reasons.
One, to cite Hitler is to immediately draw attention to yourself and your cause. The Holocaust is, says the Anti-Defamation League, “the most available historical event illustrating right versus wrong”. Dlamini and Lushaba know exactly what they are doing. For shock value and attention seeking, comparisons to Hitler always deliver.
Two, it is a way of positioning victimhood and seeking vengeance. Hitler did this to Jews, which is exactly what whites did to blacks. In other words, Hitler taught you (as whites) a lesson. Forget that Hitler did not only kill Jews and that Jews were not regarded as white for most of the century. Forget also that apartheid, for all its indescribable horror, was not the delivery of genocide on an industrial scale. That is not the point.
What makes the likes of Dlamini and Lushaba so dangerous to our civil discourse and our fragile relationships in the post-apartheid period is the destructive poison that they spread. The famed political scientist Mahmood Mamdani warned about this in reference to the Rwandan genocide in his book, When victims become killers. It is what happens when, as victims of our own horrendous history of colonialism and apartheid, we turn our vengeance on fellow citizens. That is why it is important for progressives, including academics, to counter this racist tendency within segments of South African society early and directly, for Dlamini and Lushaba do not speak for themselves.
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