A lot of people love to quote Martin Niemoller, thinking he was a poet who wrote a poem that functions as a metaphor for complying with evil.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
There are various versions of it, some of which begin with the Nazis coming for communists first, and some with the Nazis coming for the Jews first. But, it wasn’t actually a poem. It was something that Neimoller said in lectures, because it wasn’t metaphorical—it was his narrative of what actually happened to him, and how he actually responded. And his whole point was that he was okay with what the Nazis did as long as he thought their policies didn’t hurt him. It was only when he ended up in jail that the problem with Nazis wasn’t their outcomes (which he liked till they hurt him), but their way. Their process was one to which he should always have objected, but he didn’t because he liked the outcome. Till he didn’t, and then he realized the process had been wrong all along.
Those processes were ones that could be used to hurt him, and so he should have paid attention to them.
I think that’s where we are. I think a lot of people are okay with Trump’s processes because they like the outcomes and they don’t realize those processes could hurt them. Niemoller realized, once he was in jail, that the ends don’t justify the means—because the means remain.
Here’s what Hitler promised: I will protect the in-group. I will institute a government that is not about fairness across groups; my policies will be entirely about promoting and protecting the in-group. That is a way of determining policy: the government should protect and support people like me, and it’s not my business if official policy is something I would be outraged if applied to me.
Hitler said (and had always said), there are true Germans, and the German government should protect and promote their interests. That’s an argument (I will protect true Germans), and a way of arguing (laws should be applied differently depending on identity).
That second level is the one Neimoller bungled: he was fine with how the Nazis treated people until and unless it hit people like him (the Christian churches in Germany never objected to the treatment of Jews—they only mildly objected to the treatment of converted Jews; in other words, they only protected am in-group). Niemoller accepted the premised that, as long as your in-group is okay, the government is okay. Let’s think of that as the “argument from in-group/out-group” level. People might support Nazism because it seemed to support their in-group, and the hostile actions were against an out-group.[1] The way that Nazis operated—laws should be applied differently for in- versus out-group—was bad, but Niemoller was okay with it till he was a victim of that way.
This is what is important about Niemoller: his way of thinking was wrong. He was wrong because he was fine with a set of policies that applied to people that he didn’t want applied to him.
In other words, Niemoller was fine with other groups being treated in a way he would not want to be treated. It isn’t about what you’re doing; it’s about how you’re doing something. Are you treating others as you would think fair were you treated that way?
There’s a guy. He said in-group/out-group membership didn’t count. He said fairness across groups matters. Niemoller’s mistake was ignoring what that guy said, and that’s the point of his quote. People shouldn’t judge the actions of another (or a government) on the basis of whether we are harmed or benefitted at this moment, but whether we would think those actions just if applied across groups.
Hitler said (and all demagogues say), “I am you. You and I need to expel/exterminate this group that wants to exterminate us. Because they want to exterminate us, anything we do is justified.”
What Hitler did (and, to be blunt, all authoritarian demagogues do) is equivocate on the construction of that in-group. In-groups are often defined in the negative—we are this because we are not that. We take pride in not being that (to give a personal example, ELCA taking pride in not being Missouri Synod). In a culture of demagoguery, there is an out-group (Jews, communists) and any violence against that out-group is justified because they are toxic to the body politic. You demonstrate your commitment to the in-group by how much hate you express about the out-group.
When Hitler was coming to power, Niemoller was a conservative Lutheran pastor who thought the Nazis might be useful allies in regaining some of the ground lost under the socialist democrats, both in terms of the power of the church (especially Protestant) in material and cultural ways. He thought he was in Hitler’s in-group. And he thought that because there was so much rhetoric that said that there were only two sides: you could be an atheistic communist, or you could be Nazi. Hitler never argued against the many parties in the middle (including Democratic Socialists, who were not atheist, nor fascist, nor communist).
The socialists had been in favor of a separation of church and state, and so allowed secular public education, and Niemoller (and other religious figures) were worried about possibly additionally losing the substantial amount of money they got from the state. He believed, correctly, that the Nazis would not allow for the separation of church and state (whoops on how he read that belief), that they would insist on religion in the classroom, that they would have a government with an openly religious mission, and he thought he could work with them on the money issue. As far as cultural issues, Niemoller’s politics were far closer to the Nazis’ than to the socialists. He believed, correctly, that the Nazis would reinstate conservative policies regarding homosexuality, abortion, birth control, women’s rights, and religious intolerance. Niemoller was pretty typical in that regard. What that means, and this is important, is that Niemoller and people like him, because they weren’t willing to deal with a mild cutting back on their privileges, actively supported a regime that would eventually exterminate them.
And they did it because they were so obsessed with getting certain policy points–abolition of homosexuality, abortion, and birth control; a judicial system that (they thought) would promote their political agenda; financial benefits for the churches; protection of rabidly religious education—that they were willing to overlook how those policy goals would be attained.
But it’s the how that matters. Not just how policy was attained, but how people reasoned.
There is a talking point now that Nazis were atheists, and therefore atheists are bad, so, as long as we keep atheists out of office, we could never have a Holocaust. Hitler talked a lot about God, almost certainly sincerely, and, while he had some higher-level supporters who espoused atheism, most of the higher-ups were some kind of theist (even if neo-pagan), and, overwhelmingly, supporters of the regime were avowed Christian. Nazism was openly genocidal from 1939, and the genocides were not some kind of secret activity on the part of a few people. Genocide was the official and open policy of the Wehrmacht—the orders were to kill everyone who might be a political or ideological threat, and that “threat” was determined racially. People who identified as Christian stood by the side of a ditch and laughed as blood spurted from the layers of people they were killing. Had all the Christians refused to engage in genocide, the war would have ended in 1939. They didn’t. The Nazi regime was a Christian regime because most of the people enacting Nazi policies were Christian.
People who want to argue that being Christian makes someone a better person (really bad theology) and that, therefore, we should only have Christian judges and politicians, try to use Nazi Germany as an example as to why leaders should be Christian. The Nazi regime was atheist, they say, and it was bad, therefore regimes should be Christian. Not everyone in the Nazi regime was atheist, however, and most of the people who voted for, supported, and enacted Nazi policies were Christian. But, that argument is that Hitler’s entourage had a disproportionate number of atheists, and therefore atheists are dangerous. Or, Hitler’s entourage had a disproportionate number of non-Christians, and therefore this is proof that a predominantly Christian government is safe.
Here’s the problem with how people tend to argue (and it’s the problem Niemoller was trying to point to): it isn’t what you argue; it’s how you argue. For a long time, all he cared about was what people were arguing, and then he suddenly realized that what mattered was how they argued.
Milton Mayer’s troubling book They Thought They Were Free describes ten people who submitted to Nazism cheerfully, and who continued to believe that Hitler was good (but had bad advisors). It has a brilliant explanation as to why they continued to believe in Hitler, and one part of the explanation is that people tend to think in the short term as to whether they are, in this moment, better, and not whether the way they got the things they like is a good way. Mayer says that they believed “Adolf Hitler was good—in my friends’ view—up until 1943, 1941, or 1939, depending on the individual’s assessment of his strategy” (69-70). In other words, he was good for Germany until things started to go bad, but Hitler’s strategy was bad from the beginning—his was of deliberating, his plans for world domination, his racist policies. It’s as though they thought that drinking arsenic was great till the moment it killed someone—they didn’t acknowledge that the way Hitler ruled was always going to end up in an unwinnable war, racial extermination, and a devastated Germany.
There are a lot of ways to assess an argument; here I want to mention three. First, it’s a good argument because it’s made by someone you thinking is good. Second, it’s a good argument because it confirms your beliefs, and so it intuitively feels right. Third, it’s a good argument because the way it’s argued would be, you think, a good way to argue even if you didn’t like the outcome.[2] There is a similar division in terms of thinking about politics: you can decide that a policy is good because it’s advocated by someone you like; or it’s good because you’re benefitting from it here and now; or it’s good because the way it was argued and enacted and applied would be, you think, good even if you didn’t benefit from it.
The argument that Nazism was atheist fits into the first and second categories, but not the third. It is probably made by people you like, and it gets you a conclusion you like (Christians are good and Nazis are bad). But the way it’s argued—if you consistently applied that logic—would lead to your endorsing Nazi policies.
I say, “Kale is bad because I threw up after eating it.” If I sincerely believed that was a good way to argue, then I’d be willing to stop consuming anything that made me throw up. [In rhetorical terms, the enthymeme has a major premise I’ll support in other circumstances.] But, what if I threw up after drinking tequila? If I’m going to stick with the premise established in regard to kale, then I’d also conclude that tequila is bad (personally, I’d support that conclusion), in which case my argument about kale is logical. But, what if I ever want to drink tequila again (and, really, I’d say you should think about that), then my conclusion about tequila has a different premise from my argument about tequila.
In other words, the major premise of my stance about kale (things that make me throw up should be avoided) is not one I hold consistently, so it isn’t actually helping me make decisions about what to consume. It’s only helping me rationalize decisions I make for other reasons.
If I like tequila (really, why would you do that?), I’ll find lots of reasons to exempt it from the “it makes you throw up” argument I’m willing to make for kale. And that’s the important point, if I’m not willing to reason across kale and tequila, then I don’t have a logical argument. I’m just looking for reasons to hate kale and like tequila (don’t—don’t do that).
If my way of making decisions is to protect my commitments, then I will start with a premise (kale is bad), and I will just look for datapoints to support that premise. And here’s what’s important for thinking about how people reason—I will feel that I am logical in my feelings about kale since I can find lots of evidence to support my claim. You can find lots of evidence to support any claim, after all. What you can’t find (and this is where Infowars and conspiracy theories get it wrong), is evidence that you apply with consistent premises. But that’s a different pot. Here’s the point I’m making: if I’m not actually willing to apply my reasoning about kale to other things that make me throw up, then I’m not being logical; I’m just neck-deep in the swamp of confirmation bias.
It might be true that kale is bad, but kale being bad doesn’t confirm my way of reasoning. What I mean by that is that it might be true that Nazis are bad political leaders (they are), but that doesn’t mean that Christians are good political leaders. Nazis weren’t bad because some of the Nazi leaders were atheists; Nazis were bad because they were entitled authoritarian racist fascist militarist German exceptionalists who rejected any notions of universal human rights. The Nazi way of reasoning never changed, but its outcomes did—what Mayer shows is that, when that way got people what they wanted, it seemed good; when it didn’t it got bad. They didn’t see that the bad was the inevitable consequence of the apparently good. The Nazi way of reasoning initially seemed good to Niemoller, because it got him what he wanted. But it wasn’t a good way, because it got him in jail. And then he saw it was bad—it was bad all along, but he didn’t see it till he was in jail.[3]
What the Nazis should teach us is that our group succeeding is not a good reason to support a politician—we should support politicians who advocate policies we would support regardless of whether they benefit us personally. And we shouldn’t just judge an argument as to whether it gets a conclusion we like; we should think about whether we would consider it a good way of arguing for everyone.
And that’s where the “Atheists are bad because the Nazis were bad” gets awful. That argument assumes that you can and should take disproportionate representation of some group in a bad power structure as proof that the group as a whole is evil. Nazis were evil, you reason, and a disproportionate were atheist, and so all atheists are dangerous. So, if that’s a good way to argue, then if a disproportionate number of leaders of Pol Pot’s revolution were left-handed, we should consider left-handed people evil. Or, if a disproportionate number of people in Lenin’s group were Jews, then Jews are bad.
And that is exactly how Nazis did (and do) argue. So, if you think that the presence of atheists in the Nazi regime is proof that Nazism is essentially atheist (regardless of the religious affiliations of the people who enacted Nazi policies) then you’re a Nazi. Lenin’s group had a disproportionate number of Jews, so, your logic says the Nazis were logical to say all Jews are essentially bad. That’s how you reason.
I’m not saying that you think Jews are essentially bad. I’m saying you’re Niemoller. Niemoller didn’t think Protestants should be jailed. But he didn’t like communists or socialists or Jews. And he knew that the Nazis would violate laws and act in authoritarian ways to exterminate out-groups. For a long time, he was only concerned with the outcome of their policies, and not the way they enacted their policies. Hitler was a liar, and had always been a liar, but, when Hitler told a lie Niemoller liked, Hitler’s way of arguing or administering didn’t matter. It was only when Niemoller ended up in jail that he realized Hitler’s way was wrong, and it had always been wrong.
The way matters. If you think that atheists can’t be trusted because leading Nazis were disproportionately atheist, then you think the Nazis were right about the Jews. Or, in other words, you aren’t really thinking.
[1] And here I have to stop and explain that sociologists use the in-group/out-group distinction in a very specific and useful way. People often use “in-group” to mean people in power, but sociologists use it to mean the group you’re in. So, while pitbull owners is not a politically central group, it’s an in-group for people who believe that owning a pitbull is an important part of their identity.
[2] I am in an intermittent state of rage as to how scholars in rhetoric talk about Aristotle’s ethos/pathos/logos—it’s read in light of logical positivists logic/emotion binary. If you read what Aristotle says about politics and ethics, however, I think you end up with something much more like what I’m saying here.
[3] I’d also say it matters because all scams—ethical or monetary—rely on getting people to ignore major premises. If you want to scam someone, you get them to reason the wrong premises. Someone sells you a bad car on the grounds that he’s a nice guy; someone gets you to vote for her on the grounds that she is like you; someone persuades you to buy property on the grounds that he’s sold other property that made money. Those are all arguments that rely on major premises that are obviously invalid.