Vince Cable, the presumptive next leader of the Liberal Democrats, has given an interview to the New Statesman. As I have written before, I have held some hope in reserve for the possibilities of Vince’s leadership. However, before he has even actually taken up the leadership, he has dropped a clanger, unfortunately. Asked about Theresa May’s phrase about “citizens of nowhere”, Vince said:
“I thought that particular phrase was quite evil. It could’ve been taken out of Mein Kampf.”
Right, where to begin with this. First, bringing Hitler into any political conversation is almost always a bad idea (Godwin’s law, if you will recall). I can accept that there may be times when comparisons with the Nazis are valid; if the Assad regime at some point in the future assembles death camps and starts killing off Sunnis en masse, then yes, I think Hitler comparisons would be warranted at that stage. But it would take something that extreme to validate Nazi collation. Because, let us remind ourselves of this important fact, the Nazis set a very high bar for evil. Anything short of attempted genocide falls well short of the mark.
Second, while I detested the “citizens of nowhere” line as much as anyone in the country (it actually offended me, which is rare), saying it was like something from “Mein Kampf” is just wildly inaccurate. The sentence “If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere” would make absolute no sense whatsoever plopped into the text of “Mein Kampf”. For a start, it contains nothing about Hitler’s imaginary suffering at the hands of the Jews, which is pretty much what every sentence in Hitler’s badly written, self-pitying, horrible in every possible sense autobiography is about. But further, the whole trope of “citizen of the world” is entirely a 21st century one. It would have made no sense at all had anyone written it in 1925, never mind Adolf Hitler.
Why are Lib Dem leaders and leadership candidates prone to this sort of thing? I despair. I still hold out hope for Vince’s leadership – I don’t think this is on par with the “homosexuality is a sin” debacle – but it’s still not a great start.
It almost sounds like you are unconciously looking for things to be critical about. I think you are simply wrong about The Nazis, The Holocaust didnt really get going till 1942, were The Nazis not evil before that ?
Perhaps Vince would have been better to compare “Citizens of Nowhere” with Stalins phrase about “Rootless Cosmopolitans”, also code for Jews but then most people wouldnt have known what he was talking about & thats an important point when coining soundbites.
I don’t think I am, Paul. Genuinely, I feel like Vince’s comments on May’s phrase was hyperbolic and unhelpful. It feels like another attempt by a Lib Dem to get the Left to like the party again, which they simply will not. What the Lib Dems, I think, have going as a party is the ability to be rational voice in a sea of madness. Comparing people to Hitler is unhelpful to that.
Yet another senior (in age, if not power) politician falls victim to Livingstone’s Syndrome. There seems to be quite the epidemic.
I agree with Nick.
Cable was apparently thinking of a different phrase, used in Soviet Russia under Stalin, which didn’t mean the same thing at all.
If you’re going to say you think a political opponent has taken a “particular phrase” from Mein Kampf, you had bloody well better get your facts right – and it took just a few seconds to check online. And if you get them wrong, (1) you should have the decency to admit it and (2) your followers shouldn’t keep defending you, even when they know full well you got it wrong.