A display of propaganda posters at the Holocaust Memorial Museum
When the Third Reich is invoked, it's usually clear evidence that that person's position is so weak that they have had to resort to a gross misrepresentation of the other's position.
There are exceptions, of course, because sometimes the Nazi label fittingly applies. Sometimes the lineage of a movement, institution, or political figure can be traced right back to the German fascist regime.
This is the case with today's environmentalism, according to a one-time British investment banker.
"If you look at what the Nazis were doing in the 1930s, in their environmental policies, virtually every theme you see in the modern environmental movement, the Nazis were doing," said Rupert Darwall, author of "Green Tyranny," in a recent interview with Encounter Books.
"I think actually the most extraordinary thing that I came across was this quote from Adolf Hitler where he told an aide once, 'I'm not interested in politics. I'm interested in changing people's lifestyles.' Well, that could be ... that's extraordinarily contemporary. That is what the modern environmental movement is all about. It's about changing people's lifestyles," said Darwall, who is no crackpot on the fringe and whose background includes duties as a special advisor to the United Kingdom's Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The Fuhrer's interest in "changing people's lifestyles" is, not at all shockingly, similar to the goals of today's climate fanatics who want to destroy capitalism and replace it with an economic system - run by them, naturally - that would certainly change lifestyles in the West.
Darwall further notes in the interview that "the Nazis were the first political party in the world to have a wind power program," and were also opposed to eating meat, a delightful and nutritious activity that the warming alarmists consider a sin.
When interviewer Ben Weingarten asks Darwall about the "link between Nazism and Communism, and the trajectory from that (initial) union to today's climate movement," the author provides a brief history lesson that is inconvenient for the alarmist community.
The union fits perfectly, of course, with the watermelon analogy that explains today's environmentalist excesses - green on the outside, red on the inside.
It also reminds us of the validated-many-times-over aphorism that when a socialist or communist is thrown out of the window of polite society, he returns through the front door as an environmentalist.
Darwall, who seems uninterested in sugarcoating his observations, also discusses "the 'shock troops' of the climate-industrial complex," which he identifies as nongovernmental organizations such as "Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth," and other "large foundations," as well as "the Bill McKibbens of this world."
Other Nazi parallels with climate alarmists and radical environmentalists include their efforts "to delegitimize dissent" and bully "people into silence," and suppressing arguments "not by having an argument but just making sure you don't have an argument," Darwall says.
In other words, brand skeptics as "deniers" and "anti-science" rubes so they'll shut up.
Accusing its political opponents of being Nazis is an exhausted trick of the left. Think of how many times that President Trump has been called Hitler of late.
It doesn't tax the imagination greatly, though, to presume that this could be done to cover the left's own kinship with fascism.
Comment: Yet another facet of Western Liberalism that seek to subjugate, rather than liberate.