{"id":20016,"date":"2013-04-27T09:00:52","date_gmt":"2013-04-27T13:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20016"},"modified":"2017-09-25T21:56:35","modified_gmt":"2017-09-26T01:56:35","slug":"nazi-is-a-word-that-leads-to-intellectual-laziness-and-misunderstanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/04\/27\/nazi-is-a-word-that-leads-to-intellectual-laziness-and-misunderstanding\/","title":{"rendered":"“Nazi” is a word that leads to intellectual laziness and misunderstanding"},"content":{"rendered":"

In History Today<\/em>, Richard Overy<\/a> explains why the word “Nazi” has been over-used and has become an obstacle to historical understanding:<\/p>\n

Few words in regular use in historical writing can have been abused as much as the word \u2018Nazi\u2019. At the very least it has proved a persistent grammatical challenge for generations of students who fall into the trap of writing \u2018Nazi\u2019s\u2019 or \u2018Nazis\u2019 \u2018 as the plural of Nazi and \u2018Nazis\u2019 as the possessive without an apostrophe, when it should be the other way around. This has become so widespread a practice that the mistake profits from a growing linguistic inertia. Soon it will be designated as an anomaly we can all live with, like the misuse of \u2018impact\u2019 as if it were a verb — as in \u2018the Nazi\u2019s impacted the German political system\u2019. <\/p>\n

In truth this is the least of the problems. The real issue is the indiscriminate use of the term \u2018Nazi\u2019 to describe anything to do with German institutions or behaviour in the years of the dictatorship between 1933 and 1945. It is common practice to talk of the \u2018Nazi Army\u2019, or the \u2018Nazi Air Forces\u2019, or \u2018Nazi atrocities\u2019, or \u2018the Nazi economy\u2019 as if everything in Germany under Hitler was uniquely and unambiguously National Socialist. The result is a complete lack of historical precision. \u2018Nazi\u2019 becomes a shorthand term that obscures more than it explains. Historians who write about the Soviet Union under Stalin do not usually describe its features as \u2018Commie this\u2019 or \u2018Commie that\u2019, any more than historians of British party politics in the interwar years talk about \u2018Tories\u2019 and \u2018lefties\u2019 rather than the Conservative Party and the Labour Party.<\/p>\n

The term originated in the 1920s when contemporaries searched for some way of getting round the long-winded title of the party — the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). It was used chiefly by the enemies of the party and never by the regime itself. The term \u2018Nazi\u2019 or \u2018the Nazis\u2019 had strongly negative associations; it was employed as a quick way of describing a movement popularly associated in the mind of left-wing critics outside Germany with authoritarian rule, state terror, concentration camps and an assault on the cultural values of the West. Psychologists even suggested that there was such a thing as a \u2018Nazi mind\u2019 to explain why members of the party were so brutal, aggressive and mendacious. The term then, and now, was loaded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In History Today, Richard Overy explains why the word “Nazi” has been over-used and has become an obstacle to historical understanding: Few words in regular use in historical writing can have been abused as much as the word \u2018Nazi\u2019. At the very least it has proved a persistent grammatical challenge for generations of students who […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1118,7,28,230],"tags":[457,969,400],"class_list":["post-20016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-germany","category-history","category-media","category-ww2","tag-fascism","tag-hitler","tag-language"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5cQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20016"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20018,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20016\/revisions\/20018"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}