The Nazi thing

Dear Saudi friends,

Over the last few weeks, something has come back to my ears and since I was failing to understand it, it has left me wondering where this was coming from.

It’s this thing about how some Saudis call Iran a Nazi regime. The Crown Prince has referred to it in an interview with The Atlantic, saying the Iranian leader makes Hitler look good. Maybe the Crown Prince started it, in this interview, but I have seen it again since, the Iranian regime being referred to as Nazi.

When that interview came out, honestly, it was like my worst nightmare. I am very fond of your Crown Prince, I would love to work for him as a communication advisor but the headline really made me wonder. I really wondered why he said that. And then I read the interview and I thought it was even worse.

I like your Crown Prince, I support his reforms, but I thought it was wrong to compare the Iranian leader to Hitler. I am European and I don’t think people should refer to Hitler lightly. Judging by his reaction, the journalist from the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, seemed to share my view. Hitler’s regime, by their cold methods and careful planning, by the number of people who died exterminated without mercy, certainly feels like an unprecedented low in human history (the extermination of native people in different parts of North and South America and the triangular trade are actually much worse in size but largely undocumented).

I like your Crown Prince so it bothered me, because I thought he lost some credibility internationally on this.

(I could also see through the interview that because the journalist was American with a Jewish name, the Crown Prince sounded like he expected certain views from the journalist. But the interviewer didn’t fit those stereotypes because actually, he had spend time in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and probably saw first-hand how imperfect his country’s foreign policy can sometimes be. Knowing how few interviews your Crown Prince gives, knowing how important they are as a consequence, it made me wonder how it was possible anyone had agreed to this interview without briefing His Highness on the profile of the interviewer.)

For weeks, this Hitler thing bothered me. And then, as I saw it coming back on Twitter, I wondered if I had missed something. I always think I missed something, I always think there is something I failed to understand.

For some time, I thought it was the Iranians’ ambition to expand beyond their borders, just like the Nazi regime did, when they took over Poland and other countries, that justified this parallel.

But for us Europeans, this territorial expansion is not what defines the Nazi regime. It’s not, because over the recent centuries, we actually had other regimes besides Hitler’s which had an ambition to expand beyond their initial borders and which acted on it. The Napoleonic empire is probably the most famous one, it’s the one that first comes to my mind.

So, to us, when we refer to a Nazi-type regime, it’s not on the basis of an ambition for territorial expansion. It’s on the basis of the racist, discriminatory laws the Nazi regime had put in place, it’s on the basis of the hierarchy Hitler’s regime has established between races and on the basis of what Hitler’s regime has done to millions of people who were viewed as Untermenschen. More than the territorial expansion, what defines the Nazism is the systematic extermination the Nazis planned of entire portions of the population, in particular millions of Jews.

Territorial expansion is not exactly a good thing if you want to leave in peace with your neighbors. But the systematic extermination of a people takes things to a whole new level of horror. This is why, I think, one should never refer lightly to Hitler or the Nazi regime.

But then, as I was preparing this post, I realized I had probably missed something.

See, I am a communication professional, and as such I think that the biggest challenge political leaders are facing nowadays is the potential global coverage of everything they say. This is a problem that analysts are too rarely pointing out, and yet, it creates in my opinion quite an number of issues, especially in this region.

Imagine how it works, a political leader delivers a speech in front of a small group of supporters cheering him, people who agree 200% with him, he feels good, he feels he can say anything the crowd wants to hear. And bam! it happens. That leader might be in Paris, in the Middle East or anywhere, but the next day, with the coverage of news agencies, that one sentence they said to please the crowd in front of them, is on the cover of the newspapers in another country, making people there angry or scared.

We had something like this in France in the 80s, back in the days when political communication was not as mastered as it was today. Our Prime Minister said something in a speech to French people about Japanese being ants, she said it to amuse her crowd, but as the news reached Tokyo, it created a major diplomatic incident with Japan.She eventually had to resign and this small thing was part of it.

And now, with entire channels covering the news 24/7, the media is even more hungry for those unfortunate quotes. They blow them up to create a buzz.

Some leaders in the Middle East are well-known for the flamboyant speeches they give to entire crowds of their supporters. No need to name them, I am sure you know who I mean. It’s hot, they are passionate. I can just imagine how easy it must be to get carried away, and to say something just for the purpose of pleasing that particular crowd. I always think that if those leaders delivered more speeches abroad in front of more neutral crowds, they would sound more peaceful. It’s human but it’s a trap.

(That being said, abroad the problem might be the same. One might talk to a journalists and be carried away by a mix of exhaustion and sheer enthusiasm, and tell journalists what he thinks they want to hear. It’s a trap but it’s human. That’s why most global leaders have communication advisors to help them focus before the interview and to pause an interview if needed.)

I think Iran has a very complicated history with Israel partly because of this. I remember headlines saying that Iran wanted to wipe out Israel. You wonder in what context this was said. My guess, men who wanted to look smart in front of their peers. God should protect us against the vanity of some.

Hitler too was passionate when he was giving speeches. But one has to remember that some dogs bark a whole lot but they don’t bite. Some men brag but they don’t mean it. The real problem with Hitler is not that he was giving those speeches, the real problem is that his people were jobless and hungry. The real problem was that Hitler, who was rather an unfriendly hothead, was surrounded by cold-blooded creeps who came up with a plan to exterminate all Jews and to convince the German people that doing this would actually solve their problems.

When Saudis recently told me “Oh, but Iranians said this, and Iranians said that” I answered “Ok but do you believe them?”

Is Iran really like the Nazi regime?

See, the Nazi regime had established a hierarchy of races where the northern European race was superior and on the basis of that hierarchy, they coldly implemented a plan to kill every single Jew living on the surface of the earth only because the Jewish race was deemed inferior.

I imagine there must be a few hotheads in Iran but as far as I can see nobody who reminds me of the cold-blooded creeps the Nazi regime was full of. As far as I can tell, the Iranian regime opposes Israel, not based on race or religion, not because most Israelis are Jews but because they feel the Jews who have settled in Palestine and who have created the state of Israel have done so at the expense of the Palestinian people who were living there, and because to this day, they are still not treating Palestinians right. (On the contrary, with the events at Khan Al-Ahmar, we see it’s getting worse.)

Those to me are two quite different things. On one side there is an ideology justifying the extermination of a people based on race. On the other side there is a geopolitical conflict. Or is there something else I don’t see happening in Iran? Am I missing something? (I am genuinely asking)

The truth is, the Iranian regime is in a difficult position even though they would obviously deny it because with the American sanctions coming back, Iranians are losing their jobs, European companies are pulling out of Iran for fear of losing their market share in the US. This, in my opinion, is really not a good thing for the region. The EU is trying to compensate this by offering Iran $20 Million, not to destabilize the region as one Saudi told me on Twitter (why please would the European Union ever want to do that? and where the hell are you getting your news, my friend?), but to make up for the effect of the sanctions.

Because if Nazism taught us anything in Europe, it’s that you should not be too harsh on any country’s people regardless of the flaws of their leaders. The Nazis only rose on the Germans’ desperation, and that desperation was actually caused by the weight of the very heavy sanctions (yes, that word) Germany had to pay after they lost World War I.

Next time, as a follow up to this piece, I will tell you about something my years working in advertising and communication have allowed me to understand about President Trump’s relationship to Saudi Arabia.