Holocaust Hyperbole as a Warning Sign

Making hyperbolic and apocalyptic comparisons that evoke the Holocaust, having a tendency to escalate disagreements by using extreme and irreconcilable terms, way out of proportion to the immediate situation, these are some of the rhetorical similarities between mad shooters and political extremists that have nothing to do with gun laws. The Holocaust is the definitive extreme case in any debate, worse than global nuclear war because it has actually happened, the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki aside. The Holocaust has rhetorical power because it readily spreads into any number of Old Testament comparisons. So it becomes easy to slide from Scripture to genocide for some people. This then is a first sign that someone is imbalanced--when they start speaking in such end of the world language to describe a much more ordinary confrontation. If a problem with a professor, leads a student to suggest genocide, then he is seriously off the beam. If a politician evokes medieval pogroms to cast herself as the victim of unfair rhetoric, than she, too, has clearly lost all sense of proportion. And it is these slips , these moments when the mask of normalcy slips, when the hugely disproportionate metaphors stream out, that you worry about what is going in the speaker's mind. The link between Palin and the shooter is now coming out after the fact--in the tendency to make eerie and unfitting comparisons between their own personal troubles and the historical murder of the Jewish people. In her denial of any connection to the shooter, she shows just how her reasoning and rhetoric share a common tendency.