Rowan Godwin Williams

Drudge links to Archbishop of Canterbury warns recession Britain must learn lessons from Nazi Germany

Dr Rowan Williams risks causing a new controversy by inviting a comparison between Gordon Brown's response to the economic downturn and the Third Reich.

In an article for The Daily Telegraph, he claims Germany in the 1930s pursued a "principle" that worked consistently but only on the basis that "quite a lot of people that you might have thought mattered as human beings actually didn't".

Dr Williams, the most senior cleric in the Church of England, then appears to draw a parallel between the Nazis and the UK Government's policies for tackling the downturn, which he says fails to take account of the "particular human costs" to the most vulnerable in society.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, whose true calling appears to be courting controversy, demonstrates why Godwin's Law is a good one.

On the other hand, to read what he actually wrote, its clear that the Telegraph's characterization is supremely unfair.

In the article, Williams, attributing to Barth, warns us to be careful that our "principles don't simply block out actual human faces and stories." He attributes this concern to the christmas story. He blames attachment to principle, in his sense (which is also somehow tied to selfishness), for the crimes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and (somewhat oddly) Mugabe. While he exhorts his readers to be careful, he does not accuse any UK Government policies of blocking out actual human faces and stories.

With his concern, I agree whole-heartedly. Conservative critism of bureaucrats in Washington making broad descisions for local communities is largely predicatd on this concern. But it would take peculiar lack of moral compass to conflate well-intentiond great society programs that devastated african-american communites with genocide.

Given the broader context, his article comes closer to painting Jews, then Gordon Brown, as Nazis. When one talks about what Jesus, or Christmas came to change, there is a historically implicit, change-from-Judaism. This is especially true when one sees the change-from involving improperly rigid adherence to rules. There is nothing wrong with this -- a believer has a right to believe that his set of beliefs are, in some way, superior to alternatives. There is, however, something dangerous in cartoonishly attributing the evils of the world to adherents of those alternatives.