There’s an old internet maxim: Don’t compare anything to Adolf Hitler, lest you want to make yourself look like an ass. Yet people on the left seem to be intent upon comparing Vladimir Putin to Hitler. To such efforts? No, just no. Don’t try to make Hitler sound better to make Putin look worse.

The latest entry in the Very Bad Takes Sweepstakes comes from former Goldman Sachs CEO, now senior chairman, Lloyd Blankfein.

Worth noting even Hitler didn’t permit his military to use chemical weapons, though he had them. https://t.co/jG25woB8kl

— Lloyd Blankfein (@lloydblankfein) March 24, 2022

“Worth noting even Hitler didn’t permit his military to use chemical weapons, though he had them,” Blankfein tweeted.

First, let’s just note how historically wrong this is. I guess you could try to play games with whether the SS was “military” — they were certainly used as military units (although distinct from the regular Army units of the Wehrmacht). The SS ran the death camps and the gas chambers so yes, the military did use chemical weapons. But even with the military in the field, the Einsatzgruppen — the SS group that was frequently the first unit into a country to take out the political opposition and kill the Jews — had mobile gas vans that they employed in the field. And yes, gas is a “chemical weapon.” They moved on to the death camp idea because they found this killing in the field too inefficient for their purposes. This concept that Hitler was somehow holding back the use of chemical weapons is just nonsense. “At least 1.5 million and possibly more than 2 million Holocaust victims died in mass shootings or gas vans in Soviet territory,” according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Not to mention the millions killed in the stationary death camps and gas chambers as well.

But then, what’s the point in this? Why would you want to make Hitler seem better than Putin or make Putin look worse? What’s the point of this effort besides it being disgraceful and historically wrong? Blankfein isn’t the first person going down this road. As I previously reported, former U.S. ambassador to Russia under Barack Obama, Michael McFaul, also got into difficulty with a similar comment.

Putin invaded his neighbor — that’s wrong enough. You don’t need to invent things to make him sound worse. You can also be legitimately concerned about where Putin’s actions might go next and the threats he’s been tossing around, but that still doesn’t make him Hitler. So I have to wonder about what people are trying to push when they jump to such extremes — why do they need to make him worse?

No. Not it’s not worth noting.

He gassed Jews asshole. https://t.co/S7hx5hjGrI

— Kron (@n0th1ngm4n) March 25, 2022

And just like that, the people that used to call everyone else Hitler began to point out his redeeming qualities. https://t.co/6wWobVUf9w

— Rising serpent 🇺🇸 (@rising_serpent) March 24, 2022