Sean Spicer, White House press secretary and mound of Arby's roast beef given hateful sentience by an unholy flesh magician, recently made the news for somehow bungling a press conference meant to denounce the actions of a brutal dictator with a comparison that probably gave Mike Godwin an aneurysm.

The Guardian

Specifically, after a thousand black flies exited his maw and stopped screeching prophecies, Spicer said, "We didn't use chemical weapons in World War II. You had someone as despicable as Hitler, who didn't even sink to using chemical weapons." Even if you take the incredibly generous interpretation that he was only referring to combat (which you shouldn't, because if you ever find yourself saying "We should ignore the Holocaust because technically ..." then you need to step back and take a good, hard look at yourself), he's still wrong. The Germans killed thousands of Soviet soldiers and civilians with chemical gas attacks, because gas is a great way to clear pesky resistance fighters from caves and catacombs if you don't care about violating the Geneva Convention. And hey, the Allies debated using gas too, before ultimately deciding that it would be much more humane to instead firebomb civilian populations for no strategic purpose. Burning to death is better than choking to death, right?

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I'm sure someone is already spewing curses at me for disparaging the good guys, but that's the problem. Lost in the well-deserved mockery of Spicer's kindergarten-level knowledge of history is the fact that he, like so many people who use the comments of music videos on YouTube to debate history before him, is using Hitler as a benchmark. That's what Hitler has become to the modern world. He's history's perfect supervillain -- an ultimate evil that had to be defeated at all costs, a yardstick to measure all other inhumane acts against, the only part of history class that's even vaguely remembered. Someone is either better than Hitler or worse than him, as though chemical attacks, ethnic cleansing, and the lives that were lost in them can be ranked like Radiohead albums and NBA draft picks.