Is political evil worse when it is concealed and its perpetrators ashamed, or when it is committed openly and publicly?

That’s the question raised by remarks made on Thursday by the prime minister, Tony Abbott, who has a habit of comparing almost anyone and anything – Bill Shorten, job losses, abortion – to Nazism.

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The latest Third Reich reference was a curious argument for stepping up Australian intervention in the Middle East.In a radio interview, Abbott said of Islamic State (Isis) that, “The Nazis did terrible evil but they had sufficient sense of shame to try and hide it. These people boast about their evil. This is the extraordinary thing.”

He made a similar comment a year ago. It’s safe to assume Abbott’s Nazi comparisons are neither offhand remarks nor “gaffes”, as some are given to think.

At one level, the comparison could be read as simply cynical, condescending and lazy. It’s another attempt to scare people so they come running for Daddy and elect the Coalition, with its perceived strength on national security.

But it’s also infantilising, because it presumes the public has no broad historical awareness.

Isis are barbarous rapists and murderers, who may yet play a role in wiping out Christianity and a number of ethnocultural groups in the areas they control. But there’s also no comparison between the threat they present and that of Nazi Germany.

The Nazis converted a major democracy with a sophisticated industrial economy into a war machine. By the time the Final Solution began in earnest, they had conquered Europe – and its major powers – from the English Channel to the Caucasus, and had soldiers from Norway to North Africa.

This scale and the machinery of an advanced state is what enabled them to carry out industrial-scale extermination as well as opportunistic murder. Isis, by comparison, are opportunistic gangsters visiting further ruination on two failed states, and trying to jerry-rig their own state machinery in the rubble.

The west’s role in creating the conditions that led to it, and our incompetence in dealing with the consequences, should not lead us to overstate their capacities.

What’s more, the Holocaust was a state secret not because, as Abbott claimed, the Reich was ashamed of its actions, but because they didn’t want anyone interfering with their ongoing genocide.

Broader knowledge of what was happening may have alienated German opinion (including some party members), forewarned victims, and provided grist for the Allied propaganda mill. Later in the war, documents were destroyed ahead of the Allied advance so that criminals could avoid being held accountable for their actions.

They weren’t embarrassed. The Nazis concealed a world-historical crime because it suited their purposes to do so.

They weren’t embarrassed. The Nazis concealed a world-historical crime because it suited their purposes to do so. Isis’s purpose is different. Their violence is a spectacle that requires advertising; what other purpose does lowering caged prisoners into a swimming pool to drown serve, except as propaganda?

A Rhodes scholar like Abbott would have been exposed to the historical facts of Nazism; a former seminarian educated in the confessional tradition of Roman Catholicism should see that if anything, Nazi secrecy worsened the moral catastrophe they brought about.

Abbott’s apparent blindness to this makes his moral accounting, and his rhetoric, all the more striking. The thought that crimes are mitigated if you keep schtum about them is not a claim that a policeman, judge, or person in the street is likely to agree with, but it could work as a self-serving piece of reasoning for someone closer to the centres of state power.

There’s something unsettling, too, about seeing Abbott contort himself in this way. The invocation of a fictitious Nazi sense of shame is pointless, unless you want to reaffirm a moral landscape that is distinctively Western, which the Nazis fatally departed from, but which Isis could necessarily never be a part of. Otherwise, why are we talking about the Third Reich in this context at all?

The only other explanation for Abbott’s fixation on Nazi Germany may be that his powers of moral and political reflection simply aren’t very sophisticated, or attuned to modern realities.

Perhaps his permanent, nostalgic inhabitation of the period when fascism was defeated allows him to avoid the complexities which ought to bear down on any decision to commit Australians to a foreign war in 2015.

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Taking account of events since 1945 would force him to consider the times where western intervention has created conditions where genocidal actors find opportunities, and to weigh them against the situations where Western inaction might have paved the way for terrible crimes.

The man who reportedly whiled away his deepest political crisis reading Churchill’s memoirs simply may not have noticed that the challenges of the present, and the evils it throws up, cannot be helpfully scored against the horror of midcentury European fascism.

The situation we face is one with a particular history, and part of that history is the catastrophic US-led invasion of Iraq a decade ago. Nothing about it is easy, but no one is well served by reducing it to a cartoon with sloppy talk about Nazis.

And before Abbott goes dividing the world into goodies, baddies, and worsies, he should consider that the Allies’ biggest failure in the face of the holocaust was not doing enough to accommodate its refugees.