Most of us have probably seen a discussion that was getting a little heated but was still under control. Until someone finally said it: Someone compared something to the Nazis.

This is a well-documented phenomenon, which even has a fake logical fallacy named for it: reductio ad Hitlerum (pseudo-Latin for “reduction to Hitler”). This term was first used in 1951 by Leo Strauss, a German-American political philosopher, who saw people around him using comparisons to Hitler and Nazi Germany as a tool to sidestep logical arguments.

Reductio ad Hitlerum is a modified version of the logical fallacy of irrelevance and has even spawned a mock mathematical law named Godwin’s Law, which holds that any online discussion, given enough time, will eventually lead to a reference to Hitler or the Nazis.

So just why do some people make such crass comparisons, anyway?

First, almost everyone in the world knows roughly the story of Nazi Germany and the atrocities committed until the end of World War II. This universal memory is a relatively new phenomena spawned out of the global scale of WWII, which gave the world an all-too-large taste of truly global events.

It is not only that everyone knows the story, but, with very few exceptions, everyone is on the same side. It seems redundant to say the Nazi regime was the “bad” side of WWII. Everyone, aside from a few nuts, simply knows it. This makes any comparison to Nazis more than one that will always register with an audience, but one that will always provoke the same shared negative reaction.

Additionally, people always associate Nazis with things like evil, and that is just about the only thing they can associate with Nazis. The swastika is a perfect example of this. The association of the swastika with Nazism completely overpowers any other positive, peaceful symbolic meanings it once had. This same singular association mechanism associates the Nazis with “bad” and nothing else, such as establishing the world’s first freeway system.

Another less flattering reason that someone would compare something to Nazi Germany would be simply a lack of respect. For example, a disgruntled patron may be fully aware that comparing a restaurant’s no-refund policy for fully eaten meals to Nazi Germany is completely out of line, but that person may simply not care, preferring to make the most shocking and outlandish statement possible.

Since Nazis are the biggest known example of “evil” or “wrongness” for many of us, we may be tempted to reference them to try to lend their massive weight behind our accusations or comparisons. This is similar to the first child to claim “times infinity” on the playground because it is totally foreign to any point being made and is only designed to one-up someone else’s argument without any actual evidence.

Whenever the Nazis are compared to something that is relatively minor, such as the enforcing of seat-belt laws, the usual response is to make the assertion that the Nazis are not truly comparable, shifting all discussion to the comparison itself. This shift ultimately undermines any original point being made, because it takes focus away from the original point and places it on the logical fallacy, thus rendering the original argument sterile. Nothing at all can come from an interaction crippled by such poor comparisons.

Of course, there are times when Nazi Germany can be used as a perfectly valid comparison, but those times are few and far between in our everyday lives. Most of us do not often discuss various totalitarian governments or genocidal regimes truly similar to the Nazis.

Beyond the effect a Nazi comparison may have on any given discussion, it has a larger, more sinister effect on our global culture: To invoke the Nazis in everyday discussions lessens the impact of the reference and alters our perception of the world’s history.

This skewed view of the impact the Nazis’ horrors really had on the world is simply inexcusable. History is not ours to pervert because we cannot be bothered to make fitting analogies.