Leon Wieseltier in the latest New Republic makes an interesting observation.
He is talking about people who compare a recent event to the Holocaust or the Gulag: “Intelligent reflection about policy and history proceeds by analogies. These analogies are always made with respect to an attribute of an object or an event, never to the entirety of it. Otherwise things could be validly compared only to themselves, and we would learn nothing. Some analogies will be right and some will be wrong, but none will be perfect. The wrong ones must be criticized, but generally not as a form of blasphemy or treason.”
So feel free to use outrageous comparisons to the Holocaust, the Gulag, or the Nazi’s. It is not sacrilegious but be prepared to defend the validity of the analogy.