Yes, that is literally the concern. Activists hurl around the Nazi label with reckless abandon, showing little to no restraint when foisting the label on people they disagree with. There is also a sentiment taking hold that not being enthusiastically anti-Nazi makes you a Nazi sympathizer.
So yes, people have some reasonable reservations about where this could go, without having any real Nazi sympathies.
”wow, if they could do that to heretics, they could do the same thing to me (not a heretic)!”
I can't get enthusiastic about being anti-Nazi because Nazis are not a thing I've had any kind of first hand experience with. Sure, I've learned all about bad things they've done in WW2, but however bad those atrocities were, nothing even close to those events have happened in my own lifetime with regards to Nazis.
I've also learned about similar atrocities caused by the Soviets under Stalin, by Pol Pot in Cambodia, and by various Europeans during colonial times. They are similarly historically distant, with maybe the closest kind of atrocity in my lifetime being the Iraq war. Even with that I have a hard time working myself up about it too much, because... why? What would be the point? To show that I'm sufficiently scrupulous? To prove that I'm on "the right side of history"?
Case in point, right here.
I remember my liberal friends sneering Bush for his “you’re with us or against us” take on the war on terror/patriot act. Funny how it’s come full circle.
It would be exhausting to constantly be virtue signaling like that. Maybe that's why the Twitter accounts that do also often tweet about how tired they are.
“A person who is obstinately and unreasonably wedded to a particular religious or other creed, opinion, practice, or ritual; a person who is illiberally attached to any opinion, system of belief, or party organization; an intolerant dogmatist.”
Perhaps they are cut from the same cloth as those who enthusiastically guillotined perceived enemies left and right during The Terror, only to be beheaded themselves months later by other revolutionaries using the same justification and sense of righteous fervor.
Some people do use that term with insufficient care. Some people use it carefully. Some people use it carefully but disagree with you about who it reasonably applies to.
I’m talking about a subset of all activists, and I didn’t think I necessarily needed to qualify a specific amount or to specify an affiliation in order to declare that such people exist and they follow this kind of behavior. I also specifically wanted to avoid charging a particular organized group of this.
In that sense I don’t feel like I’m making a blanket accusation against defined people, but rather, claiming the behavior is being exhibited by some segment of activists.