The repugicans
love to play mix 'n match labels with Nazis and Communists but
themselves channel Hitler as they do so to stoke fear and anger…
The repugicans love to
draw false parallels between Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler, and to
liken themselves to the so-called Greatest Generation, who crusaded against Nazism.
For ignorant repugicans – leaders and base included – liberals and progressives are somehow both
Nazis and
Communists, and oddly enough, at the same time,
Caliphate-loving terrorists, as though any one of the three could be equated with the others.
Orson
Scott Card, Mormon and sci fi author, as well as being a foe of LGBT
rights, is also an Obama hater, and one of those who likes to play the
Hitler card. Four months ago
he said, “Like Hitler, he [Obama] needs a powerful domestic army to terrify any opposition that might arise.”
Like
Hitler, he [Obama] needs a powerful domestic army to terrify any
opposition that might arise…The National Police will be recruited from
“young out-of-work urban men” and it will be hailed as a cure for the
economic malaise of the inner cities. In other words, Obama will put a
thin veneer of training and military structure on urban gangs, and send
them out to channel their violence against Obama’s enemies.
Never
mind that Obama neither needs nor has a powerful domestic army – or any
domestic army – for people like Card, who operate by generating fear,
even the suggestion is enough.
Far from being punished for saying such stupid and dishonest things, Card was rewarded last week
by being appointed to the UNC -TV Board of Trustees by repugican state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger. Said Chairman Robb Teer,
We
are pleased to welcome Mr. Card to the UNC-TV Board of Trustees. We are
grateful for his willingness to serve and look forward to working with
him to continue providing the people of our state with enriching,
life-changing television in these challenging times.
Apparently,
some repugicans think public television should reflect their
hate-filled and inflammatory rhetoric – which happens to be a very
Hitler-like move, and one, no doubt, of which Der Führer would have
approved.
The use of these terms demonstrates that wingnuts
who apply them haven’t the faintest idea what they are talking about.
Communism is an extreme left wing ideology, while Nazism is an extreme
right-wing ideology. The two hated each other as only extremists can.
The Nazi hymn, the
Horst Wessel Lied, reveals the degree of antipathy existing between the two in its first verse:
Die Fahne hoch die Reihen fest geschlossen
S. A. marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt
Kam’raden die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen
Marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit
Flag high, ranks closed,
The S.A. marches with silent solid steps.
Comrades shot by the red front and reaction
march in spirit with us in our ranks.
People
like Glenn Beck and our various religious zealots fling words like
“Communist” and “Nazi” around because they generate negative emotion.
None of it has to make any sense. In fact, they don’t want to make any
sense. They just want to stoke levels of fear and hatred, which is, as
it turns out, very Nazi and very Hitler-like of them.
This absurd mixing and matching of labels is supposed to magnify the fear and danger. So we run into people like Matt Barber
who wants to equate Paganism with secularism, and Patrick Henry College professor Stephen Baskerville,
who in demonizing both feminism and islam, rationalizes how a group can be both one thing and another by invoking Hitler and Stalin:
Though
they claim to advance rights, or equality, or justice – values that in
their place may be seductively legitimate – the real aim is power – or
as currently phrased, “empowerment.” In comparison with this shared
common goal, differences in contentare secondary. This is why alliances
are readily formed between seemingly incompatible agendas: Hitler and
Stalin, or Islamists and feminists. “Power is the alpha and the omega of
contemporary Communism,” wrote Milovan Djilas during the repression of
the 1950s.”Ideas, philosophical principles, and moral considerations…-
all can be changed and sacrificed. But not power.
Because we can all see radical islamists allying themselves with feminists.
The christian
fundamentalists pretend “gay activists” are Hitler’s storm troopers but
in reality, the gays are as much the victims of repugican ideology as
they once were of Nazi ideology, and it is the gay-bashing repugicans
who are playing the part of Hitler’s brown battalions. The tea party
mantra is less “Don’t Tread on Me” and more “I will Tread on You.”
Of
course, if repugicans would spend more time reading history and less
making it up, they would know these things and their leaders would not
so easily be able to lie to them. It is all available and so easy to
find that failing to do so borders on the criminal.
Just look at a few examples:
Ernst
“Putzi” Hanfstaengl, one of Hitler’s early confidants, wrote in his
memoirs, referring to the 1920s, that, “The Nazis were only one of the
numerous Right Wing radical organizations flourishing in Bavaria at the
time.”
Like the repugicans, the Nazis received monetary
support from big business. They also received help from the military and
in their early days, even from the Bavarian government “With the
Central Government in Berlin predominantly Socialist, the Bavarian
authorities sought actively to thwart it and encouraged for their
nuisance value all the disgruntled Right Wing elements who flocked south
for safety.”
French scholar Christian Ingrao, in a recent
study of intellectuals in the SS, points to the dangers in the Third
Reich of being thought a leftist: The “firmness of [Obersturmbannführer
Heinz] Gräfe’s ideological convictions” was questioned on several
occasions” with the accusations being leveled at him not only of
pacifism but the even worse label of being “solidly on the left.” As
Ingrao says, “the accusation was a serious one.”
Ingrao also
relates how another intellectual, Erich Ehlers, was “put to work hunting
down Communists and Social Democrats” – the Social Democrats of Weimar
Germany being socialists. In fact, in the Third Reich the SD, or
security branch of the SS, had as its primary task during Hitler’s rise
to power, surveillance of the Nazi Party’s political enemies on the
left.
On the other side of the equation, the Communists in
1929 and 1930 went with the slogan, “Beat the Fascists wherever you find
them!” and they literally meant “beat” as in a physical sense –
bloody.
Like repugicans, Hitler spoke (in Mein Kampf) of
“the international traitors and enemies of the country” and the
“terrorist activities” of the Reds; he spoke disparagingly of the
“fanatical extremists of the left wing” to whom the Nazi Party who “were
organized in movements with a more or less radically Marxist
tendency…[possessing] no nationalist tendencies whatsoever and
deliberately repudiating the idea of advancing the interests of the
nation as such.”
In effect, the left was to Hitler as it is to repugicans: traitors.
Of
course, as it does for us today, the Communist Party in Germany of the
1920s occupied the far left of the political spectrum, with the
Socialists somewhere nearer the middle. But though repugicans seem
confused by the “Socialist” in National Socialist Workers Party (NSDAP),
Hanfstaengl relates that “When he [Hitler] talked of National-Socialism
what he really meant was military-Socialism, Socialism within a
framework of military discipline, or, in civilian terms,
police-Socialism.”
One of Hitler’s early supporters, Otto Strasser, left the NSDAP “because it was insufficiently Socialist and revolutionary.”
Other
supporters had issues – for different reasons – with Hitler’s
management of the Party. Hanfstaengl relates that Dietrich Eckart,
another of Hitler’s old guard, was frustrated with the anti-communists
and anti-Semites in Hitler’s inner core, complaining that “you cannot
build a political party on the basis of prejudices alone.”
As
it turns out, you can, as both the NSDAP and the repugican cabal have proven. Fear
and anger of the Other are potent weapons as the tea party phenomenon
proves.
But historically, it has not ended well. A lesson of
history repugicans might wish to consider as they dream their dreams of
just wars and crusades and the imposition of American exceptionalism on
every shore.
Today is Talk Like A Pirate Day 
