For future reference: THESE are Nazis.
Listen up, folks. I’m hereby banning any and all Nazi-Hitler-Holocaust references with regard to health care reform, progressivism, conservatism, Tea Party-ism etc. If you are an American and you are not discussing, teaching, or studying early 20th century European history, STFU about Nazis and the Holocaust. Right now.
That means you, Laura Ingraham, reading the famous anti-Nazi poem “First they came…” at a conservative rally on the Mall.
That means you, crazy-ass lady, waving a picture of President Obama as Hitler at a town hall debate and calling health care “a Nazi policy”–and to a gay Jewish congressman, no less (who then totally pwned your crazy ass).
That means you, Glenn Beck, with your bizarre Nazi fetish and penchant for injecting Nazi-era art and video into every rant about whomever you disagree with.
And yes, that also means you, my fellow left-wingers, who refer to Tea Partiers and Southern conservatives as Nazis. You may not agree with their politics–hell, I don’t agree with their politics–but Nazis they ain’t.
Whatever interesting times we may be living through right now, however much we may disagree with–or even hate–the opposition, there is no genocide or evil dictatorship or World War going on here. Get a fucking grip and find another metaphor, okay?
Word. (AKA Co-signed.)
Amen.
Amen to that.
“That means you, crazy-ass lady, waving a picture of President Obama as Hitler at a town hall debate and calling health care “a Nazi policy”–and to a gay Jewish congressman, no less (who then totally pwned your crazy ass).”
Perhaps you haven’t heard that this lady, her name is Rachel Brown, is now challenging Barney Frank for his seat. Really.
http://rachelforcongress.com/about
She is connected to Lyndon LaRouche and was a prominent presence at the South Boston St. Patrick’s day parade this year, where she was exuberantly booed.
@monkeyshines: No, I hadn’t heard that! God bless America…even crazy-ass wackjobs get to have their say. And be booed.
Amen! I feel that it shows a very shallow understanding of history — there are far better metaphors for all of these things. (Especially with regards to the teabaggers, it would help if they understood the difference between socialism, the economic system as proposed in the writings of certain political philosophers and economists; National Socialism, the name of a fascist political party; and the political structure known as socialism as in the Union of Soviet Social Republics. Unfortunately, I feel this is a lost cause and they will continue to believe that the Nazis were socialist despite the fact that the Nazis hated socialists.)
Beautifully said.
Definitely needed to be said! Crying “Nazi” is a quick way of dehumanizing an opponent – and dehumanizing is a quick way to ignore, berate, and just generally disenfranchise anyone.
Thank you for putting an end to the madness. Every time that someone invokes Godwin’s Law or whatever the equivalent would be for real world (Godwin’s Law only applies to the internet), I want to scream from the total cultural insensitivity and ignorance of it all.
@ baraqiel – Perfectly stated.
AMEN. I actually sent an email to Glenn Beck the other day saying that every time he does that, he trivializes the Nazis’ crimes. I know he won’t care, but it seemed worth saying.
I’ve studied that period of time pretty extensively and lived in Germany for a while – in a city destroyed by the war and surrounded by reminders of the horrors of Nazism – so I’m fairly sensitive to these things. I suppose I’ve gradually taken on a similar attitude towards all this to the one most Germans nowadays have: a feeling of guilt – in my case, not a a German but as a member of the human race, which did that to its own kind – and a refusal to minimize or compare those crimes to any others.
Sorry if I’m wordy on this, but I got called a Nazi by a relative yesterday because I disagreed with her (her: ‘the Nazis didn’t like to listen to other viewpoints either!’), which made me more angry than I can say. So I’m even more emotional about the inflationary use of this word than usual.
I know right (I’m picking up FB lingo, how am I doing) Pissed off kids on the playground pick up the biggest rock to heave they can find, and so it goes with media-amplified idjuts… they trivialize history. Someone crucified (guess who) becomes a ‘dead nazerene on a stick’. People who slit the larnax of their medical victims (nazi doctors) so they couldnt scream become the opposite political party. Desperate colonists risking the gallows (tea party) become excuses to say no to everything. Sorry if this offends, but its just wrong to me too.
100% co-signed.
An entirely genuine exchange I recently had on a ‘please explain feminism to me’ facebook thread (which was otherwise not a waste of time, as a few people were genuinely looking to learn):
SomeDude: A small portion of what I have read almost looks ‘femmo nazi’ and makes me wonder if I have to wear an armband and sit in a beer hall just to listen to the rhetoric… and since we have that evil minority (men) in our sights how long is it till the ‘final solution’ is penned???
Me: @SomeDude: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law. ‘Feminazis’ is proper annoying. Yeah, I forgot about that time I murdered six million people.
SomeDude: Your intolerance could lead to the murder of six million people
Me: …………………[leaves conversation to do something more worthwhile, e.g. anything].
So right, Becky. And yet, the very people who throw that epithet around are doing things like breaking windows at Democratic party offices…but irony is beyond their understanding.
As a history major, I am crying tears of gratitude right now.
Ah yes, the Nazi-drop. I know it (and it’s cousin, the Atrocity-drop)well. I teach Ethics, so I get at least 4 papers a semester that exhibit some variation of the following:
“It’s clear that X is good/bad because if we didn’t allow/did allow X, then [Atrocity-Drop/Nazi-drop!!!!11!] Therefore I am obviously right.”
This is my least favorite genre of paper, especially since we usually spend a good amount of time talking about weak analogies and the characteristics of strong argumentation. Maybe I need to add a prohibition of the Atrocity-Drop/Nazi-Drop to the syllabus?
@elenargh: OMG. That would have made me kill HIM.
@baraqiel: I love it when people scream bloody murder about how their enemies are Hitler and Stalin and communist and fascist, etc. Because yeah, historically, communism and fascism have just gone SO WELL together.
Word.
Agree, agree, agree. Especially with Endora’s point about how the horrific nature of the Nazis’ crimes is diminished every time someone references them in hyperbole. It’s a completely unfair debate tactic, because it effectively ends the conversation. This has been a pet peeve of mine for years. If you don’t want to see a discussion through to the end intelligently, then don’t start one.
Can you imagine what it would be like if Beck made legitimate comparisons? “Barack Obama campaigning on and then subsequently pushing through health care reform even when he knows his political opponents oppose it is JUST LIKE THAT TIME George W. Bush campaigned on and then pushed through tax cuts for the wealthy even though he knew his political opponents opposed it. THE NERVE OF THAT MAN!!!”
It really takes the wind out of your windbag when you have to make sense while you talk, you know?
hear, hear
I would co-sign were Brooks and Dunn not so obviously influenced by Wagner.
@eleanargh – Aaaaugh I hate that shit! It’s such a silencing tactic. I’ve heard so many guys pull out, like, Dwokin and say that therefore feminists want to kill all men when in fact there have been multiple occasions of men actually shooting multiple women that they did not know in an act of violence against all women and I have never, EVER heard of any feminist even planning such a thing against men, let alone actually carrying it out.
@Becky – it’s also really disrespectful to the people who actually lived through that stuff. I mean, they want to compare Obama to *Stalin*? It shows such a complete lack of understanding of just how bad things were under Stalin, that they would compare a country where they have the freedom to even say that sort of thing without getting locked up to Stalinist Russia. I mean, real people actually had those experiences. It’s not like it’s historical fiction that never affected anyone.
“It’s like arguing with a dining room table”
Awesome. I’m using that!
What enrages me most is the deliberate spread of misinformation (“death panels”) that equates health care reform with genocide.
A college buddy of mine posted this on our FB wall:
http://www.salon.com/sept97/comics/comics1970929.html
It says makes the point better than I could!
Amazingly well put. Here here!
I find it absurd and ridiculous how people use a Nazi comparison to ‘de-humanize’ an argument, because, obviously, Nazis weren’t human somehow. Sure, they did inhuman things, but they were still most assuredly human.
And on that depressing note I’ll drift back into obscurity.
Thank you for this. Those people are so offensive!
[...] the mere mention of Nazis is a deliberately inflammatory cheap shot (as well as a violation of my previously stated ban on all mention of Nazis, which I should extend to a ban on all statements by Newt Gingrich, the herpes that pops up on the [...]