Don't let them take the Hitler away from us!

[Must_B_Free]

Think about it this way. I say ALL Hitler comparisons are valid. Hitler is the quintessential example that is seared into our memories of the insane corrupt power of totalitarianism. It represents the ultimate evil - deception of good intentions. Thus Hitler comparisons are an essential comparison. All it says is "let us not get on that hill of ice again".

If, as has been suggested on The Daily Show and Lou Dobbs, Hitler comparisons are out of order, then it disables the most powerful and obvious comparison.

The victims of the Holocaust and those who fought totalitarian power have earned the right to reference Hilterm a right that is being lost because it has been distorted by the retort that nothing could be as bad as Hitler - "it's not as bad as the Holocaust". Well, the fact that is shrouded is that it was a slow but steady march into fascism. Hitler wasn't as bad as Hitler when he started. We as their progeny have inherited the DUTY of making comparisons to Hilter where ever we see them.

As soon as they take away our abaility to associate with that memory, it enables them to repeat it.

So, no, I say this frog will remain ready to jump if the temperature increases only slightly. We need to respect the slope before we start the slipping.

[longship]

1. Or, just use another metaphor

If it wasn't for the old Monty Python routine, you could use Attila the Hun.

[TwentyFive]

2. There was Hilter - and then people who deny the Holocaust happened.

So, no matter how accurate the Bush to Hitler comparisons are, there will always be those fools and lackeys who deny the horror of those they support.

[nytemare]

3. I agree, we need to use him as an example not to follow

We cannot believe that because we are Americans, we are not capable of doing what the Germans did. Humans are humans. Our situation now is comparable in many ways to Germany in the mid to late 30's. We need to recognize our situation for what it is, and prevent it from getting worse.

[Richard Steele]

5. I agree. Hitler should remind us that it can happen ANYWHERE.

Germany was a nation which ELECTED its public servants,
It was an EDUCATED nation,
A WORLD LEADER in SCIENCE and INDUSTRY...

And look what happened there.
All it takes is some fear-mongering, a crappy economy, and a "leader" without a consciense.

Oh yeah, and FLAGS. Lots of flags!

[KnightoftheRepublic]

7. Right

That's right. Hitler was GIVEN power, damn it, by the ignorance of the people. People don't realize how easily a republic can fall to totalitarianism.

And Why shouldn't we use Hitler? We're mostly Liberals, and Hitler was the greatest enemy of Liberal ideology.

[Richard Steele]

9. Hey, welcome to DU, Knight!

[nytemare]

18. Hitler is THE greatest example of the path not to follow.

It seems that those who are saying it is outrageous to compare our situation to Germany's don't realize that what happened in Germany did not happen overnight. It had its roots somewhere.

Welcome to DU.

On edit: I suppose my two post subjects were a tad redundant. I must be getting alzheimer's at a young age.

[noahmijo]

4. Remember in "What About Bob?" when Dr Marvin (Dreyfuss)

accidently pushes his son into the lake and "The Guffmans" are watching and the wife screams "HITLER!!!"

I still laugh out loud when I think of that part.

[dbeach]

6. Whenever someone says shut-up I only get louder

Prescott Bush was a Nazi agent..its old news BUT true..its in the national archives.

As a VN Veteran with an honorable discharge and with complete and available military records..I deeply am offended when these repukes who NEVER served a day in uniform call out that unpatriotic nonsense.

Nobody is above criticism especially the bush family.

Lou Dobbs better sell his big fat SUV..and start dieting.

The Hitler stuff is not only valid but its true.
The USA is occupied by the Nazis..you can callem busheviks ,BFEE,neo-cons, traitors BUT its a nazi occupation and all the insiders like Dobbs know it.!!

Speak out agianst the Tyranny or be complacent with it!!

NO FEAR.


“Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951” - Federal Documents
By John Buchanan and Stacey Michael
from The New Hampshire Gazette Vol. 248, No. 3, November 7, 2003

After the seizures in late 1942 of five U.S. enterprises he managed on behalf of Nazi industrialist Fritz Thyssen, Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, failed to divest himself of more than a dozen "enemy national" relationships that continued until as late as 1951, newly-discovered U.S. government documents reveal."
http://www.nhgazette.com/cgi-bin/NHGstore.cgi?user_action=detail&catalogno=NN_Bush_Nazi_2

[Colorado Blue]

11. I've heard something about Rove's ancestors? Do you

know anything about this?

[dbeach]

12. Prescott Bush CNN 'Streamer" linked to Nazis 2003

read up on this one..then google in Karl Roves grandfather was a nazi..many stories..and there was a karl Roveran who sold gas to the death camps..BUT the story changed suddenly and now Rove is an adopted kid from colorado..

Really hard to say...Adoption agencies are know to have sleezy connections
DUNNO??


http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Senator_Byrd_102203.htm

Published on Wednesday, October 22, 2003 by the Columbus (OH) Free Press
Senator Byrd, Major Media Spread Coverage of Bush-Nazi Nexus
by Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fitrakis

"US Senator Robert Byrd, on the floor of Congress, on October 17, has explicitly compared the Bush media operation to that run by Herman Goering, mastermind of the Nazi putsch against the German people.

On the same day, the Associated Press ran a national story linking Prescott Bush to Adolf Hitler. The lead read: "President Bush's grandfather was a director of a bank seized by the federal government because of its ties to a German industrialist who helped bankroll Adolf Hitler's rise to power, government documents show."

That night, CNN ran a "streamer" on the bottom of its all-news programming confirming that "declassified documents show Prescott Bush connections to Nazi finance." "

[Colorado Blue]

13. Thanks. nt

[kodi]

8. he's the lucifer of secularists needing a metaphorical embodiment for evil

lets face it, anybody you ever met named "adolf?" imagine naming your kid that?

yeah, that's right, that's my kid, "adolf johnson."

[Richard Steele]

10. Wow, nice turn of phrase!

"he's the lucifer of secularists needing a metaphorical embodiment for evil"

I am TOTALLY stealing that! (if it's ok with you)

[theplutsnw]

14. I disagree

Just got back from seeing Lakoff in Seattle. We can not talk in words that evoke fear, fear speaks to the strict father model (http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/) which identifies with what the radicals are doing. We need to talk about what we as progressives or democrats will do for America, not the issues but the values. I was kind of onboard with the whole Nazi thing, especially as a Jew, but I know see where it will hurt rather then help. We may be heading down a fascist road but we need to evoke hope, seperate ourselves from the evil that is the Bush Admin.

[nickgutierrez]

15. I just don't think the Hitler comparison works, on a rhetorical level

I mean, yes, there is some validity to it. "Truth" is different from truth, in that "truth" is often created in the minds of the people hearing a claim before all (sometimes, even 'any) of the facts have been submitted. This both affects the way facts are interpreted, and forms the way that people respond to the claim. Truth isn't enough - you also need to create "truth", to the point where the perception matches up with the claim.

The Hitler comparison doesn't work, because there's no way that public perception can possibly match up with the claim until it actually comes to pass. In the eyes of the average American, there is a massive dissimilarity between * and Hitler - the latter is the modern-day embodiment of evil, and the former is Our President, whether they voted for him or not. That dissimilarity cannot be bridged. Period.

The truth doesn't always have the ring of truth, and sadly, the ring matters more.

[Cleita]

16. I never took those criticisms seriously because if you

examine it, they are trying to define what we should say. We can say what we see to be true and they can't stop us. I think the comparisons to Hitler speak the truth and I compare all the time.

[LordshipLadyship]

17. To ignore the comparison is to be in danger of repeating it

Ask someone whose memory of the Holocaust is embedded in their soul as deeply as the tattooed number on their skin. Ask someone who actually somehow survived it if the comparison is apt. It's the old duck thing. If it waddles like a duck and it quacks like a duck...etc. Loyality oaths. Fascism wrapped snugly in the flag. Snipping away our rights. Forcing their morality down our throat. If there is just a sliver of justification for comparison, then we ought to do just what we are doing, speaking up. We're stopping evil before it gets to the point that it did back then.

[Cleita]

19. My sentiments exactly.

:thumbsup:

[nadinbrzezinski]

20. Ask the children of holocaust survivors

those of us who actually paid attention in school and did not learn to become victims can see it... every day more clearly

Never again has not lost its cache.. hell it is far more important today than ever

[dbeach]

26. Well put..

your ladyship.


"Shoah (denoting a "catastrophic upheaval") is the Hebrew language word for the Holocaust."

"The road to Auschwitz was built by hate,
but paved with indifference."

by IAN KERSHAW






born to scream!!!

"what have they done to the earth?
what have they done to our fair sister?
ravaged her ,raped her,looted her and bit her
stuck her with knives....and dragged her down.." Doors 1968

'"when the music's over"

[newswolf56]

21. While I understand the Orwellian fear of stolen memory...

...I nevertheless agree with Lou Dobbs. Indeed -- given that on matters of history, Americans are the most ignorant people on earth -- I would respectfully urge anyone contemplating a "Hitler" analogy to (at the very least) first read William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, probably the very best one-volume source on the subject. And then think long and hard before indulging in this postmodern form of crying "wolf": especially since too many of my fellow Leftists have been shouting "Hitler" ever since the Nixon years.

More to the point, Hitler made absolutely no secret of his murderous schemes and intentions: every bit of it he spelled out in Mein Kampf. The spurious notion that "Hitler wasn't as bad as Hitler when he started" is revisionist history, a deft twisting of fact intended to conceal the ugly reality that the German people who voted the Nazis into power knew exactly what they were doing and reveled in the resultant institutionalization of their hatreds.

Which is not to diminish the reality of the BushCo threat: I believe he is as bad a president as we have ever had, and I believe his contempt for working Americans (including our military folk) is both infinitely malicious and probably without precedent. But a more historically apt analogy is to some of our own (incipiently fascist) political bosses -- especially those who, in servitude to the ever-expanding greed of monopolist overlords, played off one minority against another in the interest of maximizing oppression and exploitation (just as Bush plays off Dominionist/Fundamentalist Christians against women and gays). And fascism does not inevitably a Hitler make. Think not Hitler but George Wallace, Bull Connor or even Robert K. Shelton -- the third name that of the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights Movement years, the aptness of the comparison growing from the fact Bush and his followers are surely as hateful to gays as Shelton and his night-riders were to blacks.

[nadinbrzezinski]

23. First off there are better sources than Shirer

second the PNACers have set all their plans in writing... google Project for a New American Century, and then find "rebuilding America's Defenses." It includes some good jewels in there, including the... we need a new Pearl Harbor to push our policies forth (page 48)... just a sugestion... for that whtie paper details all they are doing... all of it, from foreign afffairs to internal affairs... scary read

[newswolf56]

24. I like Shirer because he was an eyewitness to much of...

...what he wrote about, especially Hitler's ascendance. Have read his book twice: once on the troopship returning from Korea (1962), again during the Reagan years.

[Swamp Rat]

22. OK, one of them dosen't speak German.

He doesn't speak English very well either, but give Bushler more time - he's just getting started.

[dbeach]

25. Silence is golden for the busheviks..

http://www.christianethicstoday.com/Issue/009/First%20They%20Came%20for%20the%20Jews%20By%20Franklin%20H%20Littell_009_29_.htm
To not speak out is to enable the events to continue..

"Martin Niemoeller's message, in its true form, carries a powerful moral impact. Telling the story and drawing the lessees of the SHOAH are weakened, not strengthened, when carelessness or self-indulgence permits a corrupted text to be widely disseminated. The true sequence, which culminates the Nazi genocide of the Jews, is both literally and morally stronger than the corrupt forms that are becoming now widespread:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me--
and there was no one left to speak out for me."