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Edited on Thu May-13-10 02:21 AM by JDPriestly
I know the history. I know the people.
In fact, I have personally known people who sympathized with the NAZIs, people who downright were NAZIs and, on the other hand, people who were active in the resistance against the NAZIs and people who were the victims of the NAZIs. I knew these people very well.
Once, on a train from Vienna to the south of Austria, I sat across from a man who lectured me for the entire trip on NAZIism. He was a fanatic. I have known real NAZIS and ex-NAZIs.
You would be surprised how kind some of the ex-NAZIs were. They loved their children, their neighbors. They were ordinary people. But they were, during the NAZI period, NAZIs.
When Thom says that NAZIism is such an awful thing, he is right. But it was a very ordinary awful thing. Don't think that people living under the NAZIs lived in horror all the time. They didn't. In fact, under the NAZIs, life got better for many Germans. I heard over and over how, before Hitler there was high unemployment, and Hitler created jobs.
If our country is taken over by a NAZI-type regime, that regime will be elected precisely in the way that Bush was during his first if not second term. Everything will appear to be proper and in its place. Hitler was a master at creating the sense that he enjoyed broad support. People who were not political at all were swept up in the movement by the enthusiasm and desperation of their neighbors and the theater that Hitler created.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have produced a leader like Hitler, someone with the drive, the fanaticism, the hypnotic speaking style, the power over other people that Hitler had.
But, we do live (and have for some time) at a time and in an economy that are very similar in many ways to those in which Hitler rose to power.
We have seen a number of presidents -- probably beginning at least under Nixon and continuing under Clinton to reach a peak under Bush -- who have violated human rights by placing completely innocent people, even avowedly, sincerely, unquestionably nonviolent individuals under various degrees of surveillance simply because of their views and because of their exercise of their First Amendment rights. Such surveillance is reminiscent of the NAZI and Communist regimes.
When I was in high school, our very conservative high school government teacher (in the South) proudly told us that Americans had the right to freedom of travel, unlike the Russians who had to show identification to travel. Guess what. We no longer travel freely. We, too, have to show our IDs when we board planes. And there is a lot of pressure from various quarters to increase the ID checks and reduce our freedom to travel. Of course, we are told, that is all necessary to insure safety. NAZI Germany was very safe for the NAZIs and all those who did as they were told.
The violations of what we used to consider our rights are not unique to Republican administrations, nor to Democratic ones, but a reflection of the willingness of politicians and police agencies at every level and in both parties to abuse their powers.
We have seen presidents -- especially Bush, wage a war based on false, insufficiently examined evidence and questionable motives. We see Obama continue that war (Iraq).
(If you doubt that Bush lied about the reasons for the war, read the unimpeachable accounts of conservative Paul O'Neill in The Price of Loyalty about the first meetings of Bush's advisers on foreign policy. At that time, Bush was already talking about what he would do about Iraq. His foreign policy advisers were reviewing maps of Iraq's oil fields at an early meeting during Bush's presidency. Similarly, Hitler invaded Poland on a flimsy excuse. Then there was Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. Whether Bush's acts violated international law should be decided by an unbiased court.)
I am not accusing any specific party or president of being a NAZI. I am describing acts by our presidents that are despicable for the same reason that the similar acts were despicable when performed by Hitler.
The NAZI movement was always racist. That racism grew out of the belief in German exceptionalism. Germans were defined as the master race. I hate to say this, but many Americans of certain political persuasions believe that America is sort of an exceptional country, a kind of master country. Belief in a master race and belief in a master country are very different. But the exceptionalism that underlies those beliefs is similar.
The frightening thing during the Bush presidency was the vehemence with which many (not by any means all) Republicans defended everything that Bush did. Very few Democrats defend so staunchly any leader in the Democratic Party. It is not that the Republicans are NAZIs. It is that the ability that Republicans have demonstrated to completely support a "leader" suggests they have the capacity and willingness to follow a charismatic leader without questioning. When a group with that quality finds a leader and can get enough desperate people to join in blindly following him, then you have NAZIism or Communism or Fascism or a similar sort of dictatorship.
I think that we must always be mindful of the threat that such a dictatorship could happen here. We must always call out our leaders, always criticize their conduct, always stay aware of the danger of that kind of movement to our democracy. I have not in my lifetime seen Democrats willing to follow a leader in the way that Republicans do.
I disagree with both Thom Hartmann and the other gentleman on this issue. While I agree that neither party is "like" the NAZIs, we live in a time that is similar to the time in which the NAZI movement began. Therefore we must be very, very vigilant. That people are calling each other NAZIs is probably a good thing. It means that we are all aware of the danger.
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