Elaine's Cross:
It would have been nice if Hitler’s troops had laid down their weapons rather than go into Poland and other countries. From what I’ve read, they were propagandized into believing they were doing the right thing for the “Fatherland” just as our brave men and women were propagandized by our government and Fox News.
Why Calling Conservatives ‘‘Nazis’’ Is Such an Inane and Incongruous Remark
Written by Joe Mariani
Once again, we’re being ‘‘treated’’ to the same tired old cries of liberal outrage. How dare the stupid people of America not whole-heartedly embrace liberal ideas and policies? Why, they must all be mind-controlled. They must all be… Nazis!
‘‘Nazi’’ is a sort of pet insult many liberals use to taunt conservatives without understanding what it really means, the same way a three-year-old will endlessly repeat any four-letter words someone might happen to drop in front of him or her. The more you say, ‘‘Don’t say that; it’s a bad word’’ the more likely you are to hear it.
The Nazi epithet is so over-abused that there’s even a rule concerning it on the Internet, called Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Sooner or later, someone’s going to resurrect the Nazis… and whoever does so is generally understood to have lost the argument.
Comparing someone to a Nazi involves far more of an emotional appeal than a factual argument, unless the person is, in fact, a card-carrying Nazi. If you’re not actually discussing genocide and brutal world domination, the Nazi comparison is just plain offensive. What confuses most people is its frequent application to pretty much anybody to the ideological right of Lenin.
In fact, the Nazis were actually socialists by nature, not capitalists. In a 1927 speech, Hitler said, ‘‘We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.’’
The word ‘‘Nazi’’ is short for Nationalsozialistische deutsche Arbeiter-Partei, or National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Hitler came to power by turning the unemployed, the working class, and the academic elitists against the rather conservative German republic. In fact, once he achieved power, anyone who questioned his policies was branded a ‘‘conservative reactionary’’ by the state press.
In a widely distributed 1932 pamphlet, Joseph Goebbels addressed the question of Socialism. ‘‘We are socialists,’’ he wrote, ‘‘because we see the social question as a matter of necessity and justice for the very existence of a state for our people, not a question of cheap pity or insulting sentimentality. The worker has a claim to a living standard that corresponds to what he produces.’’
The Nazi Party platform contained 25 demands, adopted in 1920 and essentially unaltered at the time Hitler took power. Many of those socialist demands resonate far better with modern-day American liberals than Conservatives.
Despite the historical facts, liberals frequently insist on equating conservatives and Republicans to Nazis. This is only done to stir up feelings of hate, of course. If Democrats want to know why they keep losing elections, it’s because they allow the left-wing politics of hatred to be their public face. Until the Democrats relegate liberals to the minority fringe where they belong, we will continue to see the country slide towards a one-party system, which would be detrimental to us all.
– Mark L. Chance.
