I feel like I've been repeating myself every few months, so you'll pardon me if I don't put in quite the same effort this time around, even if this is a message that apparently needs to be repeated constantly for some of the more puerile users of this site.
My standard backgrounder for this message:
All four of my grandparents were survivors of the Holocaust, three of them the sole survivors from their own very large families. My mother's parents met in Auschwitz shortly before liberation; my father's parents met in a displaced persons camp not long after the war ended. They all eventually made their way to safety and freedom in the Milwaukee area.
And I have had more than my fair share of confrontations with contemporary Nazis, some of which I wrote about here.
So when I say I have some experience with Nazism, it is only because I have been in the unfortunate position to have forgotten more about Nazism than most people are ever going to learn. And of all the things I've learned about Nazism, one lesson stands out above all others when it comes to partisan politics:
People are idiots.
Let me say that again for the ignorant, insensitive, and teabagger equivalents here: people are idiots.
We need look no further than the teabaggers themselves for evidence of this fact in the context of discussions of Nazism and partisan politics. After all, these are the people who say that President Barack Obama is a Nazi. That Hillary Clinton is a Nazi. That dKos is a Nazi site. That universal healthcare is a Nazi policy. That intervening to prevent a recession from becoming a depression is a Nazi policy. That holding banks accountable for causing the collapse of our economy is something the Nazis would do. That failure to round up brown people from other countries and put them in concentration camps is the epitome of Nazism.
Teh Stoopid burns sufficiently so as to prove that people are idiots.
Not all people, though. Some people aren't idiots. Some people are absolute morons.
Some people look at the teabaggers and say their rhetoric is offensive. How dare they call the president a Nazi? How dare they say universal healthcare is a Nazi policy? Nothing could be farther from the truth, and making such claims is obscene given the magnitude of the Nazis' crimes. After all, there is a world of difference between rounding up 11 million innocent people -- mostly Jews, socialists, trade unionists, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma, and other minorities and political opponents -- and murdering them under the cover of a global war you started that killed perhaps 70 million other people, most of them innocent as well?
In fact, all people should look at the teabaggers this way. But some people look at the teabaggers this way and go to a very different place. A place where the depth of stupidity of so great that you have to wonder whether these people are really intelligent enough to deserve the label of "absolute moron." Because these people look at the teabaggers, take their rhetoric, apply it to the politicians they support, and think they're not doing anything wrong. The logic model goes this way:
- Republican = Bad
- Bad = Evil
- Evil = Nazi
- Therefore Republican = Nazi.
Does anyone see the problem with this? Let's try it from the teabagger's perspective:
- Democrat = Bad
- Bad = Evil
- Evil = Nazi
- Therefore Democrat = Nazi.
If this latter model pisses you off, good. It should piss you off. But the former model should piss you off too. Because if nothing else, it shows that this kneejerk tendency to refer to people like Scott Brown, the Republican candidate for Senate here in Massachusetts, as Nazis is exactly what the teabaggers do to us.
Do you get that? You don't get to take offense to what the teabaggers say about us and our candidates, then turn around and do the same thing to them and their candidates. And you especially don't get to play the victim when you get called out for doing so. When you know it's wrong to do it, or when you say it's wrong for them to do it but ok for you to do it, you're a hypocrite. And you're no different from them.
And like it or not, Scott Brown is objectively not a Nazi. And neither are his supporters. They may be terrible human beings. They may support government policy that is all about helping the rich and hurting everyone else. They may support denying healthcare, education, welfare, clean air, clean water, and other basic necessities to the people who need them most. They may favor imposing Christian-of-a-certain-variety dogma on every aspect of our lives. They may think torture is an American value. And they may favor war as a first resort rather than a last one. But vile though they may be, they're not even in the same ballpark as the Nazis.
This isn't about free speech. You can say whatever dumbass thing you want -- though not here because this is a private domain and kos decides the extent to which you can say whatever dumbass thing you want here. This is about whether you have a solid grasp of reality or suffer from self-inflicted delusions, whether you're rational or hysterical, whether you have a genuine argument to make or are the rhetorical and moral equivalent of Falafel Boy, Rush Limbaugh, and their teabagger fans. See, what the Nazis did was many orders of magnitude worse than having someone disagree with you, or insult you, or criticize your favored candidate on a blog or in the street. When you set Nazis and Nazism as the baseline against which to compare things that aren't even in the same universe in terms of evil, you trivialize the crimes of actual Nazis and the sufferings of their all too real victims.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, it is better to keep your hands off your keyboard and let people think you are a fool than to violate Godwin's Law and remove all doubt. There's enough foolishness in the world these days with the teabaggers in the streets and people like Joe Lieberman in the Senate. This blog is supposed to be a place to help fight against that. Let's keep it that way. Let's elect Martha Coakley to the Senate without becoming those fools.