World War II was one of the most significant events in human history, both in its impact on the then-present day and the shockwaves it has sent through history, mostly through the attempted genocide of the Jewish people, which killed approximately six million civilians. The Holocaust was a singular event; it wasn’t just another war, it wasn’t a repeated instance of human cruelty, it was one of the most concentrated acts of pure evil that’s ever occurred, so much so that the six million estimate was initially met with literal disbelief, because people didn’t think it was possible for one man to kill that many people in such a short period of time.
As the definitive act of cruelty in the modern era, the Holocaust has become the standard of evil, the measure against which large-scale villainy is compared, and nothing we’ve seen since has come close to it. And with the end of WWII only sixty years ago, the Holocaust is not a long-gone myth, but a real event which occurred in the lifetime of many people on this planet; it is fresh enough in our memory that we are still rightly terrified of it happening again, of a charismatic leader rising to power and gradually enacting more and more oppressive legislation in the name of economic recovery and national safety before committing unspeakable acts of terror against the population.
This necessary fear is unfortunately held by people who are not able to handle it, and fear in the wrong hands spreads, and becomes a disease that sickens people. Of course, all illnesses need an opportunity for exposure, a window through which they can sneak and spread and grow. Something like a terrorist attack on US soil, and two recessions in ten years following that event, both of which are tangentially related to it. Conveniently enough, we’ve been able to provide that, and
look what’s happened.
This
is nothing new. For the past ten years, we’ve had to endure idiot pundits who want their sound byte featured on the primetime news referencing famous dictators, from calling Obama a socialist, a communist, a Nazi (ironically ignoring the incompatibility of those terms), and just about everything short of a brain-sucking alien, to Democrats, from random Internet posters to
prominent activists like George Soros calling Bush a Nazi (I should point out that Soros has some perspective; he was 13 years old and living in Hungary when the Nazis took military control of the country in 1944).
As the standard of evil, an instantly recognizable historical reference, “Nazi” has become a buzzword for the media and for people who don’t have the intelligence to accurately refute an argument; it’s easier to call someone a Nazi than to point out exactly why they’re wrong, and the association typically serves both purposes of immediately engendering animosity and not confusing the audience with a lot of actual thought. So we see it thrown around a lot; the Patriot Act is Bush being a Nazi, and healthcare reform is Obama being a Nazi, with no one actually explaining why the policies are similar or bothering to consider the strength of what they’re saying.
The last part is what bothers me the most, though it would be a bigger issue if the people listening to these idiots weren’t making the same mistake. Most of these people don’t really think about exactly what the Nazis did:
they murdered six million innocent people entirely on the basis of their religion and ethnicity, not to mention a myriad of other war crimes and violent imperalism. By calling any politician who isn’t an outright racist (and there aren’t many of those around; the South isn’t what it used to be) a Nazi, you either have absolutely no sense of perspective or are seriously trying to equate the murder of six million people to tighter surveillance or government-funded healthcare. Either way, you have no business having a brain, much less a soapbox and millions of people listening to you.
I’m pretty liberal; I don’t like the Patriot Act, I didn’t like a lot of things that happened in the name of security during the Bush administration, and I don’t like lot of things that are happening in the name of security during the current administration. But nothing that’s been done so far even comes close to what happened sixty years ago; the government is becoming too invasive and controlling, and we’re gradually losing the liberties that make our country great. We’re nowhere near Germany in the 1930s, and unless Obama repeals term limits or eliminates the election process, installs himself as dictator, and begins rounding people up and sending them to concentration camps, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The same thing could have been said of Bush five years ago, or at any point in his presidency, and the same should be said of the next president when his detractors start calling him a Nazi. Things suck right now, and they’ve sucked for almost a decade, but no one is being murdered by the government, so let’s keep some perspective before we start slinging epithets.