22 Dec 05 Little Marina

I looked at some very sobering links this morning.

If you really think life is bad under Bush, if you really think that it’s appropriate for anyone to call anyone else Nazis, then you need to look at this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, and this. They are not appalling on their faces, so you need not worry about explicitness or ghastliness, until you really let your brain sink into what the pages are telling you. They are all brief images of people who died in the Holocaust in happier times, along with a little bit of biographical information. Looking at newlyweds, at images of young children … and realizing that at some point in time, they were gasping for breath as poison suffused their lungs. Or they had a bullet shot through their brainpan. Or …

I detest Bush, and I look forward to the day that he will leave the Oval Office. But he’s not Hitler, no matter how many of my liberal brethren like to call him that, and doing so is a disrespect to the six million who died. It’s become a handy yet very offensive “rhetorical hammer” overly used by everyone. To quote Mike Godwin, who put it well when he began getting the Godwin’s Law meme out there:

[I]nvariably, the comparisons trivialized the horror of the Holocaust and the social pathology of the Nazis. It was a trivialization I found both illogical […] and offensive (the millions of concentration-camp victims did not die to give some net.blowhard a handy trope).

I look with great sadness at these pages. At the images of three- and four-year-olds who the Nazis decided didn’t deserve to live. And I know that the outright, cold-blooded murder of children is an evil that Bush and neoconservatives do not deserve to be compared to. (Nor does anyone else. I’m looking at you again, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly.)

The neoconservatives are pushing our country to a scary place of fascism. They speak with rage and with very little rationale or respect for anyone who disagrees with them. But I find it very hard to believe that they will ever take our country to a place of concentration camps and of mass genocide, and calling them Nazis — or anyone dragging out that rhetorical sledgehammer to gratuitous and offensive purpose — needs to be an act anyone would frown upon.