Posted on 09/13/2012 5:39:56 AM PDT by SJackson
Maybe comparing Republicans to Nazis started with the 1964 Goldwater/Johnson presidential race.
Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater accepted an invitation to visit an American military installation located in Bavaria, Germany. On “CBS Evening News” hosted by Walter Cronkite, correspondent Daniel Schorr said: “It is now clear that Sen. Goldwater’s interview with Der Spiegel, with its hard line appealing to right-wing elements in Germany, was only the start of a move to link up with his opposite numbers in Germany.” The reaction shot — when the cameras returned to Cronkite — showed the “most trusted man in America” gravely shaking his head.
Or maybe it began when Goldwater accepted the Republican nomination, and Democratic California Gov. Pat Brown said the “stench of fascism is in the air.”
Or maybe the Republicans-as-fascists narrative really jump-started during the 1968 presidential campaign. For commentary at the political conventions that year, ABC hired left-wing pundit Gore Vidal and matched him with conservative pundit William F. Buckley. If the network was looking for fireworks, they were not disappointed. Quarreling with Buckley over the impact of anti-Vietnam War dissidents, Gore called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Incensed, Buckley fired back: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
More recently, former Vice President Al Gore said: “(George W. Bush’s) executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations, from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. … And every day, they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the president.”
Entertainer and liberal activist Harry Belafonte, when asked whether the number and prominence of blacks in the Bush administration suggested a lack of racism, said, “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich.”
Then-NAACP Chairman Julian Bond pulled out the Nazi card in 2004 while criticizing congressional Republicans and the White House: “They preach racial equality but practice racial division. … Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and Confederate swastika flying side by side.”
Bond later clarified whom he meant by “they.” Speaking at historically black Fayetteville State University in North Carolina in 2006, Bond said, “The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side.”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who dared to rein in excessive public employee compensation packages, received the full Nazi treatment.
The hard-left blog Libcom.org wrote: “Scott Walker is a fascist, perhaps not in the classical sense since he doesn’t operate in the streets, but a fascist nonetheless. … He is a fascist, for his program takes immediate and direct aim at (a sector of) the working class …”
This brings us to the recently concluded Republican National Convention. California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton offered this analysis: “(Republicans) lie, and they don’t care if people think they lie. As long as you lie, (Nazi propaganda minister) Joseph Goebbels — the big lie — you keep repeating it.”
In dismissing Republicans’ concern over the possibility of voter fraud, Pat Lehman, a leading member of the Kansas delegation, told The Wichita Eagle: “It’s like Hitler said, if you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big lie, and if you tell it often enough and say it in a loud enough voice, some people are going to believe you.”
Next up, we have the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Dick Harpootlian compared the state’s Republican governor to Hitler’s mistress. When told that the Republicans were holding a competing press conference at a NASCAR Hall of Fame basement studio, Harpootlian told the South Carolina delegation: “(Gov. Nikki Haley) was down in the bunker, a la Eva Braun.”
How casually Democrats make Hitler-Nazi-fascist references to demean their political opponents is astonishing. By calling political opponents “fascists” because of policy disagreements, Democrats trivialize a regime responsible for exterminating 6 million Jews in a war that resulted in the deaths of over 50 million people.
Where does this cavalier Nazi talk take us?
In 1994, schoolteachers in Oakland, Calif., took 70 mostly black high school students to see “Schindler’s List.” Some of the kids began laughing during a scene where a Jewish woman was mercilessly killed. In a Los Angeles Times opinion piece called “Why Would Anyone Laugh at ‘Schindler’s List’?” a theater employee wrote: “A three-hour-plus film in black and white about the Holocaust may not be everyone’s choice, but those who decide to view it must be prepared and understand. I find it hard to believe kids today are so desensitized to violence that when they see the strange convulsions of someone who’s been shot, their first instinct is to laugh. If one of their friends was gunned down on the way home, would they stand there and burst into laughter at the way he/she died?”
This Oakland students/”Schindler’s List” disconnect is aided and abetted by leftists like Gore, Bond and Burton who shout words like “Nazi” or “fascist” or “Hitler” at conservatives.
And, no, it appears they have no shame.
Not exactly. National Socialists (Nazis) sometimes absorbed the nations they conquered (e.g., Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland) directly into the Reich so they were ruled by Germans. However, there were some satellites (e.g., Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Vichy France) that were ruled by locals subserviant to their German overlords.
Communists (Marxists) may have have been "internationalists" at first but then developed the super nation-state of the Soviet Union by absorbing quite a number of smaller nations into Russia. The Eastern European satellite communist nations were governed by local communists who maintained their national identity, but were succeptable to Soviet military invasion when local communist hegemony was threatened (e.g., Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in the "Prague Spring", 1968).
Yes, I read it and still have a copy. It might still be available through the Conservative Book Club.
Some German emigre intellectuals saw Eisenhower as Hindenburg or McCarthy as Hitler, which was silly, since many of those intellectuals had real affinities with totalitarian thinking themselves.
American liberals didn't go that far until the 60s and 70s. By the Nixon era, it was quite common, with swastikas forming the "x" in his name on posters.
Cronkite won't do any more homework, I'm afraid. He died a few years ago.
Sorry, never heard of Harpootlian. Who is he?
Again, I'm not talking about Communists (of which you might as well include the Spanish Communist Party of 1933) but the communist international which sponsored and supported the Russian Revolution, but recoiled when it went bad. The latter, the international, was a cadre of intellectuals, principally German and Polish, that grew out of the Bund der Gerechten, then the Spartakusbund, and then the Frankfurt School, which relocated to the United States in the 1930s. Both Cultural Marxism and Critical Theory as promulgated in this country owe their origins to that political heritage.
Note that this confusion (and possibly a deliberate one) existed well before World War II. Here is a little quote written in 1938 from Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell:
In reality, it was the Communists above all others who prevented revolution in Spain. Later, when the Right Wing forces were in full control, the Communists showed themselves willing to go a great deal further than the Liberals in hunting down revolutionary leaders.Orwell understood and acknowledged that difference between the anarchists (communists) he had joined and the Spanish Communist Party, a Stalinist group. He draws the distinction because the former are the originators of the ideology that binds popular support to the dictators that have arisen therefrom. They are the source of "the beautiful lie" that gains Marxism its popular support, not just among the foot-soldiers of the movement, but among the theorists and apparatchiks seeking a piece of the action.[Snip]
Between the Communists and those who claim to stand to the Left of them there is a real difference. The Communists hold that Fascism can be beaten by alliance with sections of the capitalist class (the Popular Front); their opponents hold that this maneuver simply gives Fascism new breeding-grounds. The question has got to be settled; to make the wrong decision may be to land ourselves in for centuries of semi-slavery.
Do not underestimate the importance of the distinction. For it is the ideology of a society without landed gentry that is so attractive to the dispossessed. Hence, the difference between fascism ("you can (supposedly) keep your land" and communism ("socialize and redistribute all land from the get-go") is an important one, not only for the demographics to which they respectively appeal, but in how they express their respective dysfunctions. They are not both necessarily and inherently tyrannical, as we have seen reversal from fascism without catastrophic consequences. Here.
In many ways, the USA of the 1930s had become as fascist as the nations we were fighting. Certainly Roosevelt's control of the economy to supply the war was very nearly of that character. Yet the distinction I maintain between fascism and communism, that people still lived on the land of their fathers, is a powerful one, and a factor that played an important role in bringing us back from the brink of fascism as the War faded into memory, a memory hole we are at serious risk of revisiting today. Yet at no time was American fascism even close to its NAZI, much less Soviet parallels. It is the graduation of those difference upon which I argue their existence.
One can certainly draw parallels, but simply because America's WWII economy bore many resemblances to the NAZI system, does not mean that the latter was functionally equivalent to the Soviet State. And yes, I have seen the NAZI medallions depicting Karl Marx. I have read the quotes of parallelism from pre-War German sources, and I attribute much of that ideological affinity to political expediency, which is why it so easily evaporated the moment Hitler thought it useful to his ambitions.
See above.
Thanks justiceseeker93.
-PJ
Generally, blacks hate Jews. But both vote en bloc for left wing nut job Dems.
Go figure.
If American Jews anc Catholics help put O back in this year, then they better not come ask for my help when the jihad hits them.
The fascist FDR regime and the communists did in the 1940s.
William F. Buckley had the right answer for when someone accuses you of being a fascist: “All the Communists call me that.”
Goldwater was also a General in the USA Air Force. Media IS the enemy. Do not forget it.
I knew he had been an officer, but didn't know that he was a general. I also knew that as a young man, he wanted to go to West Point, but couldn't because his father died young and he had to get into the family business - which, BTW, became a chain of department stores known as Goldwater's. Thanks for the info.
The so-called isolationists were actually for the most part pro-Hitler, some to the point of belonging to fifth column orgs, which made FDR’s job that much easier.
You are confusing excuses of "the international" with that of reality. It's always excuses when it comes to communism in action.
I had family who died in those camps, asshole. This only proves how low you'll stoop to "win" a debate. Socializing all agricultural land to control the nation's food supply and starve all opposition is different than rounding up a particular group for their religion or race. One is a matter of ideology. The other purely for purposes of extermination, the true motives for which you don't have a clue unless you are hip to Sabbateans. Deal with it.
You stoop to emotionalism and insult without any problem while I was pointing out a very real parallel between nazis and communists in practice. The purpose of both actions was to get rid of "surplus" populations, increase the wealth and power of those running the show, and to control the remaining populace. Obviously the methodology was slightly different but they had the same goal. Again you confuse stated ideology, which ultimately is a lie, for actions, which is reality. The Germans did not just round up and kill Jews (not even Sabbateans which I have no idea why you interjected into this conversation except as a distraction) nor did the Russians just kill farmers and socialize land. They killed anyone that stood in their way, killed anyone that had anything they wanted (and could get away with killing), and any group of people that they saw as a drain to their perfect utopias. A rational observer would find this behavior quite similar regardless of the excuses used for such behavior.
No, I don't. Just because they were both murderous and tyrannical does not make them the same, principally because the ideological justifications are radically at odds. German lands were not collectivized. It's a major difference between fascism and communism. Deal with it.
You confuse the rationalizations of their action with the reality of their actions. The simple fact of the matter is that their stated ideology was always a smoke screen for the naked lust for power. It has never changed since the dawn of time. Debate over their stated ideology that ignores the variance between they say and what they do is sophistry.
So after discounting the difference between collectivizing and murdering 22 million peasants because they were landowners (regardless of religion) and rounding up largely urban Jews pretending that Jewish farmers were somehow numerous when socializing land ownership was never a major element of German policy, you paper over the difference.
That's what I mean by hand wave. It's dishonest and despicable. It shows you'll stoop to anything to what you believe is your advantage, making you no better than the people you supposedly hate. I won't bother with you further.
You debate with insult and arrogance and I'm well rid of you. I never claimed to hate anyone, I've never said I single thing that could be construed as dishonest even if you disagree, and I've never appealed to emotionalism or drama. That's all you.
For anyone still reading this that might believe some of what was written, most estimates are that around 8 millions Kulaks were killed through both direct means and starvation. Further it should be said that had Germany had a very different economy than Russia. If Germany had a great deal of rural agricultural lands held by those that opposed the regime they certainly would have done exactly what Russia did. As it was there wasn't any need to collectivize the land which they controlled.
Guess I hurt someones feelings by trying to have a conversation. That sure is a shame and stuff, but suggesting that German tyranny under Nazis and Russian tyranny under Communists is different because they targeted different ethnic groups or different industries is simply irrational.
Once the war began, the Nazi sympathizer tag was disproven when Republicans proved to be as anti-Hitler as anyone. However, it should also be noted that even after Pearl Harbor, we did not declare war on Germany until after Germany declared war on us.
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