Being “Outraged” At A Few ANTI-NAZI Signs Is Less Than Genuine

William R Collier Jr

Some people have focused on the fact that protestors at Town Hall revolts have, in a few cases, referred to the Democrats or President Obama as Nazis and, indeed, I have even heard it said that doing such things makes you a “fascist.” The focus seems to be on swastikas with circle and a line, meaning “no Nazism”, and how “offensive” it is that people would bring such signs to a debate on NATIONALIZED Health Care, which many fear is a step towards some version of “National Socialism.”

Let’s try and clear about the issue, and shed some light both on the reason people might make such comparisons, based on superficial similarities with the National Socialist agenda, and just what the National Socialists believed, said, and DID. It should then be clear that the National Socialists were many things, but they were not Christians or Conservatives and they were not Liberals or Democrats.

The primary characteristic of Nazism was not its left or right ideology, in point of fact its ideology was what we might call “leftist” in economics and what we might say is to the “right” on social issues.

The primary characteristic of Nazism was that its leaders believed in a centralized state as the supreme authority over all of human life and their willingness to kill millions of people in pursuit of their program. To REPEAT, for clarity, regardless of their economic leftism or their seeming social conservatism, what made the Nazis what they were was their belief in the supremacy of a centralized state authority as the sole or primary means by which they might pursue their policies coupled with their willingness to .use extreme violence against their opponents.

It may be impolitic to call somebody a Nazi but this does not make you a Fascist. It is, however, disingenuous  for the American Left  to protest such remarks when the Left does this every day against their opponents. It is disingenuous for Jewish Groups to make a huge fuss about this when they ignore the much more rampant use of the epithet “you are a Nazi” by the left while only protesting when they see a conservastive calling a liberal a Nazi.

As an aside, I beleive that the Jewish Groups who are attacking conservatives over a few signs, while defending liberals and supporting Democrats primarily on ideological grounds even though these Democrats are increasingly showing their hostility to the Jewish State, are beginning to look more and more collaborationist with a Party that is more pro-Arab than Pro-Israel. These groups are revealing that their leftist ideology matters more than the welfare of the Jewish State and they run the risk of alienating conservatives, who are FAR MORE pro-Israel than the Left who are in bed with the many anti-Israeli groups and organizations.

People are outraged, they have been trying to be heard, to be civil, to speak their mind, and they are being ignored and vilified. When this occurs people don’t always react in the most “civil” fashion and lecturing them about how “you should not have stooped to their level by slapping them back AFTER they punched you in the gut” shows a remarkable insensitivity to the offended party.

The true offended party are not the congresscritters who, God forbid, are getting “yelled at” or who are being called names, or who are being “hung in effigy” (as Bush was almost every day all over this nation), the true offended party are the voters who feel that all their efforts to communicate with their elected officials are being ignored both by their own elected officials and by a news media that is driven by ideological bias rather than professional standards.

I am much more offended at how the voters are being treated than their understandable, if at times unfortunate, visceral reaction to the offenses they are enduring and have endured so patiently for so long by their elected officials. I have far more outrage at the behavior of a news media that is not much more than a partisan mouthpeice that excuses or ignores all that is done by the left while sensationalizing and hyping and over-emphasizing every tiny off color remark or sign or what have you of those who oppose the liberal agenda.
But are they Nazis?

I am not saying the Democrats or their news media allies are Nazis, but those who feel that such comparisons are justified have some ground for saying so, although I would propose that while there are superficial similarities the difference between the two is one of degrees: the Nazis took ideas that we may say are similar to what the Democrats are proposing to their extreme and were willing to slaughter millions, which, to my mind, is enough to say the Democrats and Obama are NOT “Nazis”.

I think in the future when people are behaving badly in politics the epithet will be “you, sir, are worse than the Democrats” but by this they will not mean people are Nazis, only that they leaned more towards a state-corporate system of centralized control and were willing to behave in a manner that is simply not fair and that tended to create a situation where the rules were biased towards their side and against their opponents, especially in the areas of education, the news media, the entertainment media, and the government bureaucracy.

This is not Nazism, but it also not democracy or republicanism and it is, more than the “rudeness” or boisterousness of angry voters, patently Un-American!

There is nothing wrong with pointing out that a policy or plan has similarities with any other system, including Nazism, so long as you are clear that when we speak of the Democrats we are talking about, at worse, a superficial similarity, but it is not, generally, a way to de-escalate things, and I think we should prefer de-escalation to escalation.

If they are not Nazis, why are some people calling them Nazis?

Of course, the Democrats and their media allies are not Nazis, at WORSE t here are some of superficial similarities between National Socialism and the Democratic Agenda as some might see it:

1. anti-semitism (President Obama’s present policies towards Israel are seen by some as anti-Semitic and his “pastor”, along with many of his friends and associates, have spoken in very Anti-Semitic terms)

2. the Nazis had  their own version of environmentalist extremism that focused on a back-to-nature approach and an aversion to technology

3. managed health care based on a system strikingly like Holdren’s views and Emanuel’s views, the science czar and health care cars respectively: indeed the first euthanasia program (the T-4 Program) used the term “life unworthy of life” and Emanual proposes to ration health care based on the value of life TO SOCIETY (I.E. the State)

4. ideas of a right to a good job with job security, housing, health care and etc. with a de-emphasis on personal rights or the right of free speech

5. a process of socializing the economy via indirect state control over business as opposed to outright ownership by the state

6. modifying Christianity so as to mold it to the Party platform and agenda and suppressing and marginalizing traditional or more conservative Christian beliefs as an unofficial State Policy

Of course, the present Democratic Congress and Administration do not share the Nazi’s foreign policy agenda, based on lebensraum. They do, however, advocate for a land-use policy on a global scale in which saving the environment, or creating “living room” for “nature”, even at the expense of the interest of nations or human welfare, is the objective.

Like the Nazis, on a superficial level, the Obama Administration has called for the creation of a “civilian army” which would answer to the party and be outside the control of the military establishment, which would make Obama’s “civilian army” superficially akin to the “Sturm Abteilung” (SA) which was a civilian defense force that sought to be just as “well funded” as the regular army.

Were the Nazis a right-wing or a left-wing organization?

To be fair, the Nazis were called “the right”, albeit in Europe at the time what was “the right” was very different in their minds. The primary difference between the “right” and the “left” in Germany in the 1920′s to 1930′s was in the area of foreign policy and in the area of governance- the right was less trusting of democracy and said so, the left was divided between those who wanted democracy and those whose version of democracy was that of the Soviet system.

The emphasis of American Conservatism on “limited government” was alien to the German “right” and the “left”, and yet this emphasis on limited government is a key component of American Conservatism. The anger of Conservatives towards the GOP and President Bush hinged NOT on “social issues” as some propose, but, rather, their betrayal of this aspect of conservativism.

On the other hand, the emphasis on the enlargement of the role of government and heavily regulated corporations is a key component of Bush’s “compassionate conservativism”, which is disavowed and rejected by almost every “conservative”, and by almost every single “liberal” or leftist proposal, plan, or party plank!

The Populist Left, those who tend to be socially liberal and for some form of economic collectivism or “equality” of wealth distribution, may focus less on the state (and certainly they are more suspicious of large corporations), but it has not really found its voice and does not have much influence at present within the Democratic Party.

Even today, Americans would not consider the groups that Europeans call “the right”  to be such primarily because the emphasis on limited government and the concomitant empowerment of the family, private associations, and local communities, especially in respect to cultural issues, are lacking.

The Nazis were officially opposed to homosexuality, however almost the entire SA leadership whose masses of storm troopers propelled the Nazis to power were notorious homosexuals and many were pedophiles even as many of the leading Nazis were part Jewish. It is just as illogical to equate the genuine opposition of many to homosexuality to the Nazis as it would be to say that because the SA leaders were mostly homosexual then homosexuals are “Nazis”. It is also illogical, as everyone would agree, to say that because many of the leading Nazis may have been partly Jewish that people who are partly Jewish and who are not pro-Israel are Nazis.

The Nazis were opposed to Abortion for Germans because they wanted to increase their numbers, but Abortion or sterilization was mandatory for “inferior” genetic stock or for Germans who were not “racially pure”: they were neither pro-abortion not pro-life but were, rather, for population control.

On social issues the Nazis publicly came off as being more or less “conservative”, hence their being lumped in with the right, but their “conservatism” on these issues was arbitrary- Hitler often said of his associates, almost all of whom were extremely immoral, that he did not care about their morals but their use to him. He said that one had to use “the human material that lies to hand” and to use it “as you find it” rather than trying to “change” it. Quite simply, Nazis professed a conservative social agenda because almost 80% of the population was socially conservative, but in their policies and in the people they promoted to leadership, little more than lip service was paid to these issues.

Take, for instance, marriage and sex outside of marriage- the Nazis notoriously created a “Strength Through Joy” program designed to encourage pregnancy, even outside of marriage, and while this was opposed even by SS Officers, who feared that their wives at home would cheat on them, it is hardly comparable with anything a “conservative” would propose.

The Nazis have no equivalent in the American political scene, neither in the right or the left, and such terms do not apply to the Nazis.

Our present “left” and “right” terminology does not apply to the Nazis. I prefer to speak in terms of people who are more trusting of centralized authority, be it government or corporations or both, as opposed to people who are for a more distributed authority structure that favors individuals, private entities, and local communities. The first group, call them what you will, is CLOSER to the National Socialists than they are to America’s Founders when it comes to their reliance on centralization of authority, and the second group is right in line with our Founders.

Where should your outrage be directed?

No, having a sign that shows a swastika with a line going through it (like the “do not enter” sings) does not make you a fascist and while there may be superficial similarities between a specific policy or platform and the National Socialist Platform, which did not mention ONE “socially conservative” idea but is filled with leftist rhetoric, this does not mean the Democrats are Nazis

If the worse thing we can say about the protesters is that they waved a sign showing that they did not want us to enter a path that might lead to some form of National Socialism, as opposed to SEIU thugs beating people up, then I am fine with that: I save my OUTRAGE for a government that seems to increasingly have all the symptoms of the British Crown, which our Founders said “evinces a design of tyranny”. Well, perhaps not outright tyranny, perhaps just a dose of “Neototalitarianism.”

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