Injecting 'Nazi' Into Debate Is Bad for the Health of America's Democracy'

Berliners Flock to laugh at Mel Brooks' The Producers, Rosanne Barr poses as Hitler in a pathetic stunt to get some PR, but on the eve of the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II, inserting Nazism into America's political narrative was and remains an outrage. The Simon Wiesenthal Center said so when Bush Bashers portrayed him as "The Fuehrer" on various Internet sites and in demeaning verbal barrages. Now, focus on crucial issues surrounding our nation's intensifying debate on health care could be derailed by the reinsertion of the "N" word.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, the dean of the Wiesenthal Center said this:

"It is preposterous to try and make a connection between the President's health care logo and the Nazi Party symbol, the Reichsadler". Americans have every right to be critical of the President's health care plan but we demean ourselves and everything that America stands for when we compare either Democrats or Republicans to the Nazi Third Reich."

President Obama is no Nazi and neither are 99.99% of Americans who protest his policies. To quote Dragnet's Jack Webb: "Just the facts mam!" Nuff said

Follow Rabbi Abraham Cooper on Twitter: www.twitter.com/simonwiesenthal

Comments

[Egghead]

02:50 PM on 08/11/2009

Darned right. This is an insult, and the people casually tossing around the word "Nazi" need to be called on it.

[Eggsackley]

02:58 AM on 08/08/2009

I agree that calling people Nazis is counterproductive and even dangerous. But there is a very disturbing attempt being made at present to prevent real debate on a serious national issue through disinformation and deliberate disruption of the political process. I think it has definite fascist over- tones. Fascism is hard to define. One definition I found in Wikipedia was written by Robert O. Paxton. Fascism is: " a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." A large portion of the Republican base feels humiliated by the election of Barrack Obama. That they are obsessed with victimization can be seen in the popularity of the 'birther conspiracy". They are being unethically manipulated by corporate elites to disrupt democratic debate. They are militant and violent.

[blue meanie]

09:23 AM on 08/09/2009

Yes. I think you are on to something. And the birthers also have something in common with the Holocaust deniers. Their way to deal with unpleasant facts is to deny them. There is another aspect of contemporary life I want to mention: "What [George Orwell] had discovered in Spain in 1937 was that objective truth could cease to exist, that the people who controlled the means of communication could -- and did -- alter it at will, and therefore, as his friend Arthur Koestler has said, history was dead. This, then, was Orwell's great perception and it was his fear that this sort of "thought-control" was happening not only in the "totalitarian" countries but the "democracies" as well ..." [William Smart, Eight Modern Essayists (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), p.126]

[timbonotes]

09:56 PM on 08/07/2009

Name calling is futile. However, I do think people should be aware of the historical patterns that resemble what is happening in the U.S. The biggest problem in this country, bigger than health care and many other critical issues, is the dumb-ing down of the American populace that has transpired over the last 40 years or so. I went to a town hall meeting yesterday and the "astroturf" people openly admitted their allegiance to Fox News as their primary source of news. And, it's not just Fox, all of the major MSM
sources are peddlers of corporate propaganda just to a lesser degree. We live in a post-literate world, the lack intellectual curioisity out in the American "world" is appalling and frightening. Big money can manipulate the ignorant like soft putty.

[Eggsackley]

02:24 AM on 08/08/2009

I don't think the electorate as a whole is dumbing down. What is happening is that a portion of the less intelligent republican base is being manipulated by some very clever but unethical people who are feeding them outright lies to get them stirred up and the whole thing is being supported by cash from the insurance industry and other corporations. The real problem is the political payola that has too many representatives of both parties doing the bidding of corporate sponsors. Big money is not just manipulating the ignorant, it is manipulating highly intelligent member of Congress. We need to get the payola out of politics.

[blue meanie]

09:33 AM on 08/09/2009

Yes. I heard one of these people on NPR the other day. A woman in her thirties or forties probably, her level of misinformation was matched only by the strength of her convictions. These people did not like how George W, Bush was treated by the Left, and they display his same dangerous combination of ignorance and self-righteousness. Also, to them Reagan was such a nice man, how could he have done anything wrong?