The Worst Thing You Can Call Someone

Since the end of World War II, even though the world since then has seen massacres by Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Idi Amin, and others, there is still no worse judgment to be made than comparing a leader anywhere to Hitler and his party to Nazis. Name-calling in general has been on the rise in the past decade in the United States, and Hitler name-calling is increasing at an alarming rate, notes Edna Friedberg of the William Levine Family Institute for Holocaust Education at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, who finds the trend “disturbing.” She writes,

 

This oversimplified approach to complex history is dangerous. When conducted with integrity and rigor, the study of history raises more questions than answers. And as the most extensively documented crime the world has ever seen, the Holocaust offers an unmatched case study in how societies fall apart, in the immutability of human nature, in the dangers of unchecked state power. It is more than European or Jewish history. It is human history. Almost 40 years ago, the United States Congress chartered a Holocaust memorial on the National Mall for precisely this reason: The questions raised by the Holocaust transcend all divides.

 

Neither the political right nor left has a monopoly on exploiting the six million Jews murdered in a state-sponsored, systematic campaign of genocide to demonize or intimidate their political opponents.

 

Both right and left, she points out, have made use of these dangerous analogies.

 

Recently someone I know slightly posted on Facebook about Nazis in relation to American politics. He listed a few oddly chosen political sins of the Nazis (leaving out depriving people of basic citizenship rights, plus the whole Holocaust death machine!!!) as follows: They “tore down statues; banned free speech; blamed economic hardships on one group of people; instituted gun control; put the state before God; nationalized health care; and placed strict government regulations on industry.” He then posed the question (though it looks as if he copied the whole post from someone else; I don't really know), “Does this sound like the policies of a current political party in the U.S.?”

 

Well, let’s see. Let’s look at those “sins” one at a time. Here's what he says the Nazis did, which he thinks sounds like one of the American political parties:

 

Removed statues. Statues of Confederate leaders have been removed in more than one American city and state—are we talking about any statues other than those of Confederates? —and we can probably thank the primarily Democrats for that. Please note that the statues removed were leaders of an armed insurrection against the U.S. government, leaders of an opposing army in a war that cost over 600,000 American deaths, a war that took place over a century and a half ago; that most of those statues went up much later, during the 1890s, the Jim Crow era, i.e., when Reconstruction ended and Southern states began enforcing strict segregation laws; and that the current Republican president, in sympathy with the old Confederacy, has ordered a couple of those statues put back up. (He has never wanted to be the president of “all Americans” and has made that clear time and time again.) 

 

On the other hand, it has been the present Republican administration that removed online memorials to Black and Native Americans, and the Republican president himself had portraits of President Obama and both presidents Bush moved out of a highly visible area of the White House to a place where they are hidden from public view. 

 

Banned free speech. Sounds like the current Republican administration to me, where any criticism of the president is seen as treason, radio stations are threatened with loss of their licenses, newspapers are sued for printing true stories that show the administration in a bad light, etc. I suspect, however, given his general sympathies, that the questioner has in mind bans against “hate speech,” particularly on college and university campuses, so here’s the way the United Nations explains that idea. Did you follow the link for the definition? If “free speech” is an absolute, then “hate speech” must be permitted, and if this is where you come down on it, both parties are guilty restricting speech. The line between acceptable and unacceptable speech under the line has always shifted with shifts in political climate, in every country of the world, under all manner of political power. One absolutist on the matter wrote that he would not even ban yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theatre. Can you go that far? I can’t, although I tend in general to lean towards freedom. 

 

Blamed economic hardships on one group of people. Yes, Nazis blamed economic hardships on one group, the Jews, though they also scapegoated gypsies, homosexuals, disabled people, dark-skinned people, etc., etc. Republicans blame economic hardships on immigrants and Democrats, two different groups. They also love to call Democrats "socialists," because that's a hot button that short-circuits thought for many of their listeners. Democrats blame Republicans for their policies that favor the wealthiest Americans at the expense of everyone else. Not sure how to score this one.

 

Gun control. I don’t know what the specific German laws about gun ownership were under the Nazis, but neither major party in the U.S. has ever advocated making gun ownership unlawful. Democrats do, however, favor the kind of laws that most Americans also find reasonable, 

while Republicans kow-tow to the gun lobby and see any law about ownership of any weapons as an infringement of individual rights. It's strange that while they oppose even the “morning-after pill” as “murder of a child,” they are willing to sacrifice the lives of actual living schoolchildren so that anyone who wants to own a military-style assault weapon can get his hands on one. So yes, if “gun control” is a sin, Democrats are guilty. 

 

Put the state before God. That, like the foregoing, would be in the eye of the beholder. The separation of church and state does not elevate the state above the church and certainly does not elevate it above God. It’s a huge topic, what any individual might mean by this claim. 

 

Nationalized health care. There is only one country in the world, as far as I know, that has national health care, and that is the United Kingdom. Other countries have national health insurance, and the U.S. made a move in that direction with the Affordable Care Act, stopping short of having the government as a single payer. So American health insurance is still the business of for-profit corporations. Hospitals and clinics, too, which used to be owned and operated by cities and religious groups when I was young, are now for-profit businesses. Bottom line: We do not have nationalized health care. Neither major party has pushed for it. There is no country in the world that puts a greater burden on its people to pay exorbitant fees to private companies for health insurance and health care. 

 

Put strict government regulations on industry. This is certainly a sin of the Democratic party. Republicans would prefer that business be completely unregulated, with no safeguards for workers or for public health and no concern for the national resources of the country, on which all of us depend, including the industries.

 

Here's how I see these points, one by one, in summary: 

 

Every country chooses its heroes, and most adults recognize that we must choose our heroes carefully. 

 

Free speech would be less controversial if public, commonly accepted standards of civility and decency were still in place and respected and adhered to by our country’s leaders. 

 

Purposeful attributions of blame are unfortunately common in politics, but anyone following the news can see that it is much more common coming from Republicans, starting with the current president, the Blamer-in-Chief. 

 

I don’t know that this country will ever have sensible, reasonable discussion of gun ownership and gun control. 

 

Putting one religion above all others (often in a very perverted, materialistic form), rather than “putting the state before God,” is what I see Republicans doing these days, whereas Democrats would be content to maintain the traditional separation of church and state as laid out by the Founders. 

 

Nationalized health care is a straw man: We don’t have it, and neither party advocates for it. 

Government regulations on industry are nothing but common sense; the absence of regulations would be nothing but the raping and pillaging our own land and our own people for the short-term gain of the wealthiest segment of the population. I should say, for the short-term gain of the segment of that segment who recognize only one value: money and the power it gives.

 

A more important question relating to the list, however, is—what, if anything, does this list say about either major American political party? Would anyone want to say that a country with gun regulations or regulations on industry is, because of those regulations, led by Nazi-like politicians? The idea is ludicrous. 

As for my own view (which would not be the view of the person who posted the list), I believe that analogies between the present Republican administration and its leader to Nazis and Hitler are unnecessary and beside the point. We don't need analogies. All we need to do is listen to what is said by the Blamer-in-Chief and his diehard supporters and watch what they are doing and ordering done. It's all plenty bad enough without comparing it to other people and times and places. So let's not undermine our testimony with a reductio ad Hitlerum.

 

But I will let Edna Friedberg have the last word today: 

 

Careless Holocaust analogies may demonize, demean, and intimidate their targets. But there is a cost for all of us because they distract from the real issues challenging our society, because they shut down productive, thoughtful discourse. At a time when our country needs dialogue more than ever, it is especially dangerous to exploit the memory of the Holocaust as a rhetorical cudgel. We owe the survivors more than that. And we owe ourselves more than that. 

An Honored Guest

Today I am turning this blog over to the late Langston Hughes. The images below are a two-page carbon copy of a statement Hughes felt compelled to make following criticism and misinterpretation of his poem, "Goodbye, Christ." My mother arranged his visit to Springfield, Ohio, on May 8, 1945, which is how these pages came into my hands.

Old Book, Thoughts Still Relevant

 

In 1943 Alexander Woollcott wrote a piece called “For Us, the Living,” which was subsequently republished in Clifton Fadiman’s Fireside Reader in 1961. Fadiman wrote a 272-word introduction in his reader to Woollcott’s piece. Woollcott’s essay follows, and after it appears Lincoln’s 272-word Gettysburg Address, the subject of Woollcott’s essay. 

Fadiman's reader includes, its flyleaf informs us, passages from “great novels, gripping suspense yarns, fascinating accounts of historical incidents, inspiring stories of human achievement, humorous essays,” and “light poetry.” It would have to be in the light of historical incident that “For Us, the Living” is included in the book. Woollcott quotes some of the scathing reviews of Lincoln’s speech that were published in days following November 19, 1863. The president remarks were called “silly” (by The Patriot and Union of Harrisburg, PA); “silly, flat and dish-watery” (by the Chicago Times); and “dull and commonplace” (by the American correspondent for the London Times). Woollcott agrees with history that the audience at Gettysburg was “quite unimpressed,” but he speculates that Lincoln was not really speaking to the 15,000 present that day (who had already stood through a seemingly interminable 2-hour-long oration by Edward Everett) when he gave his own two-minute speech.

Lincoln, Woollcott notes, was an experienced public speaker and knew very well how to engage an audience, and if he did not begin with the usual settling-in preliminaries but went immediately to his point, Woollcott says, that could not have been an accident. The writer in 1943 is certain of his interpretation of the historic event:

Have these words, for example, at any time since they were first spoken, ever had such painful immediacy as they have seemed to have in our own anxious era? Yes, he was talking to you and to me. Of this there is no real question in my mind. The only question—in an age when beggars on horseback the world around are challenging all that Lincoln had and was—the only question is whether we will listen . . . It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here. . . .

For whom was this speech meant? Why, the answer is in his own words. For us. For us, the living. For us to resolve and see to it—that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Have those words not even more painful immediacy for Americans now, in 2025, than they had in the era of World War II, when freedom-loving countries of the world, included these United States, were united against fascist aggressors? 

Blame is no cure for pain.

There is so much pain in the world! Some of it is unavoidable, obviously. We are embodied and mortal, prey to sorrows and afflictions of the flesh, and nature can be disastrous, and if we don't die young, we get old, and that isn't easy. Life is a heart-breaker in so many ways at the same time that it is the gift that makes all other gifts possible. But must we make it harder on ourselves and each other?

Our nature as animals who speak and imagine and live in time is to personify the world. We see the sun and rain as benevolent, destructive storms as malicious. A forest may appear either as friendly or dangerous, depending on experience and knowledge. Ancient Greeks explicitly named gods of wind and sea and land, gods endowed with all the petty vanities and jealousies and angers of the human beings who invented them. 

The stimulus of pain—“I am hurt!”—triggers an almost automatic response in many people: “Who is to blame?” We want to identify a responsible other, then to inflict pain on that other, as if hurting someone else will ease our own pain, somehow “even out” the score and erase the hurt done to us. It doesn’t work, but when it comes to hurt and blame, the most modern, educated human beings revert to primitive feelings, the human brainstem remaining—necessarily—as active as it ever was. Sometimes we identify a specific human being as the one who hurt us, but often that isn’t possible, so we look for a group or people or agency and make them into villains. 

Ironically, one person’s villain is often another person’s angel, because each of us has only our own experiences, no one else’s. Each of us has only our own pain, our own losses, no one else’s. Designs to help can fail to meet everyone’s needs. Even people who love us may occasionally let us down, and a person with the best intentions cannot foresee all consequences.

All that is hard to accept because we want justice. People who don’t deserve to die — they die! It isn’t fair! It isn’t fair, but it’s life. 

The biggest problem with blaming and scapegoating is that it not only fails to erase hurt: it spreads it further. Blame and revenge are as contagious as plague. 

Now some would say—and one or two have said—that my identifying the current president of our country as the blamer-in-chief is blaming him, and isn’t that exactly what I’m saying we shouldn’t do? If I’m truly tolerant, they imply, I would tolerate intolerance. No. That is a road I refuse to go down. 

Harry Truman said, taking full responsibility for the high office he occupied, “The buck stops here.” People going into politics knows at the start that not everything they say or do will be popular and that their words and deeds will be criticized. Criticism goes with the job. Taking criticism is part of the job. Name-calling, vilifying your opposition, attempting to silence critics, blaming others for your failures, on the other hand — none of that is part of the job.

This president has tarnished the reputation of our country around the world. He is doing everything possible to destroy our “Fourth Estate,” the free press,  because honest journalists refuse to be his parrots. He is purging government of experts and career professionals and replacing them with parrots loyal only to him. He is “firing” judges whenever he can, if they hand down verdicts he doesn’t like (replacing them whenever possible with parrots). He is deporting people who are legally in our country and threatening to strip citizens of their citizenship. 

HE, the PRESIDENT, is doing all these things. Do you not think these offenses are a thousand times worse than King George III’s tax on tea?

THE BUCK STOPS IN THE OVAL OFFICE.

For Crying Out Loud!

When confronted with the character flaws of the person she supported for president in the 2024 election, one person I know replied that we are all sinners, all flawed. Equally flawed? Does character not matter then in elected officials? Do past acts committed not matter? Then anyone might as well be considered “qualified,” and we might as well draw names at random to fill government offices. Why bother with campaigns and voting? 

Several months into the administration led by one of us flawed sinners, we now have unidentified men, masked and armed, abducting people off the streets in the name of the United States government and transporting them to prisons and/or detention facilities without due process. We are told that these men must be masked to protect their identities because threats have been made against their lives. By this logic, state governors, members of Congress, governors of states, judges in courtrooms, journalists—there is no end to the people whose identities should be hidden because threats have been made against their lives! 

People who go into law enforcement or into the military choose careers that involve risk. If we are to know and trust them, we need to know who they are. We need to be able to see them--as fellow human beings. And they need to see others as fellow human beings, also. Do they? 

A friend retired from law enforcement downstate says he cannot imagine how the public would have reacted if he and fellow police officers had initiated traffic stops wearing face masks rather than badges. A certain public person objecting to the new practice (and sorry, I can’t remember who it was) said the ICE officers looked as if they were setting out to rob liquor stores. Sure does! And it makes sense that people doing that want to hide their faces. 

Bank robberies, liquor store robberies, etc. are “traditionally” performed with faces hidden. Are these government employees and their bosses all too well aware that they are the serious law-breakers?

"Look what they're doing!"

What are the current aims of the administration in our nation's capital, and what was your first clue? How about this? Anything you hear them accusing their opposition of doing is exactly what they are doing.

"Rig" an Election? The 2020 election was run and won fair and square, but can the same be said of the 2024 election? Certain remarks made by the president raise doubts. "Rigged" if you lose, not if you win? Hmmm....

"Weaponize"? Yep, that's just what the current administration and its Congressional supporters are doing. An impartial justice system, one that would punish those who break the law, is not what those determined to abolish laws desire. Hence the epidemic of "firings" (purging would be a more accurate term) of long-time government employees loyal to the Constitution and the laws of the land. 

"Witch hunt"? Again, yes! Those petulant whining and cryings from the White House about "witch hunts" are another instance of accusing your opposition of exactly what you are doing. Ever criticize the current president? Ever disagree with him on anything? And if you are a Democrat--well, that speaks for itself! "Out with the witches!" is the Republican yell today.

[Note: Republicans, not Conservatives. It is not conservative to undermine the rule of law and abandon the nation's ideals.]

"Hate"? No, the opposition to the administration does not "hate" America! Far from it! We love our country and its ideals, and if we hate anything it is the current authoritarian agenda that is dragging us into the mud and would throw those ideals out the window. But just listen to the spewing from the hater-in-chief! Accusing, blaming, name-calling. Plenty of hate in that quarter.

The psychological term for accusing the other guy of what you yourself are doing is projection. In the world of psychology, the finger-pointer is not consciously aware of what he is doing, but can the same be said of Republican finger-pointers today? In a few cases, perhaps, but I am more inclined to think it is, in general, a very conscious, intentional strategy, a pre-emptive move designed precisely to put the opposition on the defensive. I guess you might call it smart. I call it evil.

Reminder Found in a Book