?Listen? Stop Calling me a Crypto-Nazi??

I have always found it interesting that we like to believe in the unparalleled importance of the historical window of time and space we currently occupy.? Apparently, for many people progress is two-fold: it is the manifest movement of the zeitgeist forward, meaning for the better.? Secondly, as technology becomes more sophisticated (ie. ?better? as many people would have you think) so do the problems faced by people.? I like to think that this idea is articulated best by Biggie Smalls, when Puff Daddy (at the time), Ma$e and Notorious BIG performed the song Mo Money Mo Problems.? Since we do not have ?mo? Money? we have to settle with the belief that we have more problems because we general tend to have ?mo?? of everything else (including elapsed time).? What kills me is when people make comments like ?I just think it?s so hard for kids today,? because having to take buses across town to co-mingle races was not hard.? In the political spectrum, people tend to quip that ?political attacks have gotten to personal and ugly;? because meeting a man for the purpose of dueling and shooting a former Secretary of the Treasury dead just wasn?t personal enough (see Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton).? We have a tendency for generational narcissism.?

The latest personal smear being employed in today?s debate regarding Health Care is calling someone a ?Nazi? or comparing another to Hitler or the likes.? I say this in jest, because any Conservative knows that this technique has been used against Conservatives for years and years.? Just to throw in a personal anecdote: I was once caught up in a friendly debate with the ?College Democrats? table at my respective University, when my opposition to some of the ideas espoused by the young lady I was engaging warranted me being called a ?Klansmen? (to which I told her I was unaware they had changed their membership guidelines to allow Catholics in now) and then I was called anti-Semitic a mere five minutes later.? No name calling exchange is quite as infamous as the 1968 exchange between Messrs William Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal.? A cult classic.

Now we are seeing both sides using the old Nazi name-calling with a tenacious fervor.? Both sides are invoking the images of a regime none of them know much more about than what they have seen in the movies or read in books (I would likely place my bets on the former).? Interestingly enough, nobody dares bring what Nazism entailed; the slaughter of 12 million people.? It?s like we don?t have the gonads to actually say what we mean, leaving those in the audience to deduce this on their own.? Nazis equal Holocaust.? Obama equals a Nazi.? Therefore, Obama will lead to the Holocaust.? What is the point of invoking the memory of one of the most heinous regimes known to mankind if you are not going to invoke the outcome of that regime and what made them so Notorious?? Because your comparison is disingenuous and loathsome; any intellectual nincompoop can call another person a Nazi, and each time that happens, the memory of those who actually knew the Nazis diminishes little by little.? David Frum has a decent article which expresses this sentiment at NewMajority.?

Unfortunately for Conservatives, there is a populist uprising that is including many average Americans as well as ?below-average? Americans.? I don?t say this from the point of view as though I am ?better? than them or an elitist.? I mean this as Americans who know little about their own country, history, or even politics.? The good thing: they are getting involved in politics.? This is the point of a liberal democracy, no?? The bad thing: they are getting involved in politics, and they are tending to be the more boisterous and in the end, the ones on the news.? Funny how short-lived our memory span is however, when not but years before people had signs of President Bush as Hitler, and Republicans as Nazis, and accused us of killing babies for oil and the likes.? Obviously that is proper discourse when utilized by the fringe left because we expect that from them; perhaps we should be proud of the fact that the Right is held to a higher standard, even by the left.? I believe that we should do a better job living up to that standard.? I do not think that the people protesting should stop, they are doing their country a service, they ARE making a difference in politics and their regime, they should be damn proud!? Using the terms ?Nazi? and ?Hitler? loosely is disingenuous and abominable in the end (Leo Strauss use to refer to reducto ad Hitlerum), but it is selfish of us to pretend like we are bearing witness to a hostile politics like none that has ever been seen before.

-rj