Victor Davis Hanson is one of the few writers I find indispensable. His article today is very much related to many of the issues I have been raising on this blog. Language is important. The title of VDH's article is:
“Little Eichmanns” and “Digital Brownshirts”
Deconstructing the Hitlerian slur.
Here is an excerpt:
The flood of the Hitler similes is also a sign of the extremism of the times. If there was an era when the extreme Right was more likely to slander a liberal as a communist than a leftist was to smear a conservative as a fascist, those days are long past. True, Bill Clinton brought the deductive haters out of the woodwork, but for all their cruel caricature, few compared him to a mass-murdering Mao or Stalin for his embrace of tax hikes and more government. “Slick Willie” was not quite “Adolf Hitler” or “Joseph Stalin.”
But something has gone terribly wrong with a mainstream Left that tolerates a climate where the next logical slur easily devolves into Hitlerian invective. The problem is not just the usual excesses of pundits and celebrities (e.g., Jonathan Chait’s embarrassing rant in the New Republic on why “I hate George W. Bush” or Garrison Keillor’s infantile slurs about Bush’s Republicans: “brown shirts in pinstripes”), but also supposedly responsible officials of the opposition such as former Sen. John Glenn, who said of the Bush agenda: “It’s the old Hitler business.”
....
Is there a danger to all this? Plenty. The slander not only brings a president down to the level of an evil murderer, but — as worried Jewish leaders have pointed out — elevates the architect of genocide to the level of an American president....
I have written, in Defeat, Humiliation, and Rage, about the turn from humiliation to rage (externalized anger) and despair (internalized anger). The spread of democracy is underway but in no way assured. There are certain to be setbacks in Iraq, with the Palestinians, with Lebanon and Syria, and we can expect the radical fringe, fueled by the irresponsibility of many on the left, to react with rage. If Bush is truly another Hitler, the only proper response would be violent attacks to stop him from killing more people. This is the same rationalization the Pro-life lunatic fringe has used to justify murdering abortion doctors and bombing abortion clinics.
When one can not differentiate between Bush and Hitler, one is either extraordinarily ignorant of what Hitler was and how the fascist state of the Third Reich operated, or one is revealed as a deeply unserious person.
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