Victor Davis Hanson
If everything is like the Nazis, then the Nazis of history are no different from an ICE officer, a White House staffer, or . . . you and me.
"Former CIA director Michael Hayden recently tweeted a picture of a Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, with his commentary: “Other governments have separated mothers from children.” The suggestion was that industrialized death on an unprecedented scale was somehow similar to the temporary detention of children once their parents have been detained for violating federal law.
"Actor Peter Fonda recently advised the following about Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller: “Don’t let the pedophile Stephen Goebbels Miller near those girls separated from their parents.” Comedian Kathy Griffin has asserted that the Trump administration is “quite pro-Nazi.”
"Fonda perhaps lacks the subtlety of a Bill Kristol, who implies rather than sledgehammers the Nazi comparisons. When Michael Anton, a writer whose articles often appeared in The Weekly Standard, went to work for the Trump administration, Kristol reduced Anton to the status of an infamous Nazi lawyer: “Carl Schmitt to Mike Anton: First time tragedy, second time farce.”
"Sounds slick, but Anton was working for an elected government in general and in particular for a National Security Council under Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster that was trying to reestablish U.S. deterrence. Stranger still, it is hard to understand how Carl Schmitt’s Nazi-party membership and advocacy (begun formally as early as 1933) were in any sense “tragic” rather than vile. And if the subordinate is supposedly Carl Schmitt, what then would Kristol call his boss, the iconic McMaster? Goebbels? Heydrich?" . . .
If everything is like the Nazis, then the Nazis of history are no different from an ICE officer, a White House staffer, or . . . you and me.
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| Demagoguery |
"Actor Peter Fonda recently advised the following about Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller: “Don’t let the pedophile Stephen Goebbels Miller near those girls separated from their parents.” Comedian Kathy Griffin has asserted that the Trump administration is “quite pro-Nazi.”
"Fonda perhaps lacks the subtlety of a Bill Kristol, who implies rather than sledgehammers the Nazi comparisons. When Michael Anton, a writer whose articles often appeared in The Weekly Standard, went to work for the Trump administration, Kristol reduced Anton to the status of an infamous Nazi lawyer: “Carl Schmitt to Mike Anton: First time tragedy, second time farce.”
"Sounds slick, but Anton was working for an elected government in general and in particular for a National Security Council under Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster that was trying to reestablish U.S. deterrence. Stranger still, it is hard to understand how Carl Schmitt’s Nazi-party membership and advocacy (begun formally as early as 1933) were in any sense “tragic” rather than vile. And if the subordinate is supposedly Carl Schmitt, what then would Kristol call his boss, the iconic McMaster? Goebbels? Heydrich?" . . .
History is now following a sort of Gresham’s law: Lots of cheap, bad history drives out what is left of good history.In other words, when almost everything and everyone is analogous to Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka and their architects, then Belzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka become almost nothing at all.
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