Boston. -- The ceremonies are over, but I would like to suggest one last way to commemorate the golden anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis. How about a moratorium on the current abuse of terms like storm trooper, swastika, holocaust, Gestapo, Hitler? How about putting the language of the Third Reich into mothballs?
The further we are removed from the defeat of the Nazis, the more this vocabulary seems to be taking over our own. It's become part of the casual, ubiquitous, inflammatory speech Americans use to turn each other into monsters. It was, in fact, a tactic favored by Goebbels himself.
Just in the past month, the National Rifle Association attacked federal agents as ''jackbooted government thugs'' who wear ''Nazi bucket helmets and black storm-trooper uniforms.'' It wasn't enough for the NRA to complain that the agents had overstepped their bounds; they had to call them Nazis.
Twice more in recent days, congressmen have compared environmentalist agencies with Hitler's troops. On May 16, Pennsylvania's Bud Shuster talked about EPA officials as an ''environmental Gestapo.'' Before that, Missouri's Bill Emerson warned about the establish- ment of an ''eco-Gestapo force.''
On the other side of the aisle, Sen. John Kerry recently suggested that a proposed new kind of tax audit, on ''lifestyles,'' would produce an ''IRS Gestapo-like entity.'' And Democrats John Lewis and Charles Rangel compared silence in the face of the new conservative agenda to silence in the early days of the Third Reich. They didn't just disagree with conservatives; they Nazi-fied them.
Anti-abortion groups talk about the abortion holocaust -- comparing the fetuses to Jews and the doctors to Mengele. Rush Limbaugh likes to sprinkle the term ''feminazis'' across the airwaves -- turning an oxymoron into a laugh.
Much of the time, the hurling of ''Nazi'' names is just plain dumb. As dumb as the behavior of punk groups, who think they can illustrate their devotion to anarchism with symbols of fascism. Singers like Sid Vicious, groups like the Dead Boys once sported swastikas without realizing that in Hitler's time and place they would have been rounded up as enemies of the Reich.
As for pinning the Nazi label on the supporters of abortion rights, the propagandists surely know that Hitler was a hard-line opponent of abortion. (Did that make him pro-life?) In ''Mein Kampf'' he wrote, "We must also do away with the conception that the treatment of the body is the affair of every individual.'' A woman's body wasn't hers; it belonged to the state.
