I hope this column makes you sick.
See, we'll be talking about Nazis, something many of us are doing lately. Indeed, just this week a fellow named Joseph e-mailed me about a caller he heard on a radio show.
The man, vexed over health-care reform, likened President Obama to Adolf Hitler. Asked why, he said, "Hitler took over the car companies, then health care and then he killed the Jews."
Said Joseph: "I almost swerved my vehicle off the road when I heard that."
But the caller is hardly unique. Google "Obama + Nazis" and you get almost 7 million hits. Nor is the phenomenon new. Substitute President Bush's name and you get nearly 2.8 million.
Even granting that many of those hits are benign, it seems obvious the Nazis have invaded American political rhetoric in a big way. As in Rush Limbaugh declaring health-care reform "a Hitler-like policy," swastikas popping up at protest rallies, a poster with a Hitler mustache drawn onto Obama's face and a pamphlet that says: "Act Now to Stop Obama's Nazi Health Plan!"
It's important to remember that the Nazis are passing out of living memory; U.S. soldiers of that era are said to be dying at the rate of 1,200 a day. Which makes it too easy, I think, for a nation of notorious historical illiteracy to remake the Nazis as some kind of all-purpose boogeymen for slandering political enemies and scoring cheap rhetorical points.
So I thought it would be good to make you sick, i.e., to spend a few minutes reminding some and teaching others what exactly it is that you invoke when you invoke the Nazi regime.
For the record, then: the Nazis were the ones who shoved sand down a boy's throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window to compete to see how many "little Jews" could be caught on a bayonet, who injected a cement-like fluid into women's uteruses to see what would happen, stomped a pregnant woman to death, who snatched a woman's baby from her arms and, in the words of a witness, "tore him as one would tear a rag."
That's who the Nazis were, ladies and gentlemen - those obscenities plus 6 million more. They were the triumph of ideology over reason and even over humanity, the demonization of racial, religious and political difference, the objectification of the vulnerable other. And the authors of a mass murder that staggers imagination, still.
