31 January 2011 | Everyone a Nazi

It seems that everybody is being called a Nazi these days, and it's almost to the point where if you haven't been called one, you're seriously lacking the cred department.

Righties have taken to calling Lefties as being Nazis anytime someone makes any mention of the federal government in a positive light. The Hate Porn King himself, Glenn Beck, has devoted his entire career to exploring his Nazi obsession by labeling everything the Left does as a machination of national socialism. Now, just about all of his mindless followers have no idea what that is, but they hear the word "socialism" and like Pavlov's dogs, they start salivating and then frothing at the mouth.

Lefties have also accused Righties--more plausibly--of being Nazis or employing Nazi tactics as well, but in the end, it's all stupid name calling. In fact, we've now reached the saturation point that it wont' be long before everyone starts forgetting exactly what the Nazis were all about. It was more than mindless thuggery or parades by torchlight. And it certainly was not about a government out to take away peoples' guns or promote universal healthcare. These little verbal assaults work well for sloping-foreheaded Americans who like to carry posters as such, but it demonstrates a deeper ignorance. Most of the Tea Baggers love to compare Barack Obama to being a Nazi, without any real specific reason to back up that assertion.

So just how much really *is* Barack Obama like Hitler? If you ask the right wing, or at least Darrell Issa, he's the most corrupt president of all time, and could probably out-Führer the Führer. But exactly how? If you're going to call the leader of the free world a Nazi to the point where it becomes reflexive (and not because there's nothing else, as when leftists termed George W. Bush a Nazi) and you're convinced that the federal government is on its way to totalitarian dictatorship, where's the evidence? More importantly, the right wing has created such a climate of fear and intolerance that these people truly believe Obama is a Nazi. We've gone beyond mere rhetoric. In fact, the Tea Baggers have so divested the word Nazi of its insulting nature now to be factual characteristic that it doesn't matter what national socialism actually means and what the Nazis really did: they were evil, period. And in the incessant name-calling is no longer just that, nor are Glenn Beck's pathological rants (and lies) calling the entire Obama Administration just a bad showman entertaining his audience. People believe him, and the right has set up the expectation of evil, real evil and millions of Americans have no problem believing it.

You can't ask a Tea Bagger to prove anything he says. The first rule of totalitarian regimes is to shut down the opposition and their means of communication (paging Hosni Mubarak!) but has that happened here in America? What's that? No? That salient fact doesn't phase the right wing at all, because they can call the president a Nazi at will, or have Congressman Paul Broun, use Twitter to declare Obama a "socialist" who does not believe in the Constitution. Last time anyone checked, he's still a representative and alive and kicking, whereas under real Nazis, he would have been "disappeared" some time ago.

But don't bother telling that to the right wing, or avid viewers of Fox News. Right before our eyes, Americans are being duped and fed a steady diet of propaganda that can no longer be termed rhetoric. People are being made to be afraid and "angry," although no one has offered a coherent reason why he should be angry in the first place. The government is being portrayed as a malignant force bent on taking away rights and freedoms, but not one Tea Bagger or Glenn Beck acolyte can show precisely what freedoms have been away. The right wing has been allowed to infect the body politic with calling everyone who disagrees with them "Nazis," robbing the true terror and dread of that entire period of history into a casual insult expressly for creating hatred. And the Left is no better either, when it trots out that word, lest a charge of bias be leveled. (It's also arguable that no one on the left really believed George W. Bush was one, either). The right wing has employed this term more often and to worse effect, making people forget the true ugliness of calling someone a Nazi into some commonplace word like rappers using the word "bitch" every five seconds.

None of this bodes very well for the country, which is already on the slippery slope. Imagine that: an entire population extraordinarily malleable to not knowing the difference between an historical fact and scare tactics. Unfortunately, there isn't anyone with enough guts and moral outrage to stop any of this.