The current president’s policies seem to be an extension of his grandfather’s thinking. Bush’s latest string of Executive Orders are so disconcertingly undemocratic and un-American that even the Right-wing is growing leery. Last week, Bush signed an order that would enable him to seize the financial assets of anti-war activists. And in his most troubling move to date, on May 9, Bush signed an order that states that in the event of another terror attack on U.S. soil, the legislative and judicial branches of government would become subservient to the executive. This move is precisely how Hitler concretized his power following the Reichstag fire.
The Blog – 
– raised an interesting question: “When is it okay to call someone a Nazi.?”
It is interesting because the comparison to Hitler and Nazism is most often used when a debater has no arguments left for their position. It is considered bad form to use the comparison, and in most Discussion Forums it is a sure discussion killer. See Godwin’s Law.
It has also been used as a hyperbolic propagandist argument against f.i Israeli politics in regards to the Palestinians, especially by debaters on the Far Left, who somehow think they gain points by using it as an insult.
The interesting part appears when one is able to draw direct political lines between events today and those in the 1930’s and 1940’s Germany. Like the Blogger manages to do in the above quote.
The Question raises another Question – how are we to learn from history, if references to historical events cannot be made? If Hitler, the Third Reich and the Holocaust take on sacrosanct proportions in the minds of people, don’t we then loose an instrument that can and should be used for education and raising awareness of similar events taking place in our own times? What about historical, sociological and philosophical analysis – how can that be conducted if the books on certain parts of history are hermetically closed due to sensitivities of some of the victims? Isn’t that just another denial? It seems like the the slogan “Never again!” has come to mean, not that it must never happen again, but that we must never think or speak about it again. For sure, we must not point out that history is about to repeat itself in some variation.
It has been argued that the events leading up to and resulting in the Third Reich in the 1930’s were so unique that no events can be compared to them, not before and not after.
But were they? Really? The misuse of power, the political machinations, the targeting of political undesirables, followed by elimination any possible dissent – are they unique to the Rise of the Third Reich?
What about the Soviet Union? Or China? Uganda, Mozambique, Iran, Turkey, Iraq?
How about the Serbian Rise in Former Yugoslavia?
I know that Europe woke up to the plight of the Muslims in Serbia after images eerily resembling those from Bergen Belsen and Auschwitz were aired on TV – but that was long into the massacre, and for many the realization of what was happening came too late.
Could those events have been predicted and intercepted if we had been allowed to believe that this kind of evil is repeatable, because it is NOT unique, because human evil is in fact very predictable? Would we not then also have been allowed to analyze and draw parallels between events in the 1930’s and 40’s and events unfurling in our own times?
I believe that not only do we need to let go of the “sanctification” of the Holocaust and the events that led up to it as something unique, but we need to go of the permanent victimization, not just of the Jewish People and all other that perished then, but of our collective innocence. It cannot be repaired, so we might as well accept that it is gone, and live with it, learn from its demise and grow up.
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