Nazipalooza: A Closer Look at the Right's Obsession With Obama/Holocaust Imagery

[struggle4progress]

Posted by Allison Kilkenny, True/Slant at 9:31 AM on September 29, 2009.

... The cause du jour for the Republican Party is to make as many rapid-fire comparisons between the Democrats and the Nazis as humanly possible. There’re the posters altered to make the President look like Hitler, Glenn Beck’s use of Nazi imagery, and the GOP’s tendency to parade around pliant Holocaust survivors, who are willing to lie and convince hapless boobs that they’re seconds away from being loaded onto the trains headed to New Auschwitz, located… somewhere — probably in those FEMA camps Beck has been trying to warn us about.

Crazy, crazy stuff. Insulting and dangerous, too. Such propaganda is insulting to Holocaust survivors, some of whom are rightfully upset by the Obama-Hitler contrasting. "I saw Hitler’s soldiers. I saw swastikas every day. To call Obama stupid, even criminal — OK, that’s politics. But Hitler? It’s hurting to anyone no matter who is president," a Holocaust survivor told Times of the Internet ...

Stoking this irrational hatred for an amorphous enemy, the Marxist Communist Socialist Nazi President Obama, in an already frenzied, heavily armed mob, is obviously not a good thing. First, it eliminates the possibility of rational conversation about some critical issues like health care and the environment. Second, it’s extremely dangerous and irresponsible. If people like Kitty and Beck keep telling people Obama wants to take their guns, and he’s Hitler, and he’s changing America, and also there may be FEMA camps, and his health care plan is actually death panels, one of their unstable listeners is going to snap.

Of course, then Kitty and Beck will hide behind the same First Amendment rights many Republicans didn’t grant liberals when they tried to protest Bush’s illegal wars. This is the current state of things: Republicans protest health care for all. Democrats protest illegal wars. C’est la vie.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/142962/nazipalooza:_a_closer_look_at_the_right%27s_obsession_with_obama_holocaust_imagery/

[Neoconstipated]

1. Bump

Very well said.

[bluestateguy]

2. Our side made it too easy for these fools

We trivialized Nazism with the constant Bush/Hitler analogies and caricatures. First, we embarrassed ourselves and people were less inclined to take us seriously, and we now made it easier for the wacko right to emulate these tactics.

[1620rock]

3. Nonsense.

[Wilms]

4. I generally agree that caricatures are not conversation starters.

But it is our Constitution that was trivialized by Bush, et. al., and in that and other ways those Nazi analogies were understandable.

[flamingdem]

5. They are soooo dumb they don't differentiate between Nazis, Fascist, and libruls

Why not throw Jew lover in there to round it out?

Oh, well they probably do that along with the other Klan-esque items.

[Moderate-Progession]

6. to be honest

First off, i would like to say i do not agree with what i'm about to say i'm only saying i understand where its coming from. Thats ALL. Please do not tell me i think Barack Obama is a Marxist Nazi or anything. I understand that they would call Obama a socialist because of the health care reform. The Marxist and Communist are just going extreme but NAZI? Really? Throughout the bush administration when someone would call the president hitler fox news would declare them to be extremists and insane. But of course, when has fox ever been known to be accepting.