Comments | tongodeon: Comparing Hitler

tongodeon

Comparing Hitler

Mar 08, 2006 10:35

Jay Bennish, a Denver Colorado high school teacher, was put on administrative leave recently for inviting his students to compare George Bush's public statements to Hitler's. While Godwin's Law discourages trivializing the Holocaust with overreaching comparisons I think it's possible and fair to make qualified, nontrivializing comparisons between ( Read more... )

george w bush, nazi, politics, hitler

Comments 13

A somewhat scattered response creepyanonymous March 8 2006, 23:04:11 UTC

Any laws that slipped past - such as laws against torture - could be defused by the party leader with "signing statements" to announce that he wasn't going to actually comply with them, or novel legal arguments claiming that any restrictions of the president's power were prima facie unconstitutional.

Not that I particularly like the "signing statements" argument, but it's not clear that that particular tactic is going to, you know, work. The administration can make up ridiculous legal arguments all it wants to; it only gets really serious if the courts start to agree with them, and whether or not that will happen is still up in the air. This is not at all the same situation as Germany circa 1933. (Also note that the Nazis immediately outlawed rival political parties, and started imprisoning political opponents; as bad as Gitmo is, it's still orders of magnitude better ( ... )

Re: A somewhat scattered response owenferguson March 8 2006, 23:29:24 UTC

"Also note that the Nazis immediately outlawed rival political parties"

The republicans have simply stolen control of the voting process instead.

Re: A somewhat scattered response creepyanonymous March 8 2006, 23:45:36 UTC

You know, I think that there are serious issues with voting procedures all around the country, and I think that current touchscreen voting machines are atrociously insecure, but I really don't think that comments like this help.

Re: A somewhat scattered response glaucon March 9 2006, 02:22:55 UTC

what do you think would help?

Thread 10

Damned if you do... sploof March 8 2006, 23:14:27 UTC

I've thought a lot about this, and I'm one of those who probably overreacts to perceived trivialization of the holocaust. On the other hand, I think it also does a disservice to significance of the holocaust to give it such a untouchable position that it's not seen as having any real relevance to the modern world.

The whole idea of "never again" is that we should learn from what happened then, which necessarily means comparing modern political behavior to Nazi political behavior. Refusing to do this trivializes the holocaust too. The trick is to make the comparisons in a thoughtful way, rather than calling people Hitler because you don't agree with them.

Re: Damned if you do... tongodeon March 9 2006, 01:22:27 UTC

The "untouchable position" thing bugs me quite a bit. It's weird that on one hand you have deniers who claim it never happened because it's just so outrageous, and on the other hand you have people who are so alarmed by the stories that they think "that's so crazy it couldn't happen again". It happened on this earth with some of this earth's current inhabitants in an age of modern industry, air travel, telephones, radios, newspapers, etc. There's no reason why it couldn't happen again.

Re: Damned if you do... sploof March 9 2006, 02:17:02 UTC

More than that, similar things do happen. A lot.

It's not on the same scale, but when you really get into the details of what has happened and is happening in Sierra Leone, Darfur, Rwanda, etc., it's pretty clear that the holocaust wasn't the end of unspeakable human depravity. Remind me some time to tell you some of the stories I've picked up in the past few months.