Don't Waste the Moral Force of the Nazi Experience...
Again and again--today only the latest--commentators arguing against usurpation of power by the Obama administration hammer on comparisons with Nazism. National Socialism in Germany was defined by deliberate, planned, systematic slaughter of millions as official state policy. The Obama Administration's usurpation of power could be compared as easily to Venezuela under Chevez, Spain under Franco, Greece under the "generals," and on and on. To reach immediately for the Nazi comparison as supposedly unfailingly convincing only weakens and weakens the great moral force of our understanding of that example. It does not serve the cause of liberty.
Hitler did not start by killing people. Several scandals recently alarm one to the fact that though this President and administration are not setting their sites per say on military world domination, they are waging a kind of war on their own citizens. Does the violence have to be explicit? Does the threat IRS intimidation and other agency intimidation not qualify as force or life destruction of a kind?
They believe they can, through influencing the UN, in turn get the desired result throughout the world without a Declaration of War, how long until intimidation is a global force?
Look at Benghazi. Look at drone strikes on american citizens abroad. Someone was quite willing to trade peoples' lives for the political goals of the O Administration.
I am not unable to perceive the trends or the principles at work. The direction of government in our country is toward fascism, and the trend, if carried far enough, will produce all the horrors of totalitarianism. Your examples of the trend are excellent, as usual.
And, yes, one of best ways to warn of the danger is to demonstrate that what we see, today, exemplifies a principle and, carried far enough, that principle will have its inevitable results: a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mao, a Pol Pot. I agree. Our government today is at least as much about the initiation of force as the defense of our rights. But Ayn Rand achieved her unprecedented credibility (with those who listened) by always stating the precise truth. It often appeared to be an exaggeration, at the time, but eventually we saw the truth. And so, probably at Ayn Rand's urging, Peikoff entitled his book "The Ominous Parallels"--a very exact statement.
When someone writes that "Obama is a 21st Century Hitler," that is simply false, obviously, on the face of it. President Obama is a man who has accepted all the modern premises of collectivism and, true to the American pattern, elects the fascist model--with a strong pragmatic twist. He is not a Hitler. And yet, we keep crying out, "Nazis! Hitler!" and, because it so obviously is not true, we are back to the old tale of the boy who cried wolf. When that truly terrible wolf appears, I would like someone to hear my cry...
To be specific, Benghazi is an example of appeasement at the expense of American lives. President Carter carried out the most shocking appeasement in the history of diplomacy, when a country took our diplomats hostage, an open and shut cause for war for more than 2500 years, and he...essentially did nothing but talk. That dwarfs Benghazi.
Trades people's lives for the political goals of administration? That makes Mr. Obama the shadow of Hitler? What about FDR and Pearl Harbor? Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin? Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs?
Let us be to our ideological opponents that most feared and hated of all enemies--the one who offers no "handle" for being dismissed. The one who is maddeningly rational, factual, measured--so that the opponent is forced at last, in the absence of all possibilities for misdirection, to answer our arguments.
Churchill warned that Hitler or conies were bound to start a war of aggression. In Oct of 1930, most people found this to be crazy, he was a quack. In '36, he warned, Germany was arming on a scale unheard of before, critics derided him as a war monger.
Churchill said those who do not think of their future are unworthy of their ancestors. What could happen, think about it so it won't happen!
Ultimately, has the Obama administration, under the president's direction gone farther down the path then FDR, Johnson, Nixon, Kennedy? One simple measure would be government spending as a percentage of the economy. in this case, short of war, Obama has gone very far down that road. Intrusiveness and spying-he has gone farther. Regulatory reach is larger under Obama than any of the past presidents. The size of the deficit , including unfunded liabilities, is much larger than any other US president. When you combine that with a committed marxist, I think we are at the tipping point. So while I do not agree with DK's exact points, I think his fear is not unfounded.
John Locke
I see an apt parallel and it is not a weak one