Posted on 09/13/2012 5:39:56 AM PDT by SJackson
Maybe comparing Republicans to Nazis started with the 1964 Goldwater/Johnson presidential race.
Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater accepted an invitation to visit an American military installation located in Bavaria, Germany. On “CBS Evening News” hosted by Walter Cronkite, correspondent Daniel Schorr said: “It is now clear that Sen. Goldwater’s interview with Der Spiegel, with its hard line appealing to right-wing elements in Germany, was only the start of a move to link up with his opposite numbers in Germany.” The reaction shot — when the cameras returned to Cronkite — showed the “most trusted man in America” gravely shaking his head.
Or maybe it began when Goldwater accepted the Republican nomination, and Democratic California Gov. Pat Brown said the “stench of fascism is in the air.”
Or maybe the Republicans-as-fascists narrative really jump-started during the 1968 presidential campaign. For commentary at the political conventions that year, ABC hired left-wing pundit Gore Vidal and matched him with conservative pundit William F. Buckley. If the network was looking for fireworks, they were not disappointed. Quarreling with Buckley over the impact of anti-Vietnam War dissidents, Gore called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Incensed, Buckley fired back: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
More recently, former Vice President Al Gore said: “(George W. Bush’s) executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations, from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. … And every day, they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the president.”
Entertainer and liberal activist Harry Belafonte, when asked whether the number and prominence of blacks in the Bush administration suggested a lack of racism, said, “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich.”
Then-NAACP Chairman Julian Bond pulled out the Nazi card in 2004 while criticizing congressional Republicans and the White House: “They preach racial equality but practice racial division. … Their idea of equal rights is the American flag and Confederate swastika flying side by side.”
Bond later clarified whom he meant by “they.” Speaking at historically black Fayetteville State University in North Carolina in 2006, Bond said, “The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side.”
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who dared to rein in excessive public employee compensation packages, received the full Nazi treatment.
The hard-left blog Libcom.org wrote: “Scott Walker is a fascist, perhaps not in the classical sense since he doesn’t operate in the streets, but a fascist nonetheless. … He is a fascist, for his program takes immediate and direct aim at (a sector of) the working class …”
This brings us to the recently concluded Republican National Convention. California Democratic Party Chairman John Burton offered this analysis: “(Republicans) lie, and they don’t care if people think they lie. As long as you lie, (Nazi propaganda minister) Joseph Goebbels — the big lie — you keep repeating it.”
In dismissing Republicans’ concern over the possibility of voter fraud, Pat Lehman, a leading member of the Kansas delegation, told The Wichita Eagle: “It’s like Hitler said, if you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big lie, and if you tell it often enough and say it in a loud enough voice, some people are going to believe you.”
Next up, we have the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party. Dick Harpootlian compared the state’s Republican governor to Hitler’s mistress. When told that the Republicans were holding a competing press conference at a NASCAR Hall of Fame basement studio, Harpootlian told the South Carolina delegation: “(Gov. Nikki Haley) was down in the bunker, a la Eva Braun.”
How casually Democrats make Hitler-Nazi-fascist references to demean their political opponents is astonishing. By calling political opponents “fascists” because of policy disagreements, Democrats trivialize a regime responsible for exterminating 6 million Jews in a war that resulted in the deaths of over 50 million people.
Where does this cavalier Nazi talk take us?
In 1994, schoolteachers in Oakland, Calif., took 70 mostly black high school students to see “Schindler’s List.” Some of the kids began laughing during a scene where a Jewish woman was mercilessly killed. In a Los Angeles Times opinion piece called “Why Would Anyone Laugh at ‘Schindler’s List’?” a theater employee wrote: “A three-hour-plus film in black and white about the Holocaust may not be everyone’s choice, but those who decide to view it must be prepared and understand. I find it hard to believe kids today are so desensitized to violence that when they see the strange convulsions of someone who’s been shot, their first instinct is to laugh. If one of their friends was gunned down on the way home, would they stand there and burst into laughter at the way he/she died?”
This Oakland students/”Schindler’s List” disconnect is aided and abetted by leftists like Gore, Bond and Burton who shout words like “Nazi” or “fascist” or “Hitler” at conservatives.
And, no, it appears they have no shame.
We really need to stop using the German acronym for the National Socialist German Worker Party...aka ... NAZI...and call a National Socialist a National Socialist
Nazis also stated that they believed in private property and private business while communists belived in common ownership of the means of production. In practice the government completely controlled both. Again it is stated difference that never existed in reality.
When the stated differences never actually existed except in arguements between dedicated ideologues can you really call them differences never mind distinctions?
“S o we should just call them Commies and be prepared to counter the inevitable McCarthyism whine. Indeed,we should rehabilitate the name of Joe McCarthy who was a true patriot.”
You are correct!
Nazis went for control without ownership. Communists wanted both control and ownership. The difference between them amounts to a Nat’s backside.
That is hardly true. It is more like the colonial powers from which they grew. Think of the Napoleonic, British, and Russian empires.
Further while the communist collective was more successful they did maintain national borders of their member states. In effect it's a stated difference that never existed in reality. In practice they were exactly the same.
You are confusing the international with the Russians, which they regard as an aberration of communism.
Nazis also stated that they believed in private property and private business while communists belived in common ownership of the means of production.
They weren't running around the countryside rounding up farmers and assigning them to government housing and collective farms. There was no German analogue to the Kulaks.
When the stated differences never actually existed except in arguements between dedicated ideologues can you really call them differences never mind distinctions?
Tautological hand-wave.
Trying to link Barry Goldwater, of all people, to Nazism merely demonstrates just how ignorant or deliberately deceptive these MSM leftists were at the time (and still are). There is no way the Nazis or neo-Nazis could have had any common ground with him.
Barry Goldwater had a Jewish father. According to Nazi doctrine, Goldwater was as much a target for extermination as any Jew in the world they might have contact with. If Goldwater had been unfortunate enough to have been in Europe in the late 1930s, chances are he would not have survived the Nazi Holocaust.
The same thing happened when Reagan went to Bitburg.
The Nazis, they invaded Poland.
Nelson Rockefeller, who ran second in the primaries and came to the Cow Palace convention with insufficient delegates to stop Goldwater, was offered the consolation prize of a minority statement on the Party platform, by the Platform Committee. They gave Rockefeller a primo time slot, 8 pm CDT iirc (this is all related by Theodore White in The Making of the President 1964), and Rockefeller proceeded to lambaste the majority delegates up and down, causing a wave of boos and catcalls to rise from the AuH2O army of delegates. Then Rocky really went after them and called them "fascists" and "Nazis", with all of America watching. Talk about negative advance -- Rockefeller pretty much handed the election to LBJ right there, by using so much of his prestige to smear Goldwater because Goldwater's Rove, F. Clifton White (we need him today!) would not play nice with Rockefeller and offer him the VP slot or a dozen cabinet seats or anything like that. Cliff White played with Rockefeller like the RiNO's and Me-Too'ers had always played with the Mugwumps, the Bull Moosers, and the Bob Taft "Main Street" Republicans -- so Rockefeller called them all Nazis on national TV.
Bump. Both Bill Buckley (without Venona) and Ann Coulter (with Venona available) have had a go -- the MSM refuse to budge, and they abuse McCarthy and the conservative du jour every day, by resurrecting their old anti-McCarthy, pro-Communist smear.
That's a little different, though equally stupid on the part of the MSM. I specifically remember, watching the proceedings from Bitburg on TV, that Reagan deliberately changed the direction of his walk so that his rear end faced the Nazi-era graves.
We also know who's crackling in Hell and ready with his new book, Flaming Faggot: Crisper Than Pork Rinds.
The definitive McCarthy opus to which Coulter gave credit is “Blacklisted by History” by M. Stanton Evans. A tour de force.
The definitive McCarthy opus to which Coulter gave credit is “Blacklisted by History” by M. Stanton Evans. A tour de force.
Or maybe the Republicans-as-fascists narrative really jump-started during the 1968 presidential campaign. For commentary at the political conventions that year, ABC hired left-wing pundit Gore Vidal and matched him with conservative pundit William F. Buckley. If the network was looking for fireworks, they were not disappointed. Quarreling with Buckley over the impact of anti-Vietnam War dissidents, Gore called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Incensed, Buckley fired back: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
Calling Buckley a Nazi, that’s one thing. But calling Vidal a queer, now that’s a personal attack./sarc
I almost wished he did sock him. Buckley was famously even-tempered and able to beat people with facts and reasoning, but it looks like Vidal crossed a line.
.....
Entertainer and liberal activist Harry Belafonte, when asked whether the number and prominence of blacks in the Bush administration suggested a lack of racism, said, “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich.”
Belafonte was an out and out communist, card-carrying member, I believe. And completely ignorant of history.
Or maybe the Republicans-as-fascists narrative really jump-started during the 1968 presidential campaign. For commentary at the political conventions that year, ABC hired left-wing pundit Gore Vidal and matched him with conservative pundit William F. Buckley. If the network was looking for fireworks, they were not disappointed. Quarreling with Buckley over the impact of anti-Vietnam War dissidents, Gore called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi.” Incensed, Buckley fired back: “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi, or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.”
Calling Buckley a Nazi, that’s one thing. But calling Vidal a queer, now that’s a personal attack./sarc
I almost wished he did sock him. Buckley was famously even-tempered and able to beat people with facts and reasoning, but it looks like Vidal crossed a line.
.....
Entertainer and liberal activist Harry Belafonte, when asked whether the number and prominence of blacks in the Bush administration suggested a lack of racism, said, “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich.”
Belafonte was an out and out communist, card-carrying member, I believe. And completely ignorant of history.
It is factually true or did you miss the Nazi invasions? Do you claim that Russia didn't do exactly the same thing? We do not need to compare them to their precursors to see exactly what they did. They attempted to spread their ideology by force. Of course a reasonable person knows that their ideology was simply a rationale for them to impose tyranny over the masses, but that is beside the point.
You are confusing the international with the Russians, which they regard as an aberration of communism.
Of course they do...they say the same thing of every communist failure but the facts have a way of intruding upon their utopian ideals. The USSR was "THE" communist ideal until the truth started to leak out.
They weren't running around the countryside rounding up farmers and assigning them to government housing and collective farms. There was no German analogue to the Kulaks.
Ignoring the jewish farmers that were rounded up and assigned to "government housing" I assume? I guess you don't consider nazi concentration camps being similar to russians starving their peasents?
Tautological hand-wave.
Please. The differences you put forward were never in practice. They are theoretical differences according to the ideologues of said political systems. Are you suggesting that because Nazis and Communists claim that there are differences in their respective systems, that these differences don't have to actually exist in practice for them to be considered actuall differences?
I remember the 1964 election, and I also remember that Goldwater and his running mate, Bill Miller, were being compared to nazis.
You are confusing the international with the Russians, which they regard as an aberration of communism.
Of course they do...they say the same thing of every communist failure but the facts have a way of intruding upon their utopian ideals. The USSR was "THE" communist ideal until the truth started to leak out.
You are mixing "theys" again.
What you say may be true of the American media, but not in the international. It was known within three to five years that Russia had failed the ideal. It was Gramsci's objective to preclude a repeat.
Ignoring the jewish farmers that were rounded up and assigned to "government housing" I assume?
I had family who died in those camps, asshole. This only proves how low you'll stoop to "win" a debate. Socializing all agricultural land to control the nation's food supply and starve all opposition is different than rounding up a particular group for their religion or race. One is a matter of ideology. The other purely for purposes of extermination, the true motives for which you don't have a clue unless you are hip to Sabbateans. Deal with it.
I guess you don't consider nazi concentration camps being similar to russians starving their peasents?
No, I don't. Just because they were both murderous and tyrannical does not make them the same, principally because the ideological justifications are radically at odds. German lands were not collectivized. It's a major difference between fascism and communism. Deal with it.
Please. The differences you put forward were never in practice.
So after discounting the difference between collectivizing and murdering 22 million peasants because they were landowners (regardless of religion) and rounding up largely urban Jews pretending that Jewish farmers were somehow numerous when socializing land ownership was never a major element of German policy, you paper over the difference.
That's what I mean by hand wave. It's dishonest and despicable. It shows you'll stoop to anything to what you believe is your advantage, making you no better than the people you supposedly hate. I won't bother with you further.
It’s actually worse than what Elder says.
Nazism is far left ideological identity politics. People like Harpootlian, Al Gore, Cronkite, and their ilk should do some homework and find out what the NSDAP really stood for.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.