Left normalizes Hitler

The Los Angeles Times ran a piece that is demonstrated just what is wrong with today's ramped up rhetoric. The headline read, "Call immigrant detention centers what they really are: concentration camps."

No. That is a lie. The centers are nothing like concentration camps. No one is tattooed with a number. No one is worked to death. No one is sent to gas chambers. There are no mass cremations in fact there are no cremations at all.

Running that piece was irresponsible because it downplays the evil that Hitler and his nation did.

The American left has demoted Hitler. He no longer is a monster who killed 12 million people in concentration camps. He no longer is an anti-Semitic demagogue who wiped out two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe. He no longer is a savage dictator who invaded every adjacent nation in an attempt to rule the world.

By calling the last four Republican presidential nominees Hitler, Democrats have turned Hitler into someone we merely disagreed with.

Any and every disagreement the party has with President Trump results in someone alluding to Hitler.

She wrote, "Last week, a flurry of media personalities and 2020 Democratic presidential candidates set about likening President Trump to Adolf Hitler on the basis of misattributed statements Trump has made about members of a criminal gang. In the process, each has participated in the demonizing of the very person they wrongly accuse of dehumanizing immigrants."

Bailey backed this up with quotes from Beto O'Rourke and other Democrat presidential candidates.

She wrote, "People who make comparisons between modern day politicians and Hitler have one thing in common: They usually have very little understanding of the complex period of history about which they make their sweeping generalizations. In the darkest irony, they use a period marked by the mobilization of incredible hatred to launch hatred at those with whom they disagree.

"These attacks work because public knowledge of the era and its lessons is waning. As discovered in a study conducted in February 2018 at the behest of The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, 45% of U.S. adults and 49% of millennials are unable to name any of the 40,000 camps and ghettos used during the Holocaust. About 31% of adults and 41% of millennials believed that Hitler killed fewer than 2 million Jews, less than one third of the actual death toll."

Bailey made the point then that I make now, "Comparing a political opponent to Hitler is vile, vulgar, and lazy. It minimizes a horrific history and reduces the evil mastermind of a massive genocide against 11 million people to being simply bad while it conflates a human with no such tendencies or predilections with an amoral architect of genocide. Additionally, it demonstrates a lack of couthness and restraint in the accuser, who proves himself willing to sacrifice sound facts for a powerful sound bite."

It is the memory of 6 million Jews who were rounded up and killed in actual, factual concentration camps.

The American soldiers who liberated the few starving survivors of the Holocaust told the world, never again.

But we forgot. And I fear the real next Hitler will use our ignorance against us.

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll corrected me. He reported, "The last four? Virtually every Republican nominee has been dubbed Hitler since Thomas Dewey in 1948, by no less than Harry Truman himself."

I imagined Democrats were kinder to Bob Dole, who just about gave up his right arm fighting Hitler.

Comparing a political opponent to Hitler is vile, vulgar, and lazy.

It is also libel or at least slander.
In 1964 the Warren Court took the occasion of the New York Times v. Sullivan case to assert that government officials cannot sue for libel or slander (without a showing of “actual malice,” which is taken as being essentially an impossible hurdle). But there are things in Heaven and earth which are not dreamt of in the Warren Court’s philosophy:

The wire services have homogenized journalism ideologically. Considering that, according to Adam Smith, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” - and that the AP “wire” is a virtual meeting of major journalism - a “conspiracy against the public” among journalists was inevitable. Inevitably, such a conspiracy would entail self-serving propaganda by journalists, and that is precisely what is seen.

Journalism conspires to propagandize to the effect that “journalism is objective.” Now, journalists know and follow the commercial rule that “if it bleeds, it leads”- so journalists know that journalism is negative. Which means that their claim that journalism is objective is tantamount to a claim that “negativity is objectivity.” And you show me someone who says that, and I’ll show you a cynic. Objectivity is a laudable goal - but it is not a state of being.

Journalism is cynical about society, but (since government legitimately exists, per Thomas Paine, only to address imperfections in society) inevitably naive about government. This is, IMHO, the defining characteristic of socialism. The Democrat Party has no principle inconsistent with assiduously going along and getting along with journalism. Consequently “liberal" politicians are never libeled, and conservative officials routinely are (since Mr. Sullivan was a southern Democrat, that issue would not have come up in the Sullivan case).

The right to compensation for libel was recognized in the founding era, and the First Amendment does not touch it (“the” freedom of the press having existed with limitations for libel and pornography before the Constitution). Redress for libel is therefore a Ninth Amendment right. Even government officials have a right to their earned reputation, and so do their adherents - whose reputation is affected when their champion’s reputation is.

The bottom line is that the Sullivan ruling was ill-considered as a general precedent (tho it may have been correct in the particular case).

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