[annalex]

Well said:

Conservatism is not merely a philosophy which picks and chooses among issues that grow like weeds favoring some and opposing others on an ad hoc basis. Rather, conservatism is a coherent philosophy grounded in the rights of the individual, secured by a rule of law, and guaranteed by a Constitution.

All that the supra-national, marxist at roots, KGB by methods, Russian Federation lacks. You do, however, mischaracterize in the raminder of your post, the Russian Federation's law against homosexual propaganda to minors as homophobic; it is, of course a gross stretch to compare it to physical extermination of gays.

Whether Putin ideologically, and especially in the context of history, is closer to Hitler than to Jefferson is a good question, but I dislike the comparisons of everything we don't like to Hitler so much as to propose to avoid the Nazi slur.

[annalex]

raminder remainder.

[nathanbedford]

You raise an interesting objection, a common objection which is often heard that it is illegitimate to compare anyone to Hitler, or its first cousin, it is illegitimate to invoke comparisons to the Holocaust. I disagree.

Very often the charge of illegitimacy are raised when the man is not compared with Hitler, or the act is not actually compared to the Holocaust, but merely the principle behind the things criticized. This is itself an illegitimate form of argumentation, it distorts the meaning of the target and then knocks down the strawman.

The practice, even when accurately employed, carries a chilling effect against every impulse which undergirds our support of the First Amendment. That impulse should equally support the right of rich, unfettered expression as well as free expression. To place certain historical events or historical persons out of bounds is to practice a kind of censorship which is to be deplored. We see this today in the treatment of Martin Luther King and it has led us into the tyranny of Barack Obama.

Finally, it is not conventionally regarded to be illegitimate, or at least not nearly so, to equate a person or an event to Stalin or to the Soviet gulags. This is not a healthy or accurate view of history and it is inimical to the health of conservatism for us to accede to the practice. For a number of cultural, demographic, and historical reasons the left has gotten away with telling the world that fascism is much worse than communism. As a result, we have less resistance to emerging leftist tyrants like Barack Obama.

I say, let free expression range free and let inaccurate or hyperbolic statements fall of their own weight but let them be made.