Why Ben Carson's Nazi Analogies Matter

"Like many other political autodidacts, Ben Carson has an odd obsession with Nazi Germany.

On several occasions, the pediatric-neurosurgeon-turned-Republican-presidential-candidate has compared the United States to the Third Reich. Mr. Carson has warned that a Hitler-like figure could rise in America. To understand what is happening in the Obama era, he recommended that people read “Mein Kampf.” And he won’t let go of the myth that the Holocaust would have been “greatly diminished” if Jews in Nazi Germany had been allowed to possess guns.

To declare the United States to be “very much like Nazi Germany” is a special kind of libel, yet Mr. Carson is clearly drawn to it. Part of the explanation may be that people who want to impress sometimes invoke imbecilic historical analogies, with the default one often being Nazi Germany. Some part of the answer has to do with his staggering ignorance when it comes to the unique malevolence of Hitler’s Germany."......

The German Revolution, which began in the year 1933, also went through a relatively humane phase; however, June 30, 1934 was a flaming warning signal, which was followed by a steep and ineluctable plunge, like the kind described in Greek tragedy, into the hell of totalitarian left-wing tyranny. As with the French Revolution, the way had been paved in this direction from the beginning. The same thing is true of Russia. Just as in France it was the writings of the Encyclopedists, Morelly, Rousseau, Diderot, and Sade, and in Germanic countries, the writings of Haeckel, Chamberlain, and Rosenberg as well as those of Hitler and Goebbels, so in Russia it was the writings of Marx, Tschernyschewsky, Plechanow and Lenin which determined subsequent political development.

Ideas matter... Ann Coulter wrote about the French Revolution some time back and I remember feeling she was the first person to 'get it' on a real level - the level where each individual makes a choice to hand over their control to a mob.

Yeah, I know. I was just saying that the French Revolutionaries didn’t take away guns or weapons. In fact, that’s the only totalitarian/anarchistic government which actually averted the gun-grabbing.

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