The argumentum ad Hitlerum, again.

America and Weimar, again

I posted this comment at Truthout.

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Critically absent from Derber and Magrass’s "Weimar Syndrome" is the key fact that more than half the German population supported parties that opposed the very existence of the Weimar Republic, the Communists on one side and the Nazis and several other radical parties on the other.

Too, the military and government bureaucracies, including the judiciary, were staffed and run by an old right that had remained loyal to the Kaiser and loathed the republic from its birth or, at best, gave it only grudging obedience.

There is no Nazi party in America, nor any other party of the radical right committed frankly and openly to the destruction of the republic and to dictatorship in principle.

There is a Communist Party, but it is wholly insignificant; nobody but the fringiest types on the furthest left frankly opposes the republic, and they are also wholly insignificant.

Nobody is out to scuttle the American republic.

Too, in the age of Weimar, in Europe and all over the Occident, both anti-Semitism and racism were established features of the common outlook and had long played an important role in the law and in politics.

The Nazis invented neither, though they made far more of anti-Semitism than anyone in the West had for more than a century and they eventually pushed it all the way to industrial genocide.

In America, today, neither anti-Semitism nor racism is even minimally socially acceptable, let alone a norm integral to nearly everybody’s politics or a frank component of anybody’s political program.

Last, the alleged analogy between the false belief (or vain hope) of some of the German corporate elite that they could control Hitler and the belief of the relevant US corporate leadership – the Koch brothers, for example – that they can control their own creation, the tea-baggers, is transparently absurd.

Far too much so to do the work Derber and Magrass want it to, making plausible a tea-bag or Republican threat to our republic analogous to what the Nazis threatened, and eventually actually did, to Weimar.

The examples of the fascists of Italy, the Nazis of Germany, and the not really fascist dictatorships of Spain and Portugal have never had much relevance to American politics.

How much longer will it be before the professional left gives up this increasingly silly line of propaganda?

Oh, some liberals remember Reagan’s tenure nostalgically? Really? Who?

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Read the comments on the post at Truthout.

Does Truthout count as a liberal site or a further left site?

Are the authors of the comments liberals or people of the further left?

Crackpots and cranks, either way.

Update, 11082012 at 0821 EST.

The above comment is nowhere to be found at Truthout.

Imagine that.