“It’s time for a history lesson on the Nazis”, writes Leonard Pitts Jr., of the Miami Herald.  (Indeed, lack of knowledge of the past has been the primary characteristic of right wing loud mouths for decades.)

“It’s important to remember that the Nazis are passing out of living memory; U.S. soldiers of that era are said to be dying at the rate of 1,200 a day. Which makes it too easy, I think, for a nation of notorious historical illiteracy to remake the Nazis as some kind of all-purpose boogeymen for slandering political enemies and scoring cheap rhetorical points.

So I thought it would be good to make you sick, i.e., to spend a few minutes reminding some and teaching others what you invoke when you invoke the Nazi regime.

For the record, then: It was Nazis who shoved sand down a boy’s throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window and competed to see how many of those “little Jews” could be caught on a bayonet, who injected a cement-like fluid into women’s uteruses to see what would happen, who stomped a pregnant woman to death, who once snatched a woman’s baby from her arms and, in the words of an eyewitness, “tore him as one would tear a rag.”

That’s who the Nazis were, ladies and gentlemen — those obscenities plus six million more. They were the triumph of ideology over reason and even over humanity, the demonization of racial, religious and political difference, the objectification of the vulnerable other. And the authors of a mass murder that staggers imagination, still.

You would think, then, that where they are invoked to draw a parallel or make a point, it would be done with a respect for the incalculable evil the Nazis represent. You would think people would tread carefully, not because of the potential insult to a given politician (they are big boys and girls) but because to do otherwise profanes the profound and renders trivial that which ought to be held sacred by anyone who regards himself as a truly human being.

But in modern America, unfortunately, rhetoric often starts over the top and goes up from there. So fine, George W. Bush is “a smirking chimp.” Fine, Barack Obama is “a Chicago thug.” We have a Constitution, after all, and it says we can say whatever we want. It doesn’t say it has to be intelligent.

And yes, you are even protected if you liken Obama or Bush to Hitler. Yet every time I hear that, it makes me cringe for what it says about our collective propensity for historical amnesia and our retarded capacity for reverence. Once upon a lifetime ago, six million people with DNA, names and faces just like you and I, were butchered with gleeful sadism and mechanistic dispatch. Six million people.

You and I may no longer respect one another, but is it asking too much that we still respect them?”

see: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/73998.html

Thanks, Mr. Pitts!

“Those who cannot remember the past are destined to relive it”.  (George Santayana, the Life of Reason).