A teacher in Colorado has been suspended for comments made in class. He is a geography teacher, in geography class, and he harangued his class on the evils of the current administration, calling George W. Bush Hitler. I'm not sure what that has to do with geography, but I'm glad he's not a history teacher.
It happens constantly, especially lately, someone calls Bush Hitler, says someone else is a Nazi, likens something to a concentration camp, calls the people killed in the Twin Towers "Little Eichmans". All these descriptions are incorrect, all of them used for the shock value alone, all of it horrid propaganda to try to guilt people in to agreeing with a view that is questionable in it's logic and so must resort to name calling and labeling to get a misguided point across. And they get away with it. How is that? It's because people have a myopic view of themselves and a twisted view of history. How else can it be? If you think you are put upon, censored, and discriminated against, it follows that you would make that analogy. But are those feelings valid? Are you just being required to face the natural debate of a free society? (I have a censorship soapbox speech for another day.)
Hitler and the Nazi's were a singular evil, they are not "like" much of anyone else. They used German industry, know how and 400 years of building anti-semitism to produce a war machine that systematically slaughtered millions. Nazis were voted into power and then took over in a coup. They outlawed being a Jew, a gypsy, a homosexual, senile, insane, retarded and deformed people were also outcast. The Nazis deliberately and with great precision rounded up all the "undesirables" and shipped them off to work camps, and if they couldn't work, to death camps. The goal of the Third Reich was to dominate the entire world and make everyone else a slave to the Aryan race.
That isn't George Bush or the Republicans. You may not agree with the policies of this administration, you may not like what they do or say, but you can not begin to honestly compare the two. To do so is to so greatly inflate your feelings about an issue so as to have committed a war crime yourself. By comparing the two and calling them the same you have cheapened the truth of the holocaust as to render it a little thing. It was not a little thing. 12 million people were ripped from their homes, divested of all they owned and murdered. That number is only the dead, remember that it does not include the millions upon millions who survived the death camps, the marches, the slave labor, or the ones who hid, living as fugitives, in the hopes of surviving hell on earth.
There are no medical experiments, no vivisections, no tortures for the joy of torturing a Jew, homosexual or Christian caught hiding Jews. None of that is going on.
To play the Nazi card you have to know what the Nazis did, actually did, even then, you had better be careful. Robert Mugabe is such a one. Look him up. Just because you feel something strongly doesn't make it so. Calling a person a Nazi is an insult that is nearly unforgivable. Don't do it.
