No, William Shirer and Hitler have not really addressed current political issues, because (of course) both are dead.  And no, I’m most certainly not comparing Obama or anyone in his administration to Hitler.  But yes, they both did in the past offer advice about direct government attacks on the Catholic Church, and Obama would be wise to heed that advice.

Now that it’s available in sleek Kindle form, so that I no longer have to lug around a 1,200 page book, I’m finally reading William Shirer’s masterful The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.  As I just started reading it yesterday, I’ve only gotten as far as Hitler’s 1909-1913 sojourn in Vienna, the time during which he formulated his philosophies, both racial and political.  Vienna, the capital of a rapidly disintegrating polyglot nation that saw the Germanic minority holding political power over the Slavs, allowed Hitler to witness the rise and fall of several political movements, and to draw his own conclusions about what contributed to their success or failure.

Hitler was a man of unparalleled evil.  He was also an exceptionally astute observer of human nature and politics, who put his insights into the service of his evil agenda.  That the agenda was wrong does not mean that the insights lack validity.  One of the insights that Shirer points out would not have struck me so strongly had it not been for the events of the past week.  Georg Ritter von Schoenerer’s Pan-German Nationalist Party was one of the political movements that did not succeed during Hitler’s Vienna years, but that certainly gave him food for thought.  I’ll now cede the floor to quotations from Shirer and Hitler (at location 640 of 35703, emphasis mine):

The Pan-Germans at that time were engaged in a last-ditch struggle for German supremacy in the multinational empire.  And though Hitler thought that Schoenerer was a “profound thinker” and enthusiastically embraced his basic program of violent nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-socialism, union with Germany and opposition to the Hapsburgs and the Holy See, he quickly sized up the causes for the party’s failure:

This movement’s inadequate appreciation of the importance of the social problem cost it the truly militant mass of the people; its entry into Parliament took away its might impetus and burdened it with all the weaknesses peculiar to this institution; the struggle against the Catholic Church . . . robbed it of countless of the best elements that the nation can call its own.

Though Hitler was to forget it when he came to power in Germany, one of the lessons of his Vienna years which he stresses at great length in Mein Kampf is the futility of a political party’s trying to oppose the churches.  “Regardless of how much room for criticism there was in any religious denomination,” he says, in explaining why Schoenerer’s Los-vonRom (Away from Rome) movement was a tactical error, “a political party must never for a moment lose sight of the fact that in all previous historical experience a purely political party has never succeeded in producing a religious reformation.”

The Catholic Church has changed because it wanted to.  In the last 50 or 60 years, it has changed, at least at the grass-roots level, because Leftists have infiltrated it.  But the Catholic Church does not change when a political movement attacks it from the front, which is what the Leftists in America have suddenly decided to do.

Incidentally, I’m not the only one seeing that, without in any way calling today’s Leftist’s Nazis, all of us can learn by examining the mistakes of the past.

For reasons unclear to me, myriad conservative sites are hosting an advertisement for Alan Grayson, a Progressive’s Progressive. You might remember Grayson from his last go-round in Congress.  This is not a guy who’s shy about sharing his convictions.  During the health care debate, he gave a quick and easy summary of the Republican position:  “‘Don’t get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly.”  When called upon to apologize, he basically apologized for having been too mealy-mouthed in his criticisms of Republicans: “I apologize to the dead and their families that we haven’t voted sooner to end this holocaust in America.”

Maybe the above quote explains why, when I think of Grayson, I’ve got the Holocaust on my mind.  (Grayson, by the way, is Jewish.)  How else to explain my reaction every single time I see this ad:

It’s that shadow under the nose, I know it is.  But whenever I see his picture in that ad (not any of his other pictures, just the one above), I see this:

I’m not saying Grayson is Hitler.  Indeed, I would never say that, because I don’t think there is any comparison.  I do think he’s an angry man with awful political ideas, but that’s the end of it as far as I’m concerned.  Considering that I don’t harbor bad thoughts towards Grayson, and I’m sure his campaign doesn’t, it leaves me wondering why his campaign would choose an image that, with that shadowy upper lip, creates the visual suggestion that he is a bad guy.

Or, as I asked in my post title, is it just me?

Is Obama telling a true story or not?  I don’t know and with Obama’s credibility gap, it’s impossible to tell.  It doesn’t matter, though.  What does matter is that, by relaying this anecdote, Obama is keeping alive the Obama/Hitler analogy:

President Obama at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner last night, discussing false claims made about the health care reform bill, told a little anecdote.

“I was up at the G20 — just a little aside — I was up at the G20, and some of you saw those big flags and all the world leaders come in and Michelle and I are shaking hands with them,” the president said. “One of the leaders — I won’t mention who it was — he comes up to me. We take the picture, we go behind.

“He says, ‘Barack, explain to me this health care debate.’

“He says, ‘We don’t understand it. You’re trying to make sure everybody has health care and they’re putting a Hitler mustache on you — I don’t — that doesn’t make sense to me. Explain that to me.’”

You and I aren’t dumb.  We know Obama told this anecdote to a black group as a way to make it clear that, all he’s trying to do is help poor folk (read:  black folk) and he, a black man, is subject to the ultimate insult of being called Hitler.

Not that my blog has any impact on Obama and his acolytes, but let me try to set things straight for Obama and that “world leader.”  There is actually a legtimate reason why some (although by no means all, or even a critical mass) of ObamaCare opponents like ObamaCare to Nazi social policy and, therefore, liken Obama, the driving force behind ObamaCare, to Hitler, the driving force behind Naziism.  (And I’m NOT defending the use of the Obama/Hitler meme, I’m just explaining it.)  Although the historically ignorant keep trying to deny it, Naziism was a Leftism philosophy.  The party’s official name was the National Socialist Party.  Socialists socialize things:  they take whatever they can out of the private sector and put it into the government sector.  The more they take, the more control they have over their citizens.

Obama’s self-serving and vicious little anecdote aside, the ObamaCare issue is not about “mak[ing] sure everybody has health care.”  Putting aside the question of whether that’s even the government’s responsibility, there are actually lots of ways to make sure everybody has health care without giving the government more power.  Instead, there are myriad possible ways to expand health care that specifically result from giving the government less power.  You can create greater competition by allowing insurance to be sold across state lines, which would lower prices; you can decrease the thousands of regulations that hamper the sale of insurance and the practice of medicine; you can stop requiring insurer’s to sell premium insurance to everyone, whether they need or want it; you can put a cap on outrageous malpractice claims; you can take employers out of the equation so that individuals shop for health insurance just as they do for all other forms of insurance; and so on and so forth.

Alternative, to expand health care, you can do what Obama and his fellow socialists want and take over the medical system, making it a branch of the government. In that way, you can monitor how people work, what they eat, what they drink, how they exercise, perhaps how they procreate, whether babies deserve to be born, etc.  That’s rather extreme, but we know that, in even the most unextreme cases, rather like Santa doling out presents based on whether people have been naughty or nice, the government can start to dole out health care to those the government deems worthy — the young and productive.  The British have certainly gone this route.  While the average young or middle-aged Brit gets decent enough service for colds and appendix attacks, woe unto the Brit who reaches a hoary old age or gets a fatal disease.  If you’re salvageable, the care is adequate.  If you’re not, tough luck. That’s a slippery slope.

If you travel far enough down that slippery slope of government decisions about deserving sick people, you start getting to the Nazis.  No, Obama is not Hitler.  No, the Democrats are not Nazis.  But government health care opens the door to rationing on an extreme scale, with ever more categories of people classes as undeserving of government beneficence and, eventually, undeserving of life itself.  (My great uncle went that way:  A manic depressive one day; a Nazi created corpse the next.)  And once a government starts deciding that people are undeserving of life for health reasons (they’re a burden, not a benefit, to the state), government has a nasty habit of deciding that people are undeserving of life for other reasons, such as ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, etc.

Americans are a freedom loving people.  While Ken Burns may think that the only good idea ever to come out of America is the National Park system (this is true, ’cause his new show is named The National Parks : America’s Best Idea), I’d like to go out on a limb here and suggest that America’s best idea is limited government, with its emphasis an individual freedom and responsiblity.  History has shown, over and over, that unlimited government is a slippery slope, and whether one dresses Obama up as Clement Atlee, or Harold Wilson, or Mao, or Hitler (the most recognizable one of the bunch), the point is the same — like them, and possibly with the best intentions in the world, Obama wants to limit Americans’ freedoms by making every fact of American life subject to government mandate.

When Obama, speaking to a black audience, uses a “world leader” as his ventriloquist’s dummy to imply that conservatives are calling him Hitler because he’s a black man who wants to improve poor/black people’s lives, he is being dishonest or disingenuous.  The relatively small number of protesters who have made the Hitler analogy, while they definitely made a PR mistake, used the analogy to drive home a point about the ultimate dangers that can arise when we let government grow too big, and they’ve used the most memorable and recognizable symbol around to make that point.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

While we were having lunch today, my dear friend Don Quixote asked “Do you think Barack Obama is evil?”

I hedged.  “That’s an interesting question.  Why do you ask?”

“I’m getting the feeling,” he answered, “that conservatives are starting to define Obama as being evil.  At least, that’s the impression I get from the emails my father sends me.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m not comfortable with the word evil.  However, if you define evil as someone who has a personality disorder, who is a malignant narcissist, or even a sociopath, then I guess I would say he’s evil.  However, to me, evil is a very fraught word, with a lot of . . . um . . . theological connotations.”

DQ picked up from there and said he thought the word “evil” was being overused and devalued.  “For one thing,” he said, “contrary to the grinning Hollywood maniac, the type who delights in his own malevolence, most evil people in real life are driven by good intentions.  They think they’re doing the right thing.”

“Careful,” I said.  “What you’re saying sounds a lot like moral relativity.”

“No,” he replied.  “I’m not excusing what they’re doing by saying that one man’s evil is another man’s good.  Their acts are still evil.  But their motives may be ordinary or even, in their own minds, good.”

You can tell, can’t you, why I love having lunch with DQ?  There is no one else with whom I can have deep philosophical questions about the nature of good and evil.

Even when lunch ended, my thoughts about evil kept going and going.  (Indeed, I warned DQ that I’d almost certainly write a post on the subject.)

The big question, of course, is “what is evil?”  Go check out the word in the dictionary and you get what amount to a series of synonyms.  Evil is immoral, wrong, bad, wicked, etc.  All true, but that really doesn’t take you anywhere.  When I think about evil, I have two mental definitions.  The first is a theological one, where evil represents the absence of God’s goodness or justice.  Simplistically, evil is the anti-God.  In that sense, I’ve never imagined the Devil as some personified being, with or without a tail and horns.  Instead, evil is the absence of everything that is moral as defined by the Judeo-Christian tradition.  But that’s still an abstract.  What is evil in practice?

And now I get to my second definition.  I think evil is the furthest end of the scale of “bad.”  If you imagine a line with neutral acts at one end, and the worst kind of acts at the other end, that furthest end would bear the label evil.  That’s why not all war time leaders are evil, but Hitler is.

War is a human condition (whether the peaceniks like it or not).  During war, people, even ordinary, normally good people, do bad acts.  When war ends, most people resume their normal lives, and put behind them the barbarity, the cruelty, that war brings out.  I come by this belief honestly.  Although she spent four years suffering terribly in Japanese concentration camps in Java, my mother never bore a grudge against the Japanese.  “It was war,” she said.  “Bad things happened.  Even though they were cruel to us, and didn’t care if we lived or died, they weren’t committing genocide against us, the way the Germans did.”

And my mother is absolutely right.  Hitler expanded to realms hitherto unknown the scope of ordinary wartime cruelty and death dealing.  Under his aegis, and in response to his desires and imagination, a nation embarked on a concerted, mechanized killing spree the likes of which had never before been seen.  The scope of his enterprise was so large that it no longer could possibly fall within DQ’s theory that many evil people actually think they’re acting appropriately or for the best, or under my Mom’s theory that war is always Hell.  Hitler and his minions deviated so far from the scale of human behavior — even human behavior in the worst of times — that they clearly qualified as “evil.”

The same holds true for Stalin and Mao.  Their defenders can argue that they were simply doing what was necessary to advance their political ideologies, hold their countries together, bring their citizens into the future (or, at minimum, into the present), update their economies, or whatever other apologetics these followers’ fertile minds can devise.  But none of that excuses the scope what Stalin and Mao did.  As Dennis Prager explains, we in the West may be forgiving because they visited their excesses on their own people, but the fact remains that they committed their abuses on an unimaginable scale.  Best guesses for Russian deaths under Stalin are about 20-30 million; for Mao, up to 70 million.  No good intentions can explain away that road to Hell.  That is evil.

Evil can also exist with smaller numbers, but heinous acts that are outside the pale of even the worst kind of behavior humans ordinarily commit.  Although the major papers gave it scant coverage, decent people were aware of the unbearable acts of cruelty that four men and one woman committed in connection with the murders of Hugh Christopher Newsom, age 23, and Channon Gail Christian, age 21:

While Channon was forced to watch, her boyfriend was raped prison style and then his penis was cut off. He was later driven to nearby railroad tracks where he was shot and set afire. But Channon’s hell was just beginning. She was beaten; gang raped repeatedly in many ways, had one of her breasts cut off and bleach poured down her throat to destroy DNA evidence-all while she was still alive. To add to Channon’s degradation the suspects took turns urinating on her. They too set her body afire, apparently inside the residence, but for some reason left her body there-in five separate trash bags.

That may not be 70, 20 or 6 million dead, but that is two people dead in a way that is an utter repudiation of all humanity.  Heck, even animals are more humane when they kill.  Although the murders of Newsom and Christian were small in number, in scope they established the actors as irredeemably, absolutely evil.  Those four people (and the word people has to be used lightly in connection with those hideous life forms) broke even the most tenuous bonds they might have had with basic civilization.

With those thoughts in mind — with a definition of evil as the committing of ordinary bad acts on a scale that should be unimaginable (i.e., the stuff only of nightmares) — I cannot say that Obama is evil.  I can apply all sorts of negative descriptions to him (arrogant, ill-informed, thoughtless, unkind, selfish, willful, morally obtuse), but he is not evil.

To say that he Obama is not evil does not mean that I don’t fear the acts he is committing.  I do not know whether he deliberately intends to provoke America’s downfall or whether his arrogance and commitment to his ideology prevent him from recognizing that his acts will lead to that downfall.  Nevertheless, whatever is currently motivating him, he has not left the pale of humanity.  Currently, he’s still just a politico with some damn bad ideas — but ideas that have defined Europe (which is quite a functional, and often a very civil, society) for decades.  Obama may in future commit acts that are genuinely evil because they go beyond the pale of ordinary humanity, but he has not yet done so.

This is an important point.  Conservatives devalue their arguments against Obama’s policy if they start throwing the word “evil” around.  While that may work with the converted, it frightens the vast middle.  Rather than looking like wise men (and women) with a better plan, conservatives start looking like wild-eyed street corner prophets.  We may be right, but no one will listen.

One of the most important things young lawyers learn (or, at least, should learn), is not to use ad hominem attacks against opposing counsel.  If your opposing counsel is indeed dishonest (which is usually the direction ad attacks take), you get much further with the Court if you provide proof of that dishonesty, and then let the Court draw the obvious conclusion itself.  Calling opposing counsel names denies the Court the necessary proof and merely makes you look bad.

In our discussions about Obama and the Democrats, we should make sure that we lead our readers to the truth.  Let them draw the ultimate negative conclusions.  As Socrates knew, a lesson is always learned better if the student has his own epiphany, rather than having a point, no matter how good it is, forced down his throat.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

My 9 year old son was looking at his book about fighter planes through history.  That triggered this question and answer session:

Son:  Why were the Germans so bad?

Me:  Humans have always fought.  It’s part of the human condition.  They’ve also always killed their enemies, including destroying whole villages, or cities, or even countries, and then enslaving and killing all the people.  The Germans, however, did this on a bigger scale than ever before.  Also, the Germans were the only people in history who decided in advance that whole groups of people needed to be exterminated, hunted these people down everywhere they could reach, and built huge factories to kill them.  They took evil to a level never seen before.

Son:  Why did the Germans do that?

Me:  That’s one of the big questions.  Up until the Nazis, the Germans had been considered the most civilized nation in the world.  They had the smartest scientists, their people composed the best music, they wrote poetry (Beethoven and Mozart came from Germanic countries), and their towns and cities were beautiful.  Yet they abandoned all that civilization to become the most evil people in the world.

Son (after a moment’s contemplation):  Was Hitler crazy that he did all this?

Me:  Another good question, but it wasn’t just Hitler.  Hitler’s ideas were evil, but he didn’t act alone.  After all, did the German and Austrian people lock him up in an insane asylum or did they make him leader of their countries?

Son:  They made him leader?  But why did they do that?

Me:  That’s another good….

Son:  Maybe he was like Obama.  He gave really good speeches, and the people who listened to him stopped thinking.

My son scares me sometimes.  He’s smarter than the whole Democratic party put together.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News

It’s gotten so that anything that is not pro-Obama is racist.  The latest attack is that it’s racist to call his positions “socialist” (and this despite his affiliation with the socialist New Party).  In the spirit of this attack, I hereby present a photo gallery of famous, black, self-admitted socialists:

Karl Marx

Friedrich Engels

Adolf Hitler

Benito Mussolini

Che Guevara

Chairman Mao

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Josef Stalin

Fidel Castro

Kim Jong Il

Okay, I was just kidding.  Not one of the really famous socialists is black.  So, though I’ve said it before, I’ll still say it again:  The only color that matters when it comes to Obama is RED.

UPDATE:  Neo-neocon picked up on the flip side of this absurd new racism charge.  She quotes verbatim from the Diuguid article making the charge that “socialism” is a racist term, and then adds what is obvious (I guess) only to those who actually like facts:

If Diuguid actually knew the meaning of the word “shame,” he might feel some himself—because three of the four civil rights leaders he mentioned were in fact Socialists or even Communists, and the fourth was intermittently sympathetic to the cause.

Please read the rest of neo’s post, since it explains that she’s not just playing around with racist name-calling when she makes that statement.

People have always recognized Napoleon’s over-weening ego.  Heck, we have a whole phrase for it, especially when applied to men of shorter stature:  “Napoleon complex.”  Still, Napoleon is generally admired for breaking down the last medieval walls on the European continent, both figuratively and literally.  Also, people with a bone to pick against British Imperialism like the way in which he kept the British on their toes for decades.  And considering that he lost to the imperialist power, he has the lovely smell about him of a victim of, yes, imperialism.  In France, he’s lauded for breaking down social barriers and bringing about universal education.  All of which leads to the “but….” sentence, explaining why we shouldn’t admire him too much.

It turns out that there is quite a big “but” to append to Napoleon’s accomplishments — and it may explain, beyond the shared idea of world domination, just why Hitler admired Napoleon so much.  More than 120 years before Hitler, Napoleon was big on mass torture and genocide, including gassing 100,000 people to death using sulfur smoke in ship holds.  As with the Nazis, Napoleon believed in collective punishment, public torture and execution, and the destruction of those races he deemed inferior (Caribbean blacks, and Turks).

It all makes for harrowing reading, and it reminds us, yet again, that a State has no conscience so that, once its leaders set a goal, there is nothing to stop their most extreme efforts to carry it out.  Conscience resides in individuals, and when they are subordinated to the state, anything goes, no matter how foul.

Hat tip:  Danny Lemieux

Hamas is an official terrorist organization. That minor detail, however, doesn’t seem to deter President Jimmy Carter, a man who has never met a sleazy Islamic or communist terrorist he doesn’t admire and trust:

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said in remarks to air on Sunday that his upcoming visit to the Middle East probably would include a meeting in Syria with leaders of the militant group Hamas.

“I’ve not confirmed our itinerary yet for the Syrian visit, but it’s likely that I will be meeting with the Hamas leaders,” Carter said, according to a transcript of his interview on ABC News’ “This Week.”

The Bush administration and close U.S. ally Israel oppose the meeting, which would take place during Carter’s nine-day trip to the Middle East that begins on Sunday.

U.S. policy has been to isolate Hamas, which seized control of Gaza last June, and to bolster pro-Western President Mahmoud Abbas, who rules the West Bank and is in U.S.-sponsored talks with the Israelis.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who sought Carter’s counsel on his own previous Arab-Israeli peacemaking efforts ahead of a U.S.-hosted Middle East conference in Annapolis last November, called Hamas a “terrorist organization” on Friday.

With regard to his travel plans, here is what Carter said:

“I think there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that, if Europe is ever going to find peace with justice concerning the relationship with their next-door neighbors, the Nazis, that Hitler will have to be included in the process,” said Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

“I think someone should be meeting with Hitler and the Nazi Party to see what we can do to encourage them to be cooperative,” he added.

Carter, who served one term as president from 1977 to 1981, would be one of the most prominent Americans to meet with the leader of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler.

“We’ll be meeting with the Nazis, the Italian Fascists, the Japanese Imperialists, the Vichy Government, and with the whole gamut of people who might have to play a crucial role in any future peace agreement that involves Europe and the World,” Carter said of his trip.

Oh, silly me. I was having a weird historical flashback. What Carter really said was:

“I think there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that, if Israel is ever going to find peace with justice concerning the relationship with their [sic -- proving that he's not only an idiot, but a grammatical cretin] next-door neighbors, the Palestinians, that Hamas will have to be included in the process,” said Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

“I think someone should be meeting with Hamas to see what we can do to encourage them to be cooperative,” he added.

Carter, who served one term as president from 1977 to 1981, would be one of the most prominent Americans to meet with the leader of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal.

“We’ll be meeting with the Syrians, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Saudi Arabians, and with the whole gamut of people who might have to play a crucial role in any future peace agreement that involves the Middle East,” Carter said of his trip.

You can see where I might suffer some temporal confusion when it comes to a bumbling idiot, who lacks anything approaching a moral compass and who doesn’t even have the common sense of an old-fashioned real politician (a la Kissinger), inserting himself into foreign policy.

Two more things: First, a reminder that not only was it morally wrong to talk to Hitler, it was also useless. Hitler simply used those talks as a way to buy time to arm himself. He then kept making incremental terror steps, broken by brazen apologies to the West, and each of which was followed by an even bigger step, all of which culminated in WWII itself. Hitler loved to talk because he had no interest in cooperation or peace. For him, talk was as much weapon in his arsenal as anything else.

Second, if you find Carter’s conduct utterly loathsome, remember that Obama will be even worse, because he’ll be in the White House when he meets with Ahmadinijad.