If we must yield to Godwin’s Law in hyperbolizing about the less lesser of weasel presidential candidates, let’s agree that Trump is not Hitler, neither by villany, political accumen, IQ, nor charisma. If Trump is a Nazi he’s a dead ringer for Nazi blowhard Hermann Göring, self-aggrandizing Lord Fontleroy of the Luftwaffe, minus the hair.
First they came for the Communists,?
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists,
?and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,?
and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for me?
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
These famous words float an admonition, but isn’t it more likely an adage? They describe the passivity which permitted Hitler’s abuses, but could apply to the ordinary manifestation of totalitarianism. Has human nature yet learned except in hindsight? First they came for the Communists, but we all spoke out, the end. That’s because the big lie is “they.” Try substituting “we” and you see the tsunamic inevitability of mob ethnocentrism. First we came for the Communists, Trade Unionists, and Jews, then him, then her, pure fun until it was me. Oops.
This quote, spoken by German priest Martin Niemoll, features prominently in the US Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. When I saw it I made a note to look up what seemed a strange discrepancy. Curiously in their version, the first group to be targeted are Socialists, not Communists. I say curiously, because I wouldn’t bring it up if I didn’t think the distinction was very unfortunate.
There are several variations of this “poem” because Niemoll repeated it in many sermons and never wrote it down. Asked about it through the years, sometimes he included Jehovah’s Witnesses and gays, and omitted others. Never, however, did he fail to mention Communists, and never were they not the first.
Does it make a difference? If you consider that Communists are the beasts of burden for Socialism, yes. If there’s a boogieman of Capitalism, it’s not the straw man Socialist, it’s the grassroots, proletariat Communist. Socialists are the intellectuals. The far less palatable working class are the Communists. How unfortunate to scrub Niemoll’s warning of its authentic historical detail. The Nazis first came for the Communists.
Bed bugs have made a comeback in the lives of the American poor, lending an uncomfortable new relevance to a folk bedtime salutation. Imagine if we said “Goodnight, don’t let the butterflies bite.” That carries no folk wisdom whatever.
And so how perverse that a traditionally maligned group such as the Jews, firmly ensconcing themselves on Niemoll’s list, decide another unpopular group needn’t the same protection. Doesn’t it defeat the very threat the old priest wanted us to think about? Yes, each group is meant to represent people in general, universality. But it doesn’t work to say bunnies, or amiable characteristics, because then the prospect doesn’t make sense, our youngsters are made vigilant facing a direction from which an attack never comes.
If the exclusion of Communists was a concession to the perennial Red Scare climate of the US capitol, it sadly confirms why Martin Niemoll’s warning won’t find purchase. Even in a Holocaust Museum dedicated to “never again” coming after people based on their social group, some don’t care about looking out for the most vulnerable.
Imagine Niemoll’s dictum as paraphrased for the Hindu castes. Imagine the Brahmins reciting it, leaving off the untouchables.
Since the Republican’t Party is taking their senate still-minority, and running it up as a National Mandate to repeal Health Care, why not have a two-part challenge. For the Democrats, have a lame duck vote and put the public option in to Health Care right where it belonged all along.
You’d get back the independent voters who stayed away in droves.
For the Republicans and TeaBags, first, you’re complete idiots. As evidenced by your Twitter hero who tweeted thus:
“We should do to LIBERALS what Hitler did to the JEWS, give them a chance to RENOUNCE Liberalism, if they do not, send them to ovens-PatInMichigan”
See, we try not to call y’all a bunch of Nazis, then you let a Jackass like that who is One Of Your Own, call you Nazis who have a strong desire to Kill Your Fellow Americans. Even though you have a cop-out you’ve already played again and again, that anybody who doesn’t agree with your Whore of Babylon Palin is “not a REAL American”.
Which shows the depth of both your hatred and stupidity.
The challenge for YOUR party would be along the lines of, either YOU take out YOUR (he’s white too but that’s just a coincidence, right?) Trash or those of us you’ve targeted for Forced Extinction can hang him around your collective Scrawny Neck like the proverbial albatross. Call me Ishmael.
Thank you God in Heaven for creating really STUPID people who are literate and articulate enough to express their hatred so bluntly. I know the guy is white or at least uses a white BOY for his avatar. The idiot is genuinely shocked that people don’t like that shit.
If he has in fact been threatened by people who are on his target list, well, what should he expect? Most people don’t like being threatened, and for those of our Right Wing readers who are Cops, Soldiers, Judges or other Pigs, in your professions if somebody says anything that sounds like “Cops, Soldiers, Judges or other Pigs should be exterminated” you either have him shot on the spot or you put him in prison charged with making THREATS, and your sadistic Sexually Deviant prison guards torture him until he’s completely broken, thus not as sexually attractive to them, and then kill him.
Just pointing out that fact so your worshipers will understand the full import of any response you make to that. If they’re actually capable of any kind of comprehension.
If you believe that to be insulting, just look to your Comrade who’s picking a major fight in the hopes you’ll back his stupid shit up. THAT’S insulting and it’s coming from your own side. Deal with it.
OK, not like THAT, but with his newest Crusade/Jihad/RightWing Terrorist campaign against Gays. Not just gay rights, but Gay PEOPLE. You know, Human Beings created in the Image of God, the same God Glenn Beck claims to worship?
I know there’s an internet rule that arbitrarily prohibits people from comparing others to the Nazis, even when they behave like Nazis…
Something that is of enormous benefit mainly to those who behave like Nazis and just don’t want to be noticed in their Nazi-like behavior.
But this behavior of his is much like the “special” Kamaradisch relationship between Ernst Rohm, Adolf Hitler and Josef Goebbels. By the way, the literal translation of Kamarad is reported to be “bedfellow”. Somebody who spreches die Deutcsh better than I do would have to confirm or cancel that one.
In a less apocryphal statement, guys who are most freaked out by Homosexuality are usually afraid that they themselves might be attracted to other men.
So perhaps this is Beck’s way of outing himself.
One might think the Nazis embraced kitsch. But they didn’t like Hummels. Their Army Times equivalent, Der SA-Mann, derided Berta Hummel’s depictions of impoverished but happy German children. Her charcoals and porcelain figurines looked like “wasserköpfige und klumpfüßige Dreckspatzen.” That’s “hydrocephalic, club-footed goblins,” instead of the “hard as Krupp Steel” Aryans they wanted Nazi Youth to be.
You might be wondering about the American Flag shown on the right…
The Third Reich banned the sale of the light hearted Hummel statuettes in Germany, but allowed their export, to profit by the foreign exchange.
In 1937 as Germany geared up for war, Berta, now Sister Maria Innocentia working from a convent in Siessen, Wuerttemberg, countered by publishing an uncharacteristically sad drawing of two boys dressed as Brownshirts, called Die Freiwillige, or The Volunteers, under which she inscribed this plea: “Dear Fatherland, let there be peace!”
When the Hummel print archive was on display in New Braunfels, Texas, in 1999, museum docent Tom Ryan described Die Freiwillige:
“They wear short pants and long sleeved brown shirts resembling those of adult Nazi ‘S.A.’ thugs. The cowed boys goose step in unison from left to right. Their tiny combat boots have no strings. Their hair spills out from under their caps. Nearer to us, the first boy somberly beats cadence on a thin, gaily colored drum which resembles a castanet. On his right a less than happy marching partner rests his toy rifle upside down on his right shoulder.”
Hitler was reportedly furious. Paper supplies were denied to the convent and German galleries were forbidden to display Hummel’s art. Eventually SA soldiers were quartered in the Siessen convent and the sisters were put out. Sister Hummel was forced to live in a basement and died shortly after the war of tuberculosis.
But the story is not over.
Another fate awaited Sister Maria’s sad satiric pair, the two little boys who marched unhappily, accompanying Hummel’s personal call for peace. Instead of unwittingly beaconing adults to lead their drumbeat circle in the opposite direction, far away from war, the little pair was ultimately fashioned into a new Hummel. This time sans brown shirts, but with rifle held adroitly.
The two play soldiers were remade into infant patriots, taking up the drum and given the same name, this time in English: “The Volunteers.” Hummel figure 50/0 was made into a special collectible in 1990, for Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
(Synopsis: Godmother Superior of kitsch, Maria Innocentia Hummel, intended her “Volunteers” to be a plea for peace. The forlorn would-be soldiers were an affront to Hitler, but a half century later, the United States would prove its imperviousness to satire and enlist Hummel’s little boys into the war against Iraq.)