(Slate) The N-Word: Unmentionable lessons of the midterm aftermath

[arissa]

http://www.slate.com/id/2154567/

The N-Word
Unmentionable lessons of the midterm aftermath.
By Diane McWhorter
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006, at 6:29 PM ET

Warning: This article contains the word Nazi.

-snip-

For some reason, I keep thinking about an observation Eleanor Roosevelt made in an unpublished interview conducted in May of 1940, as the German Wehrmacht swept across France. She expressed dismay that a "great many Americans" would look with favor on a Hitler victory in Europe and be greatly attracted to fascism. Why? "Simply because we are a people who tend to admire things that work," she said. So, were the voters last month protesting Bush's policies—or were they complaining that he had not made those policies work? If Operation Iraqi Freedom had not been such an unqualified catastrophe, how long would the public have assented to the programs that accompanied the "war on terror": the legalization of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, the unauthorized surveillance of law-abiding Americans, the unilateral exercise of executive power, and the Bush team's avowed prerogative to "create our own reality"?

-snip-

Mrs. Roosevelt's example notwithstanding, polite discussion of that question does not contain any derivative of the words fascism, propaganda, or dictatorship. God forbid Nazi or Hitler. The extent to which it is verboten to bring up Nazi Germany has now become a jape. "Can't pols just have little Post-its on their microphones reminding them not to compare anything to the Nazis?" Maureen Dowd wrote in the Times recently, after yet another off-message senator was taken to the woodshed. The ban applies equally to the arena of intellectual debate, such that even the wild and woolly Internet has a Godwin's Law to describe the cred-killing effect of dropping the N-bomb. So, even though it is a truism that we learn by analogy, even though the Bush administration unapologetically practices the reality-eschewing art of propaganda—with procured "journalists," its own "news" pipeline at Fox, leader-centric ("war president") stagecraft, the classic Big Lie MO of, say, draft avoiders smearing war heroes as unpatriotic—we are not permitted to draw any comparisons to the über-propagandists of the previous century. That prohibition is reiterated in the coy caution with which I introduce the topic here.

The taboo is itself a precept of the propaganda state. Usually its enforcers profess a politically correct motive: the exceptionalism of genocidal Jewish victimhood. Thus, poor Sen. Richard Durbin, the Democrat from Illinois, found himself apologizing to the Anti-Defamation League after Republicans jumped all over him for invoking Nazi Germany to describe the conditions at Guantanamo. And so by allowing the issue to be defined by the unique suffering of the Jews, we ignore the Holocaust's more universal hallmark: the banal ordinariness of the citizens who perpetrated it.

-snip-

Much more at link. I think the author makes some good points.

[bemildred]

1. Kick.

Great piece. I do tire of the Nazi taboo/dogma. In the larger context of political and military history, they were not exceptional, although some of them were loons, and one ought to be able to discuss them in the same way one does any other wannabe conquerors/tyrants.

[Bucky]

2. I would accept the Nazi name calling if I ever saw a politician worthy of the comparison

When people call Bush a nazi, it speaks more to their rage and their historical ignorance of what life is like under a true fascist government than it does to any particular policies of the uber-capitalistic Bushies.

As for the article itself; yes it's an intriguing read. But there's a cart-and-horse problem here. It's not significant that people turned against the war because it wasn't working right. It is of the very nature of this particular war (and Bush's war aims that started it) to fail. It was always going to fail; their mismanagement of it may have accellerated the decaying process for the puppet governments they installed, but the war was bound to be a failure, no matter how smartly it was run.