Please explain what difference there is between Republicans and Nazis!

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

When Ronald Reagan became President, his party declared a 'revolution'. He was hailed by American right-wing “reactionaries” as our armed forces –a so-called volunteer army –became an organization of paid mercenaries characterized by increasingly militarist, corporatist attitudes.

We know that the Nazi Party was not put in power by a majority of the German vote. We know it came to power by an evil alliance between the most extreme of the Nazi revolutionists, the most unrestrained of the German reactionaries, and the most aggressive of the German militarists.

--Justice Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor, Nuremberg War Crimes Trial

George W. Bush provided the nation with a political spectacle --a conservative champion assuming office under a cloud. He did not achieve a majority vote, let alone a mandate. Unprecedented in American History, the U.S. Supreme Court executed the Republican strategy: stop a legally mandated recount while Bush is still ahead in the count.

With timely help from the U.S. Supreme Court, the fait accompli became a coup d'etat. Public servants --who had been court-ordered to recount votes –were physically assaulted as 'white shirts' attacked vote counters in Florida. This gang committed numerous counts of assault and battery if not treason. Photographed and identified by the Washington Post, this lawless gang should have been prosecuted but were not and that they were not was a warning that the rule of law would mean less, perhaps nothing to the new regime. Thus was begun a process by which the American GOP would resume an agenda that had been on the table in Nazi Germany.

Under Hitler, 'Jesus' prayers became mandatory in all schools. Abortion was a crime. Homosexuality was criminalized.

--Anonymous

Clearly, the GOP agenda might have been supported by Herr Hitler, were he alive and in the US. Hitler put into practice the current Republican platform. Albert Speer asserted at Nuremberg that the entire Third Reich was premised upon “meaningless platitudes”. And so it is in America where the GOP speaks political babble, a smorgasbord of code words, slogans and utterly 'meaningless platitudes". It was the GOP convention in Houston nominating George H.W. Bush that almost made me puke. A Republican on the convention floor opined: "Reagan made us feel good about ourselves!"

BARF!

Hitler had done as much for 'good Germans' many years earlier. Hitler had shown them the way!

Some 60 years after World War II, critics of the right wing agenda are criticized for “thinking logically”. Since 911, millions ridicule 'truth' itself. Anyone daring to advocate a real, fair and exhaustive investigation of 911, for example, is called a 'truther', a 'toofer', a 'troofer'. It does not matter that those using those absurd terms sound retarded; they ARE retarded! But –truth matters. Lies matter. There is, in my view, no legitimate state without truth. If truth does not matter, nothing matters. Those regimes premised and maintained upon lies are illegitimate. The recent Bush regime was illegitimate, the result of illegal force, intimidation, a stolen election.

Thus, despite the ascension of Barack Obama to the White House, the GOP has left in its wake a delusional society on one end, a disillusioned society at the other. The 'United States' itself is now premised upon false beliefs supported and argued fallaciously by ideologues who desire nothing less than the creation of a right wing state in which the environment, education, equality, peace, civil rights and responsibility itself are eschewed and demonized outright. Environmentalists are called 'tree huggers' and obstructionists to progress. Peace activists are called traitors, accused of failure to support the troops. These outcomes are the result of GOP tactics, in fact, NAZI tactics.

In Texas, a right-wing 'lab', education is reserved for the very rich as support for public schools increasingly becomes a low priority. Naturally, as a result, the corporate-owned prisons have swelled to over-flowing with the influx of those who are deliberately robbed of both education and opportunity. The great gains made by the civil rights movement are undone. Poverty, like one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, is an equal opportunity offender, laying waste to brown, black and white! The GOP are a different type of bigot favoring only the dirty ink green on money!

The Collection of Claptrap that Defines Two Parties

Hitler premised the Third Reich upon a collection of claptrap and muddled-thinking called: “Mein Kampf”. The truth about Hitler is found elsewhere. To The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, I would add prosecutor Robert Jackson's summation to the jury at Nuremberg. It may be found in its entirety in Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury by Michael S. Lief, who writes of Jackson's summation:

It is difficult for the mind to come to grips with the Holocaust. The sheer enormity of the crimes is so beyond ordinary human experience that there is no context in which to begin evaluating the defendants' misdeeds, assess blame, and then move on to assign punishment.

--Michael S. Lief

Every crime perpetrated by the Third Reich had it origins in a lie and its corollaries: the belief that Jews and other non-Aryans were subhuman, the belief that Germans were a Master Race!

Efforts to shape a society upon a finite set of “lies” did not end with the Nazi Goetterdamerung. Nuremberg did not inoculate the world against fallacy, error and ordinary bullshit! Today, there is a voluminous encyclopedia of insidious claptrap and fallacy that is paid obeisance to, circulated, and repeated by the Religious Right, the NRA, and a virulent, corporatist right wing that has seized control of the Republican Party.

Taken collectively, these falsehoods, myths, and dogma consist of dangerous economic propaganda, conscious efforts to revise History, deliberate distortions of Constitutional Law, and efforts by powerful lobbies and special interests to coerce, bribe, and unduly influence the Constitutional process for personal and corporate gain. Amid all this, the voice of the individual is lost, shouted down and ignored. And with it –the voice of reason.

So what difference does it make if Republicans--as a class--espouse a pack of malicious lies? So what? Simply, the sane and insane alike act upon what they believe to be true and those actions invariably affect us all. What good can possibly come of an action that is premised upon a lie?

None!

---