Some examples are more wrong than others. Take the School Board candidate in Zionsville, Indiana, who answered a voter's question on Facebook by saying, among other things "All Nazis were not bad people." That's all the reason I need to recommend you not vote for Dr. Matt Keefer in that election.
While history is complicated, the same sentiment cost General George S. Patton his last major command:
"Patton attracted controversy as military governor [of postwar Bavaria] when it was noted that several former Nazi Party members continued to hold political posts in the region. When responding to the press about the subject, Patton repeatedly compared Nazis to Democrats and Republicans in noting that most of the people with experience in infrastructure management had been compelled to join the party in the war, causing negative press stateside and angering Eisenhower. On September 28, 1945, after a heated exchange with Eisenhower over his statements, Patton was relieved of his military governorship."
I don't know exactly what's gone wrong. As the horrors of Nazi Germany fade from living memory, this kind of "...But they sure built nice freeways! Horst never realized what he was joining," excuse-mongering masquerading as nuance is becoming more and more common. "Tankies" on the farther Left have played similar sleight-of-mind about Stalin and the Soviet Union for decades (and it has been increasingly marginalized as the BS it is) but it used to be that you had to go very far Right indeed to get the crooked-cross variety, all the way over to nutjob territory. Now, not so much.
Never realized I was going to so intensely miss William F. Buckley's staunch efforts to get the fascist rats and their apologists out of the American Right and keep them out, but I certainly do. We all may, by and by, if things go poorly enough.
The title of today's post comes from this image. Read it carefully, and ask yourself which path you're on. It's our crossroads now.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
2 comments:
The Patton example is an odd one. Patton thought if a guy was forced to join the Nazi party to keep his local postmaster job it wasn't a good thing but not a disqualifier. At the same time the American government was grabbing every Nazi scientist they could through Operation Paperclip including people like Werner Von Braun who developed the V1 and V2 that killed people in Great Britain. Patton paid the price because what he said and did became public knowledge right away. The passage of time creates the fog of forgetfulness and people will "overlook" what happened in the past. We still try to find and prosecute those involved in concentration camps but not the Nazi who delivered the mail. Von Braun could be considered a war criminal but his contributions to the American rocket and space programs allowed him to be a respected member of society until very late in his life as details of his contributions for German rocketry was more publicly known. I need another cup of coffee to argue the difference between bad, badder, and horrible people of the past.
People all eventually die. Perniciously evil philosophies keep coming back. One of 'em will do great harm if not countered, and it's not the dead guys.
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