I'm thankful for my Facebook friends for alerting to me to a growing danger in America.
A few people that I barely knew in high school have decided that we should be friends, and they regularly post links to material that I don't usually come across. The mainstream conservative pundits that I follow on Twitter don't link to this stuff, so without Facebook I would have no idea that America is beginning a slow march to NAZI GERMANY.
An Austrian woman, Kitty Werthmann, who lived in Austria during the Nazi years gave a speech about the horrors of their rule. The transcript of her speech is being circulated among Facebook friends.
Werthmann explains that Hilter was an excellent orator, like somebody else that we know. Hmmm. Who could that be?
Hitler also got rid of religion and socialized the medical system. Who else wants to get rid of religion and social our medical system? Hmmmmm. Who could that be?
Hitler's worst sins were that he socialized the healthcare system and the farm industry, not that he killed millions of Jews. And guess what path we're on America? Keep up voting for Obama and we're going to end up goose stepping in the town square.
Apt. 11d 
I especially enjoyed the part where she writes that Hitler looked like a normal politician and she’s apparently writing about 1938.
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Interesting twist. It’s sort of like when Brian Leiter accused the Bush administration of creeping Stalinism–the difference being that Brian Leiter is a tenured professor at a major university, whereas these people are powerless nobodies posting internet ravings that no one reads.
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I haven’t seen the meme myself. I see Obama as more of a narcissistic screw-up, personally. All his personal anecdotes about insurance reveal a deep misunderstanding of pretty much all forms of insurance. The guy literally didn’t know the difference between collision and liability insurance and gave a number of speeches revealing that fact. He also put a political campaign on his credit card and did a lot of home equity extraction and his family barely seemed to be able to get by on a quarter million dollars a year when they made that much. It worked for him, but don’t do that at home, kids!
Bush = Hitler was a favorite slogan just a few years ago. You can google “Bush equals Hitler” and see for yourself.
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There are lots of people making very dubious political points, but this one is especially strange. You have somebody who is apparently an eye witnesses to these events writing it and yet this is remarkably ahistorical.
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Well, this isn’t completely new. Jonah Goldberg compared Hilary Clinton to the Nazis in his book Liberal Fascism about 5 years ago. Also, there’s been an attempt for awhile to make the Nazis seem like leftists, because National SOCIALISM.
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My comment was eaten, so apologies if this posts twice:
I read the whole speech and am confused. At the end, her point is Obama is like Hitler because of…immigration from Mexico? Do undocumented workers = the SA? the German army?
But anyways, one of the main things that annoyed me about this is that it seems fairly representative of how Austrians pretty much refuse to accept any responsibility for WW2 and their role in it. No formal apologies, no return of stolen property, and on a more individual level, Austrians seem perfectly happy to just blame the Germans. In my book, they’re on the same level as Turkey in terms of genocide denial.
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I didn’t see much evidence of the usual German-blaming at all. She starts by mentioning that Austria elected Hitler by 98% and denies that Germany conquered Austria. Nazi troops are on the ground in Austria when the vote was taken. It may be that the Nazi’s would have won in Austria in a fair election, but the vote that was actually taken wasn’t fair. It seems like just a general re-writing of history.
I think that is why I think this is so strange. Lots of people have distorted or interpreted what their political opponents are doing to compare them to what the Nazis actually did. This is distorting what the Nazis did so that it fits with what Obama is doing.
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The comments here suggest I don’t want to read that particular article (ahistorical, confusion doesn’t seem like a good recommendation). But, I’m guessing that the article is retrospective, right, not contemporaneous? I’ve never been surprised that historical memories are not particularly data driven.
But, I do find the question of how Hitler gained power to be fascinating and an important lesson to study. How does one know when one is on the path to evil? I certainly do know liberals who believe that the Bush administration was on the path (mostly centering on administration decisions to promote renditions, torture, administrative detention, government secrecy). Some of those same liberals recognize that Obama has continued the policies and still think we are on the path to evil.
I don’t mind people who think we’re on those paths speaking out so that I can consider whether I agree. I think my biggest danger sign is scapegoating, targeting particular groups as being the cause of our problems, all the more worrisome if those groups are outlier groups and if the groups are defined by membership rather than actions. For example, when liberals start blaming Mormons as a group (rather than the actions of an institution or individuals, as in the battle for Prop 8).
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MH
You’re right that she doesn’t maybe blame the Germans as much as many Austrians, but there was a lot of “what were we to know! It worked in Germany!” which seems to me to be less than innocently naive. I mean, so many problems with her piece, but it just seemed to represent the mindset of someone who never got over thinking of herself as a victim, rather than silent/passive perpetrator. Clearly the victims of Nazism were Catholic Austrian housewives! I spent this summer with Germans who were children of Resistance heros but who still feel keenly the weight and responsibility for the terrible actions which occurred, so maybe I’m being unduly harsh towards her. I do know elderly Germans who make excuses (Hitler was an Austrian!), but in general I think the ways of remembering the war in Germany make that much harder and less socially acceptable to do so, especially publicly.
bj,
Yeah, this is something I struggle with a lot, and have for a long time. One of the main questions for me from WW2, growing up hearing a lot of first person narratives from people on different sides, is how a society not composed of individual moral monsters could derail so completely. One thing that seems to be a consensus is by the time you have a Hitler in power, by the time you need a Resistance or act of individual heroism, you’ve already failed, and that the moment of vigilance needs to come much much sooner. I think there are general things we can do, like, as you note, to watch out for scapegoating, or to protect the rights of minorities, and try to keep government as accountable and transparent as possible. But, as Bonhoeffer, drawing from Kierkegaard, has noted, when society really starts to go off the rails how do you know when to hold yourself above society and decide to take extreme action? When is moral urgency justified, vs. when are you an anti-social lunatic?
Also, sometimes I wonder if I’m seeing too much of the past in the present, and that my upbringing confers a certain level of historical myopia. We’re not the Weimar Republic, and it’s hard to know when drawing parallels is useful or just melodramatic.
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I’m curious about the idea, which you can see a lot, that Obama wants to “get rid of religion”. All the evidence is that he’s a sincerely religious person. I personally don’t find that to be a good thing at all, but I do wonder if it’s necessary for many people to be willing to do what it takes to run for high office. (I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way, either.) I just see no evidence at all either that Obama wants to do away with religion, or that he’s not personally religious, and quite a lot to the contrary. So, something is clearly going on here- some sort of cognitive mistake, but of what sort I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s just a dumber version of the old idea, deployed throughout history, (both by and against Christians) that people with views that differ from one’s own are “atheists”. Or perhaps it’s something even dumber or more sinister than that, but it is an amazingly evidence-free and stupid idea, despite being quite common.
(I’d put the idea that Obama is _particularly_ narcissistic in nearly the same box, I must admit. Nearly all high officials have unreasonable confidence in themselves, it seems- or else they’d not do this sort of thing- but the idea that Obama is exception in this seems completely devoid of evidence, and mostly needing a psychological explanation.)
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I’ve heard it said that post-war Austria’s neatest trick was to convince the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler German.
Apropos tricks from the eastern marches, I read in the Hairy Trib a few years back that Haider’s family’s money was based on land confiscated from Jewish people. I shouldn’t have been surprised.
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Well one of the key things about Weimar is that there were very few constituencies that were committed to the Republic as such. The right would have preferred a monarchy or a strongman (depending on which part of the right we are talking about, and at which time); they of course eventually got their wish. (Good and hard, as H.L. Mencken might have added.) The left wanted a socialist society. The Catholic Center was long one of Weimar’s key pillars, but it eventually began to crack and wound up crumbling toward neoclericalism and authoritarianism. (They gave Germny Chancellors Brüning and von Papen, although in the event the race was on to see whether von Papen would resign from the Center before they could throw him out.) Not enough people really liked Weimar and were willing to stand up for it. Certainly many other European countries were throwing away their democracies during those years as well.
That’s one reason to think that an American authoritarianism would come wrapped in the flag and carrying a Bible, as Sinclair Lewis seems not quite to have said. The would-be fascists would set themselves up as the truest patriots, the only real lovers of the American idea.
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Wrote bj, “But, I do find the question of how Hitler gained power to be fascinating and an important lesson to study.”
A depressingly large number of European state threw away their republics in the 1920s and 1930s — Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Yugoslavia, etc. The failure of democracies and the apparent success of dictatorships certainly helped smooth the path for others to go down the same path.
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Before I start googling, I’m going to say that the whole Kitty Werthman thing sounds very fishy and awfully convenient.
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I’ll be darned, she’s real. And apparently has been doing this particular bit since at least 2009.
http://washingtonindependent.com/61121/fear-of-fascism-gay-agenda-dominate-conservative-kickoff-for-midterm-elections
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Evidence that Obama is not particularly religious: he says himself that he started going to church for political reasons, the church he attended was very politicized, none of the memoirs or histories of his tenure in the White House that have appeared mentions his praying, or referring matters to God, or attempting to determine God’s will, he doesn’t mention God much in speeches or announcements, etc.
Evidence that Obama is more than ordinarily narcissistic: his Inouye eulogy. Even Slate magazine (not a hotbed of conservatism) commented.
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“Evidence that Obama is more than ordinarily narcissistic: his Inouye eulogy. ”
I just read it, and I don’t get that criticism.
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“As a church organist and having buried both my parents, I’m seen many, many funerals and heard many, many eulogies. The ones that seem to affect and comfort the mourning families the most are the ones that speak directly to how the departed one had a specific influence on the life of the speaker. When the eulogist is the President of the United States …. that’s powerful to the nth degree.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/12/a-buddhists-wishes-on-christmas-day/266608/
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I’ll be darned, she’s real.
Yes, DOUG, there is a Kitty Werthman. She exists as certainly as fear and Godwin’s Law and concern-trolling old people exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest annoyance.
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Here’s a quote from Obama from a 2004 interview that I think gives some insight both into his religious views and personality.
The interviewer asks him (in the course of an interview with a lot of questions about his religious views), “What is sin?”
Obama’s reply is, “Being out of alignment with my values.”
http://blog.beliefnet.com/stevenwaldman/2008/11/obamas-interview-with-cathleen.html
That raises the question, is that the definition of sin generally? If I’m out of alignment with Obama’s values, is that sin, or does Obama mean that sin is being out of alignment with your own personal values. That second possible definition is probably what he means but it’s quite the doozy if you think about it. To bring up our man Hitler again, does Obama’s definition mean that Hitler only committed sins when he violated his own Hitlerian values? That’s a very obvious objection and yet Obama (who is supposed to be a smart guy) doesn’t think of it.
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Other quotes, same source:
“That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there’s an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived.”
“And I think always, her view always was that underlying these religions were a common set of beliefs about how you treat other people and how you aspire to act, not just for yourself but also for the greater good.”
“And I’m not somebody who is always comfortable with language that implies I’ve got a monopoly on the truth, or that my faith is automatically transferable to others.”
I argue with students all the time about relativism and I know it when I see it. Obama’s no relativist. How can you be a relativist and believe in values that transcend?
I also don’t think it implies he’s arrogant and assumes that he’s always right. I think what he means by that quote is that to sin is to violate what you believe to be morally right. He talks about doubt throughout the essay, so I don’t think he believes that he is always correct or that his individual values are all that matters; but what else can we go on in deciding the right action, other than our best assessment of what is right? Even those who have no doubt about dogma (which he says in the essay he has a problem accepting) are still doing what they believe to be right–following the creed of their religion.
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I know I shouldn’t respond to this sort of thing, but I will tell you what I try to do when the party I disagree with is in power. I watch for any emotionalism or irrationality that might affect my judgment about the goodness, sincerity, and decency of people on the other side, as well as catastrophism about what will happen and what they might do. I strive to remain aware just how tempting it is to do that, to cherry pick data and engage in confirmation bias. That’s how I avoided believing in bushitler and the theory that Bush wouldn’t give up the presidency.
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