- Using Nazi or Holocaust-era terminology for political gain is more than insensitive or callous; it is monstrously bloodless, cold-hearted, and crass.
- The flippant use of such terms as "genocide," "mass murder," "extermination" and "Third Reich," in any discussion of contemporary American politics desecrates the memory of the millions upon millions of men, women and children who were exterminated. It also transmutes the very horrific reality of history's darkest, most barbarous period into nothing more than a rhetorical club with which to attack the people with whom one disagrees.
If I were in charge, I would make it mandatory for anyone using such vile rhetoric -- whether in political speeches, video or print ads or on radio talk shows -- to tour Auschwitz, watch all 9 1/2 hours of Claude Lanzmann's epic film Shoah and then spend a minimum of 12 hours at Yad Vashem , the Holocaust History Museum in Jerusalem. To my way of thinking, this is the prescription for disarming and disabusing die historisch gefordert -- the "historically challenged."
Rush: Barack Obama is not Adolf Hitler; he has not and will not kill tens of millions of people regardless of what you say or think.
Governor LePage: The I.R.S. is not the Gestapo; I.R.S. agents do not round up people in the middle of the night and then whisk them away to crematoria. They do make sure we pay taxes . . . that's about it.
Joe the Plumber: Your notion that the Holocaust was caused by gun control laws is beyond the pale. It also proves that you are a schwachkopf -- a "moron." Even if every Jew in Germany owned a Luger or a Mauser, it would not have stopped the Holocaust from happening. Or perhaps in your extensive study of history you never learned that the majority of Jews who were murdered came from Poland . . .
And so, in Mid-August of 2012, I say -- this time in German, rather than Yiddish pretty much the same thing I said in early August of 2009:
WIEDER . . . SHON GENUG!
Once again . . . ENOUGH ALREADY!
-2012 Kurt F. Stone
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